Educating for inclusion: Diversity education programs can reduce prejudice toward outgroups in Israel.

Intergroup prejudice is pervasive in many contexts worldwide, leading to discrimination and conflict. Existing research suggests that prejudice is acquired at an early age and that durably improving intergroup relations is extremely challenging, often requiring intense interventions. Building on existing research in social psychology and inspired by the Israeli TV series "You Can't Ask That," which depicts charismatic children from minority groups broaching sensitive topics at the core of intergroup relations, we develop a month-long diversity education program. Our program exposed students to the TV series and facilitated follow-up classroom discussions in which students constructively addressed various sensitive topics at the core of intergroup relations and learned about intergroup similarities, intragroup heterogeneity, and the value of taking others' perspectives. Through two field experiments implemented in Israeli schools, we show that integrating our intervention into school curricula improved Jewish students' attitudes toward minorities and increased some pro-diversity behavior up to 13 wk posttreatment. We further provide suggestive evidence that the intervention was effective by encouraging students to take their outgroups' perspectives and address an element of scalability by delegating implementation responsibilities to classroom teachers in our second study. Our findings suggest that theoretically informed intensive education programs are a promising route to reducing prejudice at a young age.

Beliefs about minority representation in policing and support for diversification.

Diversification of police forces is widely promoted as a reform for reducing racial disparities in police-civilian interactions and increasing police legitimacy. Despite these potential benefits, nearly every municipal police department in the United States remains predominately White and male. Here, we investigate whether the scale and persistence of minority underrepresentation in policing might partly be explained by a lack of support for diversification among voters and current police officers. Across two studies (N = 2, 661) sampling the US adult population and residents from a city with one of the least representative police forces in the country, individuals significantly overestimate officer diversity at both the local and national levels. We find that correcting these biased beliefs with accurate information reduces trust in police and increases support for hiring new officers from underrepresented groups. In the municipal sample, these corrections also cause an increase in residents' willingness to vote for reforms to diversify their majority White police department. Additional paired decision-making experiments (N = 1, 663) conducted on these residents and current police officers demonstrate that both prefer hiring new officers from currently underrepresented groups, independent of civil service exam performance and other hiring criteria. Overall, these results suggest that attitudes among voters and police officers are unlikely to pose a major barrier to diversity reforms.

Diversity in health care institutions reduces Israeli patients' prejudice toward Arabs.

Diversity in the lines of public institutions, such as hospitals, schools, and police forces, is thought to improve provision for minority group members. Nonetheless, whether and how diversity in public institutions shapes majority citizens' prejudice toward minorities are unclear. Building on insights from the intergroup contact literature, I suggest that diversity in public institutions can facilitate positive intergroup contact between majority group members and minorities in elevated social positions. Such unique interactions, which exceed the equal status condition for effective intergroup contact, can serve to reduce prejudice and facilitate more inclusive attitudes among majority group members. To test this expectation, I focus on health care provision-a leading sector with regard to minority representation. Leveraging a natural experiment unfolding in 21 Israeli medical clinics where Jewish patients are haphazardly assigned to receive care from Jewish or Arab doctors and embedding prejudice-related questions in a routine evaluation survey, I demonstrate that brief contact with an Arab doctor reduces prejudice. Specifically, contact with an Arab doctor reduces Jewish patients' exclusionary preferences toward Arabs by one-sixth of an SD and increases Jewish patients' optimism about peace by a 10th of an SD. The modest magnitude of these effects is similar to the impact of well-powered interventions recently reviewed in a meta-analysis of prejudice reduction experiments. These findings emphasize how the demographic makeup of public institutions can reduce mass prejudice, even in a context of intractable conflict.