Eran Halperin’s research while affiliated with Hebrew University of Jerusalem and other places

Climate change is currently one of humanity’s greatest threats. To help scholars understand the psychology of climate change, we conducted an online quasi-experimental survey on 59,508 participants from 63 countries (collected between July 2022 and July 2023). In a between-subjects design, we tested 11 interventions designed to promote climate change mitigation across four outcomes: climate change belief, support for climate policies, willingness to share information on social media, and performance on an effortful pro-environmental behavioural task. Participants also reported their demographic information (e.g., age, gender) and several other independent variables (e.g., political orientation, perceptions about the scientific consensus). In the no-intervention control group, we also measured important additional variables, such as environmentalist identity and trust in climate science. We report the collaboration procedure, study design, raw and cleaned data, all survey materials, relevant analysis scripts, and data visualisations. This dataset can be used to further the understanding of psychological, demographic, and national-level factors related to individual-level climate action and how these differ across countries.

In the field of intergroup conflict reconciliation, the relationship between psychological interventions and diverse political ideologies is often overlooked. The current work presents an innovative framework targeting individuals from different ideological backgrounds with effective interventions to promote social equality in real-world settings. In the first phase, we conducted an intervention tournament among 2,241 Jewish Israelis with varying political orientations. We found that conservatives showed the highest support for social equality after a corrective meta-perception intervention, centrists responded best to a social norms intervention, and liberals exhibited the strongest support after a malleability intervention. The second study involved a field experiment using A/B testing on social media to extend and replicate these findings. The results confirmed our hypotheses and demonstrated the potential of combining social psychology principles with contemporary marketing tools to enhance the effectiveness and real-world relevance of socio-psychological interventions.

Closing the achievement gap for minority students in higher education requires addressing the lack of belonging these students experience. This paper introduces a psychological intervention that strategically targets key elements within the learning environment to foster the success of minority students. The intervention sought to enhance Palestinian minority student’s sense of belonging by increasing the presence of their native language. We tested the effectiveness of the intervention in two field experiments in Israel (n > 20,000), at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when all classes were held via Zoom. Lecturers in the experimental condition added a transcript of their names in Arabic to their default display (English/Hebrew only). Our findings revealed a substantial and positive impact on Palestinian student’s sense of belonging, class participation, and overall grades. In experiment 1, Palestinian student’s average grade increased by 10 points. In experiment 2, there was an average increase of 4 points among Palestinian students’ semester grade. Our intervention demonstrates that small institutional changes when carefully crafted can have a significant impact on minority populations. These results have significant implications for addressing educational disparities and fostering inclusive learning environment.

Societies are often comprised of majority group members who feel threatened by minorities which, in return, are denied equal rights. How do perceived societal threats, that impact both majorities and minorities, influence perceived minority threat and the support for their rights? We utilized the February 2021 Myanmar coup – which has been perceived as threatening by most majority and minority citizens – to examine this question in a three-wave cross-sectional survey. One wave was conducted before the coup. The second (immediately after) and third (one year after) were aimed to understand short and long-term changes in perceived minority threat following the coup. Perceived minority threat decreased after the coup with increased perceived societal threat (wave 2) and increased back again when perceived societal threat diminished (wave 3). Perceived minority threat was also associated with higher support for minority rights. Our results reveal the dynamic nature of group-relevant threats using a unique non-WEIRD sample.

This chapter examines how emotions contribute to the development of violent extremism, drawing on research into emotional drivers of violent intergroup behavior. We first introduce the concept of emotion and explain the role of cognitive appraisals of events in shaping emotions. Then, to position emotions within the context of hostile intergroup relations, we demonstrate how social identities and group processes impact emotional experience. In the main section of this chapter, we consider the roles of several discrete emotions that motivate distinct types of behaviors relevant to violent extremism. Using a broad framework of the radicalization process, we suggest that: (1) Humiliation, shame, and anger in response to self- or group-relevant experiences are pertinent pre-radicalization as they create a desire to re- establish a positive self- or group-image and to restore a sense of justice; (2) Contempt, disgust, and hatred, as emotions that exclude their targets from moral consideration and motivate their eradication, develop during active radicalization; and (3) Positive emotions, such as love, joy and pride, which increase commitment and motivate others, characterize the engagement stage. We draw out implications of our analysis for policy makers, stressing the importance of responding to the unfulfilled emotional needs that motivate violent extremism.

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions’ effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior—several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people’s initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors.

Social scientists have increasingly applied insights from descriptive research to develop psychological interventions aimed at improving intergroup relations. These interventions have achieved marked success—reducing prejudicial attitudes, fostering support for conciliatory social policies, and promoting peacebuilding behaviors. At the same time, intergroup conflict continues to rage in part because individuals often lack motivation to engage with these promising interventions. We take a step toward addressing this issue by developing a framework of approaches for delivering interventions to an unmotivated target audience. Along with (a) directly motivating targets by increasing their values and expectancies for addressing intergroup conflict, researchers can deliver interventions by (b) satisfying other psychological motivations of the target audience, (c) providing an instrumental benefit for engaging with the intervention, (d) embedding the intervention in a hedonically captivating medium, or (e) bypassing motivational barriers entirely by delivering the intervention outside of targets’ conscious awareness. We define each approach and use illustrative examples to organize them into a conceptual framework before concluding with implications and future directions.

How does hope for peace form and proliferate in the seemingly hopeless reality of intractable conflicts, and why do despair and fear often prevail? How do political elites utilize hope and skepticism to manipulate their public during conflict? And how does hope manifest itself at the societal level? These questions are not only thought-provoking but also highly relevant to the political realities of millions of people worldwide who are struggling for justice, equality, and peace. Hope Amidst Conflict takes on the bold challenge of answering these questions by merging insights from philosophy and social psychology and investigating hope for peace in an intense political context—the intractable violent conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Hope for peace has gathered scholarly attention in the past decade. However, the work has been focusing on the mechanisms of hope while failing to ask the bigger questions about hope’s role in the politics of conflict. Moreover, existing research presents a confusing account of what hope “is” and how it can be measured. This confusion yielded mixed results regarding the levels and consequences of hope during conflict. Combining the wisdom of more than a hundred years of scholarship on hope with insights from original data collected in conflict zones, this book offers a novel, concise but comprehensive conceptualization of hope and a standardized way to measure hope in a wide array of contexts. Using these new approaches, the work embarks on a journey to identify the determinants and consequences of hope amidst conflict.

How does hope for peace form and proliferate in the seemingly hopeless reality of intractable conflicts, and why do despair and fear often prevail? How do political elites utilize hope and skepticism to manipulate their public during conflict? And how does hope manifest itself at the societal level? These questions are not only thought-provoking but also highly relevant to the political realities of millions of people worldwide who are struggling for justice, equality, and peace. Hope Amidst Conflict takes on the bold challenge of answering these questions by merging insights from philosophy and social psychology and investigating hope for peace in an intense political context—the intractable violent conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Hope for peace has gathered scholarly attention in the past decade. However, the work has been focusing on the mechanisms of hope while failing to ask the bigger questions about hope’s role in the politics of conflict. Moreover, existing research presents a confusing account of what hope “is” and how it can be measured. This confusion yielded mixed results regarding the levels and consequences of hope during conflict. Combining the wisdom of more than a hundred years of scholarship on hope with insights from original data collected in conflict zones, this book offers a novel, concise but comprehensive conceptualization of hope and a standardized way to measure hope in a wide array of contexts. Using these new approaches, the work embarks on a journey to identify the determinants and consequences of hope amidst conflict.