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We live in a time where a lot of
social conflicts
are presented in moral terms.
People wonder who is
the perpetrator and
who is the victim here?
And the way we answer that question
shapes the narrative that emerges.
>> Once people decide who to blame,
how easy is it to change their
views?
In our research, we discovered that
we can actually flip the script in
terms of who gets blamed for
long standing conflicts.
In some of our experiments,
we were able to change who's being
blamed by almost 30%.
>> We focused on entrenched ongoing
disputes where it would be most
surprising if we could shift
people's moral judgments.
So we started with
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
If you're an Israeli,
who do you blame for
the lack of a solution?
Provided with just two choices,
most Israelis may choose to blame
the Palestinians.
We wondered what would happen if
people considered more options.
So we asked them to divide the
blame between the Palestinians and
three different Israeli subgroups.
The right wing, left wing and
center blocks.
Other participants were given
the choice between blaming Israel
or three different Palestinian
political groups.
>> What we did is called unpacking.
Unpacking groups into their
constituent subgroups is something
we do intuitively all the time.
For example, you can think about
the EU as a single entity, or
you can think about Italy, France,
Germany, and
other countries within it.
As it turns out,
unpacking changes how people decide
which groups deserve
the greater share of the blame.
In our study, when the Palestinian
side was unpacked into three
subgroups, participants assigned
about two thirds of the blame to it
as a whole.
But when the Israelis side was
unpacked we saw a complete flip.
Now, the Israeli side received
two-thirds of the blame.
>> When people follow
moral Judgements,
they don't reason like scientists.
In fact, they often think
like prosecutors or
defense attorneys trying to protect
their sense of moral self regard or
avoid feelings of collective guilt.
When you unpack a group you find
ways to shift or distance blame
from your specific subgroup.
If I as an Israeli don't
want to think that Israel is mostly
responsible for the conflict I
might say, well, there are
subgroups within Israeli society
who are more to blame than others.
If I don't identify with them,
my sense of moral self-regard is
not harmed by assigning a lot
of blame to them.
>> We also ran similar experiments
on racial tensions in the US and on
the gender wage gap, and found that
people's opinions on who's to blame
could be flipped there as well.
>> Who is to blame for
the gender gap in wages,
women or men?
Unpacking women into white women,
black women and
other ethnicities led people to
assign more blame to women.
And when we unpacked men into those
same racial categories,
people increased the amount of
blame they assigned to men.
>> There's something else going on
here, a phenomenon
called partition dependence.
That's a cognitive process where
people assign more importance to
a specific category when it's
broken into smaller parts.
Once you know what partition
dependence is, you start to see it
in so many different places.
>> For example, when people are
asked how likely it is that they
will die of natural causes, they
give a lower estimate than when
they're asked to consider a long
list of natural causes of death.
Knowing this, insurance salespeople
sometimes use a list of potentially
deadly fates to persuade consumers
to purchase insurance plans.
>> People are often wrong about
their intuitive belief that their
moralized views can't be shifted.
Yet we were able to shift them
pretty significantly through
reframing the way that we ask just
one question.
>> What we discovered in our
research is a tool that can be
used in many different ways.
On the positive side,
educators can use it to engage
young people in conversations about
the malleability of social justice.
On the negative side,
politicians can use it to pour
more gasoline on the flames of hate
in intergroup conflict.
>> So what can you do with this?
If you hear someone lamenting about
how it's not even worth their
time to engage
with people across the aisle,
you could mention that moral views
can be surprisingly malleable.
Our research shows that small
changes can have large ripple
effects.
You have the power to change how
people think about important
societal issues.
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