Examining the impact of learning about a resolved conflict on attitudes in an ongoing conflict: Evidence from the Israeli–Palestinian context

A popular intervention for increasing support for peace in violent intergroup conflicts is to describe the peaceful resolution of other conflicts. In four experiments, we tested the effectiveness of this approach in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict by exposing Jewish-Israelis to information about the Northern Ireland conflict and peace process, or about tourism in Northern Ireland as a control. We found that learning about the historical peace process generally led participants to view conflicts as more malleable, their own conflict as less unique, and led to unfreezing of conflict-related beliefs. However, it neither increased hope nor consistently boosted support for conciliatory policies. We explored boundary conditions and found effects were often stronger among leftist and centrist compared with rightists. Moreover, explicitly drawing analogies between conflicts at the outset proved ineffective, whereas exposing participants to the historical conflict and peace process without mentioning the proximal conflict was more successful.