Young generations’ hopelessness perpetuates long-term conflicts

Béatrice S. Hasler*, Oded A. Leshem, Yossi Hasson, Daniel H. Landau, Yara Krayem, Chen Blatansky, Guy Baratz, Doron Friedman, Charis Psaltis, Huseyin Cakal, Smadar Cohen-Chen, Eran Halperin*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Scopus citations

Abstract

Transforming long-term conflicts into peaceful intergroup relations is one of the most difficult challenges for humanity. Such meaningful social changes are often driven by young people. But do young people living in contexts of long-term conflicts believe that change is even possible? In a series of six studies (Ntotal = 119,671) over two decades and across two unrelated intractable conflicts in Israel/Palestine and Cyprus, we found that younger (compared to older) generations from both respective rival groups have less hope for peace, and consequently less conciliatory attitudes. We also show that this gradual improvement of peace-promoting emotions and attitudes with increasing age can be experimentally accelerated in young people through a virtual reality-based aging simulation. These findings provide a new perspective on the fundamental question of why long-term conflicts are so difficult to resolve and highlight the importance of instilling hope in young generations to advance peace processes.

Original languageEnglish
Article number4926
JournalScientific Reports
Volume13
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2023

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s).

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Young generations’ hopelessness perpetuates long-term conflicts'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this