Ponente:  Sandra Polanía Reyes (Universidad de Navarra)

Título: Overcoming empathy failures to promote prosociality: A media intervention approach

Abstract: When inequalities in social environments are substantial, they affect the quality of social interactions and economic outcomes. Although prosocial behavior is understood as key for development, little is known about the role of prosocial behavior in the presence of conflict between groups and inequality. Prosocial behavior may succeed in overcoming collective action problems only if beliefs about outgroup members' willingness or ability to integrate with the ingroup members are present, prejudice is reduced, and empathy improved.
The aim of this study is twofold. First, we explore the role of social preferences and inequality within a specific society with persistent inequality and empathy barriers between groups. We implement a lab-in-the-field experiment with a representative sample (N=839) in the main Colombian regions to measure Colombian citizens' prosocial behavior (i.e. altruism, trust, and preferences for redistribution) towards four groups: Venezuelan migrants, former combatants, internally displaced people and the very poor. Second, we show the benefits of interventions based on social psychology insights on reducing inequality. Our behavioral informed intervention is a 5-minute media intervention we created from interviews we conducted with Venezuelans and Colombians in a slum in Bogotá. A second media intervention was created by Bruneau, Casas, Hameiri, and Kteily (2022) and uses interviews with FARC ex-combatants in a Colombian demobilization camp and non-FARC Colombians in neighboring communities. We show that exposure to the media interventions humanizes FARC ex-combatants, affecting both attitudes (e.g., support for inclusive policies) and prosocial behavior toward them and internally displaced people (IDPs). The robust effects of our intervention inform the design of future policies and thus accelerate the integration of the migrant population into their host communities.