Interpersonal Peacemaking
Highlighting some of the research being done on BYU campus in the area of interpersonal peacemaking
Research Papers
The Ideational Approach to Populism, Volume II: Consequences and Mitigation
Edited By: Angelos Chryssogelos, Eliza Tanner Hawkins, Kirk A. Hawkins, Levente Littvay, Nina Wiesehomeier
The Ideational approach to populism provides a robust theoretical framework for understanding populism's consequences and for identifying policies that mitigate its most negative effects
Changing Hearts and Minds? Why Media Messages Designed to Foster Empathy Often Fail
Joshua R Gubler, Christopher F Karpowitz, J Quin Monson, David A Romney, Mikle South
Politicians and social activists frequently employ media designed to "change hearts and minds" by humanizing out-groups. These messages, it is assumed, lead to empathic concern, which motivates individuals to reconsider punitive policy attitudes. How effective is this approach? Using two experiments, we find that while media messages humanized Latinos for all respondents, the treatment messages produced the largest empathy response among those with the most positive prior attitudes. A key intended target of the media messages—those with the highest pretreatment antipathy toward the out-group—reported a dramatically lower increase in empathy. In a second study, we show that unpleasant affect from dissonance is one important mechanism driving these differential results. In both studies, treatments designed to provoke increased empathic concern produced little change in the policy attitudes.
The Two-Way Effects of Populism on Affective Polarization
by Braeden Davis, Jay Goodliffe, Kirk Hawkins
Populism leads to greater affective polarization among both populist citizens and non-populist citizens, and that the latter effect grows as populism increases