Ravi Gurumurthy: Hello and welcome to the mission. My name is Ravi Gurumurthy. This is the podcast to listen to if you're interested in innovation for social good. We're talking to practitioners, academics, and policymakers about how to drive social change and what makes people, organizations, and systems innovative.

In today's podcast, I got to interview Betsy Paluck, a Psychology professor at Princeton university. Betsy's a winner of the MacArthur Foundation's genius award for her amazing work on reducing prejudice and conflict.

I met Betsy a few years ago when she was helping my former colleagues at the international rescue committee design a program to reduce intimate partner violence in Uganda. And in this conversation, we talk about whole set of issues from why anti-racism interventions are going wrong, how to tackle bullying in schools, to our interest in studying pop culture.

We also touch on an issue that I was particularly keen to get Betsy's take on, which is how behavioral science as a field needs to evolve. Behavioral science it's sometimes caricature is just a set of marketing interventions that nudge individuals to make different decisions, to save for a pension or pay taxes on time.

But as a social psychologist, Betsy brings a much greater focus on group processes and the role of social networks and social norms and the behaviors she's trying to shape often those quite tractable ones that require large scale social change, a connecting thread in Betsy's work is the influence of social.

And defining what we actually mean by social norms is where this conversation begins.

Betsy Paluck welcome.

Betsy Paluck: Thank you. It's good to be here.

Ravi Gurumurthy: It's great to have you. So your research has covered many different areas from bullying in middle schools to genocide in Rwanda, but one common thread is this focus on social norms and the word social norms is one. I think you think, you know what it means until I just started reading your work and I realized it had a bunch more specific it's like different meaning than I'd understood. So how do you define social norms and why do they matter?

Betsy Paluck: It does take on a different meaning depending on who's talking about it. And so I think that most of us think of a social norm as and incorrectly, a social norm would be, you know, the average tendency of a group, so how most people behave or what most people value. And that is what a social norm is but because I'm a psychologist, I study individuals, right. I study the mental life of individuals and how that's shaped by groups in their environment. What I study specifically about norms is how we perceive them. So what do you Ravi perceive the norm to be in your environment and really that's what matters, what you think is the norm is going to influence how you behave, what you think is appropriate. And in general, people are really good at social norm perceptions. In fact, I just saw a paper, a scientific paper come out just recently talking about people as social sensors. It's a really nice term for a really old phenomenon that we've been talking about forever, which is that we look around at our environments and we're constantly doing this sort of social reality testing.

We're trying to figure out, you know, what is the average tendency of my group? So usually we're pretty good at this social sensing at perceiving what the norm is but there are really important and interesting times when we misperceive the norm. So when we think that most people believe something or doing something, in fact privately, they're not that's, that's a pretty important disjuncture to know that's something that we call pluralistic ignorance.

There are also these times when there's these spirals of silence, it's also called, where there's really attention grabbing people in our environments who are doing things that make us think that, wow, everybody must agree with them. Everybody must believe that. And so people are afraid to speak up about it.

You have these spirals of silence and that changes what we think of as the norm. So as a psychologist, I'm interested in, you know, what you think is the average tendency of your group or the predominant values of. So that's how I think about social norms.

Ravi Gurumurthy: You make a distinction sometimes between what we perceive to be typical behaviors versus desirable behaviors. Can you say a bit more about that?

Betsy Paluck: Yeah, it might be just degrees of importance, meaning that if you think that, well, this is, this is something that a lot of people typically do, it's kind of a descriptive fact about your group and if you do something different you might feel a little odd, a little different ,but if you differ from what people really desire, what most people really think is important, then you might feel if you deviate from that, you might feel wrong or bad.

Maybe you might even imbue this with some sort of morality. So you, you feel unethical doing something different. So, it seems to be the same sort of perception, but in, in degrees of importance.

Ravi Gurumurthy: Got it. And I think, you know, a lot of people would say social norms are just there. You can't really do very much about them, but yeah, a lot of your work is about how you can actually shape and shift social norms.

So I just wondered whether you could give one or two examples of your work in that area?

Betsy Paluck: Yeah, sure. So my work is really based on a pretty small idea that I think has a deep truth about it. And that's this idea of social proof. So it's this idea that we, we're going to determine the appropriate behavior in a setting by examining the behaviors of others,

right? So this isn't just simple mimicry. We have a lot of data out there, you know, even before I started doing research, showing we pay attention to particular people. Sometimes they're people like us, sometimes they're people of a certain stature and the hierarchy. The deep truth, there is that norms aren't just these fixed statistics that we carry around in our heads, you know? I think that, you know, most people in my community want to get vaccinated. They're more like hypothesis they're guesses about our world that we're constantly testing out by looking at the world around us. So we have conversations with people, we gossip we notice all of these little behavioral traces, you know? Do you have a band-aid on your arm? You know, what are you thinking about with your kids in daycare? We get a lot of information just by being the social creatures that we are. And so I've been really interested in trying to intervene in these, you know, social reality testing processes, these processes, by which we gather this social proof. So in one case what we did, I think you mentioned that we've been working in middle schools, we would, we measured the social network of a middle school, let's just start with one, we've done dozens since then,

and we just found out where everybody was, in the network in terms of friendships. We did this by giving everybody a survey, asking them, you know, who did you choose to spend time with in the last 10 days? You know, maybe it was face-to-face maybe it was online. And we just determined who was really getting a lot of nominations that way.

Some of them were really popular but some of them actually were just very central to small subgroups of young people in that school, so clique leaders, we called them. And what we did is we went into the school and we worked with those students who are getting the most attention. We figured that when students were going through their day, they were trying to get that social proof of, you know, whether it's funny to make a racist joke, whether

it's okay to make fun of someone for being fat. They were going to look toward these people to see if they were doing it, or if they were laughing when it happened, et cetera. So we worked with these students and you know, kind of, we, we acted as their campaign advisors. We asked them, you know, what do you want to change

about your school to make people feel more comfortable? These were really the norm setters of the school and we traced to see whether changes in their behavior change their classmates' minds about norms. And in fact, that's what we found. And we found that you can change the behavior of students, so conflict went down in the school when more of these norm entrepreneurs had been involved in this, in this program. And so it went down at the same time as people started changing their minds about what was appropriate at that school. So that's an example of, of how we use these kinds of reality testing processes.

We try to change the environment around people, change the behaviors that they see that make them think "this is something that will get attention", or "this is something that's cool", or at least this is something that will help me avoid sticking out of the crowd.

Ravi Gurumurthy: So does this suggest that social norms are actually quite pliable?

And if so, to what degree, is this something that you can do fairly marginally around the edges? Or do you see social norms changing quite fundamental ways?

Betsy Paluck: So I think that dark social norms are very, very delicate meters of human life. And if they're not changing, that's because they're being constantly reinforced and, and kept at the same level.

So I think they're very dynamic. There's a lot of possibility to change them. But I I'm, I'm really interested in the word you used about it, so, you know, can we do something at the margins? I kind of think that this is where we've been getting a little bit wrong in the behavioral science community. I think that a lot of people have been

taking these messages about, you know, social norms being moveable and I've been trying to kind of nudge them around, you know, do something a little bit marginal in order to get this massive behavior change. And you know, social norm interventions have been some of the most popular behavioral science intervention in the last dozen years.

I think they've come with the most high variance in terms of success. There have been successes and a lot, a lot of failures, but it has to do with this point about people doing something small.

Ravi Gurumurthy: But what's interesting about your work, I think is that some of the social norms interventions I've seen are very individualistic.

They like saying your nine out of 10 people cycle, you're trying to shape sort of group dynamics aren't you?.

Betsy Paluck: Yeah, so you've gone to exactly the heart of it, so, what sort of happened is that a lot of people who are using behavioral science to do these social engineering, these behavior change projects have had turned to marketing strategies to change an individual's perception of the norm.

So some examples of this would be college women when folks are trying to change norms about sexual assault giving college women information about how frequent hookups are on campus, you know, by this, the same mechanism that you just mentioned, you know, only 20% of people, you know, really actually want to participate in hookup culture on campus, for example, which presumably would change their opinion about how much it's actually happening out there.

Other people are using signs of entrances of hospitals saying, you know, this, you know, very high percentage of visitors to this hospital, they prefer a smoke-free environment. So, you know, 99% of people, you know, wish you wouldn't smoke, et cetera. So, so these are all interventions that are really seeking to create broad social change, but they're trying to do it individual by individual.

And they're not accounting for this social proof process, this group dynamic where people look at these messages and then what they're going to do is they're going to look around their environment and say, is this true? Is this what I'm actually observing? And you know, if it's not, the message is not going to stick, it's not going to be consequential for their behaviors, or it's not going to change their perception of the environment. It's going to be perceived as just, you know, propaganda.

Ravi Gurumurthy: So you said before that you know, the behavioral science community, that's slightly wrong or it's limited in its application. Where were you trying to take this research next?

Betsy Paluck: Yeah, I mean, I, I just think that there's a lot of missed opportunities.

I think that the insights are deep and they're there but I think that, like you mentioned, we have to take into account these group processes. So, you know, intervening with different people in the network, really working together with them is, is one direction. And I think there's so much exciting work coming out of the networks and hierarchy literature.

So you know, I mentioned that in our work, we were interested in people who get a lot of attention. So that may be with, you know, popular people in certain communities these traditional opinion leaders, but it may also be with people who you wouldn't suspect. And a lot of people have been working on that question.

So who are the people who you wouldn't suspect who are basically culture makers and some of the answers have been really intriguing. So Jen Dannel's work showing that, you know, this may come from people at the bottom of the hierarchy in certain organizations, rather than leaders at the top of the hierarchy.

You know, Davidson told his works, this is coming from the margins of, of networks rather than the center that these are the change-makers. So I think that's really a promising area. I also think that, you know, we should be looking toward folks who are working in collective action. That is a literature that sort of got a divorce from the social norms literature, like a long time ago and they, they're not speaking to each other and they should really do that. Because you know, what is collective action except coming together to sort of raise consciousness and share experiences. That's exactly how we figure out what is the norm or what's

the next norm. What's, what's the possibility, right? And so, you know, some really classic work by my colleague, Debbie Prentice was on pluralistic ignorance and it was about, and probably many people know about this, it's, you know, the, the classic pluralistic ignorance on the college campus that she was looking at this idea that a lot of people are taught in classes

now that most of the students thought that they, you know, should be drinking until they blackout on campus. But privately, a lot of them hated that, or didn't want to participate in that. The intervention, and this is I think the lesser known part of this research, the intervention that she and her colleagues designed to address that was essentially kind of a consciousness raising group.

So bringing students together in groups to talk about how they felt about the campus culture of binge drinking and allowing students to find out that they privately hated it. And, and trying to shift norms that way to show that there's this private resistance and this sort of secret resistance, that's what you know, Cron and others write about in terms of, you know, how you take down dictatorships is you, you connect the dots among the resistance showing that actually the public facing acquiescence to this power is, hiding a deeper private, you know, disagreement. So, I think that that's a really cool next example too, but it's going to take so much more than, you know, a sign on, on the hospital entranceway, right?

Ravi Gurumurthy: Yeah, exactly. And you talked before about sometimes it's unusual people who might be influential, who might be the social reference.

How do you find those people and how do you also do that in a way that is not manipulative, is with their consent.

Betsy Paluck: So I think that that is the deeper work that's required. You, really want to get to know the context. So You, you have to first accept that, you know, social norms belong to context to groups.

And so in order to know how that norm is being held up, whether it's the norm that you want to change, or if you want to create a whole new norm, you need to know that context so what is that social group like? What is their hierarchy? What are their dynamics? Who are the respected people in that environment who get noticed?

And I think you could do that with like a formal network analysis. A lot of people have done that by doing qualitative interviews as well. I'll just give you the example of the middle school experiment just because like there's no better example of resistance than middle-school.

I mean, try to bring together a bunch of young people in their early teens, their pre and early teens, and tell them how to behave in their social groups. You know, just say no to drugs, right? So what we did in those circumstances was we first acknowledged to them. We said we see you as the people who really set the culture of your school.

And we imagine that there are things about your school that make it difficult to go there that you know, are stressful, conflict is stressful, and while it may be even entertaining some time, we imagine that there are aspects of this that you don't appreciate. And of course, a lot of these, you know, culture makers, the ones who are propagating a lot of the stuff that you might not like, including conflict, there were some people who you might even call bullies, who we tried to engross in this activity, but we really wanted to act as their campaign managers and not their speech writers and we let them write the speeches. We let them do things that felt really authentic to them and we try to help them promote that. In that particular setting we gave them lots of materials to make online materials, to even make art or signage that they would hang around the school, things that they would sign, put their Polaroid pictures on to make it really identifiable.

This is coming from me. And that's how we really engage them in that, in that project, they had to see it as theirs, they had to see it as for their own community and something that made sense to them and wouldn't cost them their reputations.

Ravi Gurumurthy: One question on all this work is how it works at scale, and also how you can leverage social media and WhatsApp and digital mechanisms to basically do that.

Can you say a bit more about, firstly, how have you focused on scale within your interventions and then also the specific potential of digital?

Betsy Paluck: Yeah, I think that here we learn a lot from the social movements literature, but we should still bring along all of the knowledge that we have from these marketing techniques that have been really developed in the past dozen years in the, in the social norms literature. I think that one idea that I've really focused on a lot is to really develop interventions that are more about principles rather than playbooks. So, the principal here is to find the students who get the most attention in a school and to invite them to work on issues that cause a lot of conflict that distressed them at their school, rather than saying, I want you to work on racism at the school,

I want you to give these messages about, you know, structural racism, et cetera. You know, topics that I am all for teaching at schools, but not necessarily in terms of giving students marching orders in how to affect their communities. So education could be involved, but really the idea at scale is to make the principle flexible enough that it can fit many, many different communities,

and that people in the community can make it theirs. So that's one idea that I've pursued in my own work, but there are many, many other techniques from the social movements, literature that I think, you know, are just waiting to be opened up by people who are interested in social norm change. And then I think at the same time, there are all of these moments where there may be a demonstration.

There may be some kind of you know, collective moment like a public art unveiling. A public art experiment that, you know, just get a lot of eyeballs, a lot of attention where you could really try to capitalize that, crystallize that, and maybe you could do this digitally by using some of these marketing techniques, you know, by saying, this is the number of people who attended this event.

You know, this was like the average reaction of the crowd, really crystallize it for people. So there's where the marketing could really come in because it's based on something real it's based on something that happened that the community came out for. And so I think like combining these insights is the most productive next wave, rather than sort of tossing it aside and saying this, this social norms thing, it's just it's not reliable enough.

We can't, we can't change it based on these sort of information marketing campaigns.

Ravi Gurumurthy: Yeah. I mean, I'm quite sure that in deliberative democracy, and one of the concerns about deliberative democracy has been that it's obviously very small numbers of people who you can actually engage.

And then you're assuming that then has a sort of wider effect as you, as you share the findings, but it seems not impossible , with a world that's gone all online and zoom to potentially do deliberative democracy at a sort of at a bigger scale, but often lots and lots of small intimate groups. And I just wondered whether that's an area that is worth looking at. as well.

Betsy Paluck: That's interesting. You know I sort of cut my teeth on a deliberative democracy project when I was a graduate student. I had the opportunity to attend one of these enormous deliberative democracy experiments, this event in Philadelphia, in the United States in Pennsylvania. And I remember it being really interesting.

One of the things they did that was so great about it. They flew out , this very, talk about scale, this very, very time and resource intensive, sort of utopian like one-off ideal. But but what was interesting about it is that everyone flew in and they made it really exciting.

They got tours of Philadelphia and so forth and so I'm not proposing this as the model, but I am saying that they made it fun. And then I sat in on a lot of those discussions and a lot of the discussions were not fun. They were painful. They dragged on, you know, everybody who's ever been in any kind of discussion like that can tell you that, you know, you kind of need other things to keep it going.

And so maybe this is a random connection to make, but this is why I'm really interested in pop culture and I study pop culture quite a bit as a mover of norms because it's fun. It gets eyeballs. We all actually want to talk about it. And so I'm interested in ways like you, that we can bring people together to discuss things, but what would be the right vehicle for it?

Would it be a platform where we're going to come to talk about political issues, would it be something that mixed music and politics, would it be something that mixed, you know, you see where I'm going?

Ravi Gurumurthy: I think a lot of the work in it can sound very worthy, let's bring together people to talk about things that are not fun.

Whereas actually we all probably have a desire to meet new people, talk about stuff that we have in common and then you can almost wear the politics a bit more lightly. We've talked so far about how you intervene to shape social norms, but what can we learn from where social norms have shifted quite far, quite fast.

So when you think about questions about gender identity, for instance, I'm surprised at how things have changed over the last 10, 15, 20 years. What can we learn from those areas?

Betsy Paluck: I think that well, your example of gender identity is a very interesting one. I think that we can think a lot of the social movements that have brought us along... the social movements, which met popular culture and reinforced and support popular culture. So it's not just that we all started watching famous actors and shows that were transformative it's that, that was brought along by a lot of social action and activism. But I think that was really important that it, it also started to permeate young pop culture. I think that, you know, in a related topic, the topic of same-sex marriage is something that has changed so drastically over the past number of years and we can see there too, that there was strategic choices made by activists and then really, really salient court cases, at least in the US that brought a ton of attention. And in some of my own work, we see how you know, really big court cases that decide for the legality of same-sex marriage, didn't change people's minds about same-sex couples in terms of their beliefs about whether they liked them or, you know, thought it was moral, but it did change their minds about how normative it was, how many Americans accepted same-sex marriage and how many Americans would accept same-sex marriage going forward.

So I think there's a lot of things that had to happen. I think it's always come with grassroots activism, but then, these sort of like structural levers, whether they're actual laws and institution or whether they're just these big collective events, like in culture, in pop culture and and so forth, that draw a lot of attention to, and admiration and eyeballs, to the topic.

Ravi Gurumurthy: And you mentioned legislation and rules, and that gets onto a classic debate about whether behavior leads to attitudinal change as a sort of behavioralist might think, or whether sometimes, as probably most people think, you change people's attitudes and then their behavior follows that. Both of those ways of looking at the issues feel a little bit simplistic.

I just wondered about what, what is your account of the interplay between attitudes and behaviour.

Betsy Paluck: Yeah, I treat people's attitudes and I think people treat their own attitudes a bit like their possessions. They hold on to them until they're maybe no longer useful. But people don't switch them around very fast or easily and so I think they're interesting to know about, I think that what people say they think is very interesting and important, but social science has not been able to find this very strong connection between what people say they believe and then what they do for better or for worse. And so that's why I've just been so interested in sort of the prevailing social winds, the perception of, well is my attitude appropriate here? Is it acceptable? Can I speak it aloud in this setting? Those kinds of perceptions seem to override personal attitudes quite often, and in really significant ways. I mean, a really good example is research on hate crime shows that perpetrators of hate crime believe that their attitudes are shared by some important community. They think that they're supported by a community of people. So essentially that their extremism is not just theirs alone. It's not just their possession, but it's one shared by many.

Ravi Gurumurthy: So what I want to turn to some other work that you've been doing on tackling prejudice and you wrote a very good, you and some colleagues, did some work to review what actually works in tackling prejudice. I just wondered whether you could just try and summarise what we know about what works?

Betsy Paluck: Sure. So what we did recently, this is where this response is coming from is, we basically tried to hoover up every single study that had ever been done to measure the effectiveness of a prejudice reduction intervention.

So that includes diversity training, implicit bias reduction, intergroup contact. So, you know sports camps where you bring people together from different ethnic groups or religions, everything under the sun. And we looked at it all together. We said like, what are we doing overall?

Is it, is it working? And then we sort of split it up and looked at it, you know, sector by sector. One of the things that we noted is that, well, we're onto something. There are on average, what the research shows is that we're making, small, positive changes. It also just pointed us to what's really popular these days.

And you're going to hear an echo of what I just talked about with the social norms literature, which is that it seems like so much of behavioral science these days is all about what can we do? What little things can we do with the margins? So 75% of all interventions, we're talking globally here, and everywhere from, schools to faith-based communities to corporations.

A lot of what we're doing is what we call light touch. So, I mean, that's a policy term, but we really defined it as it had to be really cheap, very brief, some many cases, 15 minutes or less time, and really easy to implement. That's what we called light touch that, that characterises 75% of what we're doing.

And now I guess it leaves out rule changes, policy changes, that organizations where they weren't able to actually do an assessment of impact, that probably din't get picked up by our study, but in terms of programming that people deploy to try to reduce prejudice, it's just really short.

And I don't want to say it's like a box check because I think that when a lot of people, you know, reach for these programs, they're really trying to do something, in other cases it might be a bit of a box check, it's changing things in very small ways and depressingly though with the best of that research showed when you just skimmed the cream off the top and said, what does the best and most rigorous studies show? We're talking very small changes.

So what we concluded from that is that there's a lot of interesting ideas out there, but if we were just to get better and better at implementing those ideas, for example, training people about implicit bias, doing these one-off online diversity trainings, it seems like we might not change that much.

And so we ended that course of research by saying, we need to be thinking more structurally. We need to be thinking bigger, in part because the small stuff is not working, but also because there's a lot of ideas that are sort of on the table still, and we should be collaborating with economists, political scientists, behavioral scientists, altogether to look at these sort of stronger levers of policy.

Ravi Gurumurthy: What kinds of things would you, what kind of leaders would you like to be pulling that are going to have a big effect?

Betsy Paluck: One way to think about it? Let me just, let me just say how we think about it, which is that again, If you say, like we need more structural change.

I would say that there's the traditional way of thinking about structure, which is leaders make announcements, set new policy and there's another way to think about structure, which is to say it could be a social structure. So what are the events or the happenings, the organisations that bring a lot of attention to something that really give us the chance to change our opinion about

what's appropriate, you know, so going back to norms or just give us a chance to really learn something because everybody's talking about it, right? So I think that we're thinking in terms of structure, it's both social and sort of more traditional structures like institutions. And from there, I think it really depends on what your position is.

Who are you? What kind of thing can you do to affect structure? Or can you go work with people who are working on structural change to make sure that it's best suited for humans. So if you're a behavioral scientist and a new policy is coming into play, can you work on that policy to make sure that it's well understood by everyone, that it's framed in the right way so that people understand what its purpose is and what its goal is, et cetera? So I think that would be a really worthy thing for all behavioral scientists to sort of stop and think about like, how does that Idea of what we should do, how does that measure up with the work we're doing right now?

A lot of this might involve flipping what we're doing on its head. So, you know, myself included, a lot of psychologists and behavioral scientists have been trying to measure diversity trainings. Maybe because we believe they work or we believe they don't, we just want to show, what is the evidence-base, it's almost nil by the way, and so we've been, saying things like, we should really know. Do these white fragility trainings work? And one way to think about how they work is to say, well, two years down the road, do we see more black board members at this company? This would be to say the opposite. It would be to say, work with the company and just say, you know what I advise you as a behavioral scientist? Put more black board members on your board and then I'll measure two years later whether there's more white fragility in your corporate culture.

Ravi Gurumurthy: And just going back to, you know, you were criticizing sort of behavioral science, or criticizing the fact that so much of the evidence-base is based on low intensity interventions, that's sometimes for good reason isn't it? That people want low cost things that can actually be done at scale. Is there a risk that you go for sort of higher intensity interventions that don't scale? I'm not saying the things you just suggested actually very cheap to do because they're institutional, but apart from the sort of more institutional measures, do you think it is worth looking at sort of higher intensity interventions?

Betsy Paluck: Maybe. I think that what we should avoid is just doing the things that we're doing, but for longer. I don't think that we need to repeat ourselves several times about the things that we're saying right now. I think maybe we should be careful about what we mean by more high intensity interventions.

Is that an intervention of a different kind? Does that mean you're really integrating it into the sort of lifeblood of an organization? You know, anti-racism is just something we do? It's like a practice that this organization it's built into our group processes and how we discuss topics, it's built into our decisions about how to direct funds, it's built into X, Y, and Z, right?

That's a pretty high intensity anti-racism effort, for example, just to use one example, what it's not is just having implicit bias trainings all the time, right? And, I worry that people think, "oh, well, you know, sure, so Betsy and her colleagues are saying these 15 minute trainings aren't enough, we should just do them for 30 minutes every week." That's not what we're saying. And there's actually no evidence that this kind of thing accumulates. So, we're showing, okay, there's this tiny, tiny, positive change as a result on average of all these interventions, but there's no research to show that that either snowballs or that reinforcing it over time helps it to grow.

There's just an absence of evidence on that. So I wouldn't bet on it.

Ravi Gurumurthy: One way potentially reducing prejudice is to bring different people from diverse groups into contact with each other and there was this thing called the Contact hypothesis that again you've looked at, to what extent is that true? And under what circumstances?

Betsy Paluck: Yeah, so the Contact hypothesis was developed by Gordon Allport, this psychologist who was thinking about these things around the time of many desegregation policies in the United States. And so, one way to think about the Contact hypothesis is that it's almost impossible to prove because what Allport did was, Allport laid out this idea that groups coming together would reduce their prejudice prejudices toward one another, under a number of conditions. And those conditions kind of describe a utopia that we're just not living in and are not going to live in any time soon. So it includes equal status. They need to have a common goal. They need to have cooperative practices. The whole shebang needs to be approved by a relevant authority who's incredibly supportive of it. And so what it is, is a description of an ideal. And so I think what is really interesting is to then use that theory to say, well, what are the minimal conditions under which contact can reduce prejudice?

Because we have data showing that near contact can actually exacerbate prejudice. And I don't think that research gets enough attention. So research, for example, by Ryan Enos and colleagues showing that just seeing other people on the subway, on the train, that can sometimes actually increase prejudice.

So these mere encounters, that's not going to do it. But then, I mean, who is going to engineer a situation in which there is authority approval cooperation, common goal, equal status, et cetera, et cetera. So what I think is really interesting is the research coming out now saying, okay let's engineer a situation where they're cooperating together and they're coming together and they have this sort of cooperative dynamic.

How important is that? So there's been excellent research by two really dynamic young researchers in economics and political science. One that Lowe was basically running a cricket league in India with low and high cap men playing cricket together and testing whether being on the same team versus playing together, but competing against one another, under what conditions might they actually start to cooperate more and, and have less stigma about those interactions.

And then likewise in Northern Iraq a soccer league with, or football excuse me, with Christians and Muslims. Again, testing does it matter if they're on your team or is it okay just to see them on the field? And does that desensitize and so forth? And so I think cooperation, it seems, it's suggested, is important.

But also there's some, some limits to these particular settings. So it doesn't seem that the changes extend to, for example, Christians feeling differently about all Muslims and it doesn't always seem to extend to behaviors and it doesn't seem to affect their attitudes about policies in Iraq, so reconciliation policies and so forth , not at least after one season. But I think that this is where it's at, that we really have to be thinking in terms of contact, not just about like, let's just bring people together, but let's try and get as close as possible. Let's try to think about which of these conditions are possible here.

Could it be authority? Sanction? Could we really emphasize, look we have a progressive or a reconciliation minded new governor of this state, this governor is going to come and sort of give their blessing to this gathering, this hospital, that's going to serve both communities and et cetera. I think that's where it's at. And almost universal.

Ravi Gurumurthy: Yeah. Can I sort of end Betsy with asking you to quite difficult questions that really are about giving advice to us? One is, we're working at Nesta on a series of big societal challenges such as how you tackle obesity, or how you reduce carbon emissions in homes and also how you narrow the gap in educational underachievement between kids on free school meals, people on low incomes and the average, and I'm just interested in how we can apply some of your research to the things that we're working on.

Betsy Paluck: I think that what I would want to do if I were sitting at your table is I would want to ask what the communities where you're doing this work, what they're like right now, what are the existing norms that you think are obstacles to what you're trying to do? Are there entrenched norms that you could weaken, for example? I think that one thing that's really hard about social change is inventing something new, trying to pass on a new idea, " this is what it should be now". But a lot of times it's interesting to think about what exists there right now that might be an obstacle, to behaviors that you're trying, you're hoping, that people will adopt. And is there a way to weaken that norm to, to challenge it, to show that there's disagreement with it?

I would also think really hard about identity. This is something that hasn't come up yet, but you know, all norms belong to groups, right? And we've talked a little bit about who you look toward when you try to figure out like which way is the wind blowing and so much of that has to do with identity.

It's not just hierarchy it's bounded by who you think you are and who you think is relevant to you. And that's another principle that I would really keep at the forefront of your mind, make any intervention, even one that you want to bring to scale, really sensitive to the local identities and treat those identities as focal points, as placeholders.

So, we need the people who speak to these identities to be involved and who are experts in that group's norms, we need them to be involved. And I, again, would think about structure, both social and institutional sort of traditional structures, I would think about events and informal collectives that that draw a lot of attention.

And I would think about you know, the traditional structures that draw a lot of attention. So, you know, leadership and the traditional stuff. So I think those are, without being able to delve into each topic specifically and knowing the environments where you're really focusing in those are the principles that I would hold very dear in, in those settings.

Ravi Gurumurthy: That's incredibly useful. Can I also ask you about, we've touched at various points in this podcast about behavioral science and where it might go next and, over the last 10, 15 years, it's been heavily popularized, it's been applied in public policy, I think that there are limitations and there's a slight risk that it's almost has too much exposure.

And I just wonder about, if you were sort of looking 5, 10, 15 years ahead, where do you want this collection of disciplines, this field to go?

Betsy Paluck: I feel like at a certain point in time, there was sort of like a drawing out of like one part of psychology and behavioral science and that part was, how can we affect individuals one at a time?

And it really fit this neoliberal moment where we weren't going to boldly change enormous programs or design new structures, we were going to try to equip individuals to make the best out of what we had. And that is something that psychology can help you to do. Absolutely. But I think that I'm sensing that that moment is passing and maybe that is what we're thinking of when we say there's just been too much exposure. I think the frustration is really around that approach. And unfortunately that's not all that psychology and that behavioral science has to offer. I think that going forward, I hope that what is drawn out of behavioral science or what is offered proactively by behavioral scientists is this focus on identities, collective identities, getting back together again with our work on social movements and groups and and how individual perception interacts with structures.

So I think that the, the policy moment has changed. I think that there's room and just a burning need for bolder action and research traditions from those literatures.

Ravi Gurumurthy: Absolutely. I mean, as you say, Betsy, this is now a time where there is a demand politically for big solutions to big challenges, so something that focuses on a small scale change, incrementally with individuals feels very much out of kilter. I could carry on talking for a long, long time, but we should end it there. Betsy Paluck, thank you very much for joining us.

Betsy Paluck: It was a delight, thanks.