“The Unequal Effects of Unequal Contact: Power, Race, and Social Cohesion in the U.S. Military.” (with Eddie Yang). April 2025.
The contact hypothesis posits that cooperative, egalitarian contact reduces prejudice. Yet in practice, contact is often unequal — especially in the very settings where prejudice reduction is most needed. Unequal power status further complicates the contact experience for minorities. Leveraging rich data from surveys, censuses, and testimonials among servicemembers in WWII and the Vietnam War, we develop and test a theory of unequal contact. We find that equal contact improves intergroup atti- tudes among minorities while unequal contact sparks backlash effects, driven by a more negative experience. White soldiers respond to equal contact similar to how Black sol- diers respond to unequal contact, suggesting that perceived threats and actual threats are processed in similar ways. We add qualitative nuance to these results by digitizing thousands of veteran testimonies from both wars, revealing drastic assymetries in how white vs. non-white veterans describe their experiences with race within and outside the military. Our results underscore the importance of power status in determining the effects of contact, challenging a fundamental premise underpinning the contact hypothesis.
“From International Peacemaking to Individual Peacebuilding: Lessons from the Past and Challenges for the Future.” (with Lisa Hultman). March 2025. Developed for the ReCIPE research initiative.
How can societies escape the conflict trap of violence and distrust between social outgroups? The literature offers a plethora of tools for reducing conflict through peacemaking, peacebuilding and reconstruction efforts. Peacemaking tools are intended to manage conflict between organized actors and reduce violence in the short-term. The efforts are often international, focused on changing the immediate behavior of actors. Once immediate violence has been stymied, additional peacebuilding and reconstruction efforts are necessary to foster intergroup trust, tolerance, and a shared national identity, thereby reducing incentives for violence and building resilience against future `shocks' to tolerance in the long-term. Such efforts typically occur at the grassroots, local levels, and seek to change attitudes of individuals in post-conflict societies. We provide an overview of the evidence base on peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding --- identifying promising policies and programs, limitations, and shared mechanisms driving positive effects. We integrate these literatures into a framework tracing the path from immediate violence reduction to durable peace, pinpointing critical empirical and theoretic gaps in our knowledge of how to break the conflict trap.
“Random Acts of Kindness? How Gender Shapes Everyday Helping Behaviors.” (with Saad Gulzar). March 2024.
Everyday acts of cooperation between strangers from different social groups form the crux of social cohesion, a key driver of economic, polit- ical, and social development. This study examines how gender shapes these behaviors. Randomizing the gender, class, and ethnic identities of research assistants approaching over 25,000 pedestrians worldwide, we measure whether strangers provide directions, assist with dropped groceries, or lend their cell phone. Across all countries and experi- ments, gender consistently emerges as a stronger determinant of helping behavior than class or ethnicity: women are more likely to be helped — but less likely to help a stranger in need — compared to men. These gender gaps grow with the riskiness of the interaction, but can- not be explained by safety concerns alone. We also uncover nuanced patterns of in-group cooperation, with some groups, such as ethnic minorities, exhibiting solidarity, while others, like lower-income individ- uals, reinforcing existing hierarchies. Our results suggest that random acts of kindness are not random; they are gendered, first and foremost.
“Do refugee co-sponsorship programs improve economic integration? Causal evidence from the U.S.” (with Jeremy Ferwerda, Jens Hainmueller, Duncan Lawrence, and Jeremy Weinstein). January 2025. [Pending approval].
The global rise in forcibly displaced people has led many receiving states to adopt community-based sponsorship models, in which local volunteers partner with professional agencies to support refugee integration. While community-based sponsorship holds the potential to facilitate refugee integration, concerns remain about outsourcing responsibilities from professional caseworkers to volunteers. Leveraging U.S. administrative data, we compare outcomes between refugees assigned to cosponsorship, a U.S. form of community-based sponsorship, and those who were not, employing a selection-on-observables design using agency assignment criteria. Our analysis reveals that cosponsorship improves refugee employment, reduces out-migration from assigned locations, and increases educational enrollment for both parents and children. We also find, however, that cosponsored refugees are less likely to repay their initial travel loan, potentially harming their credit scores. Viewed together, the results suggest that community-based sponsorship programs can be an effective complement to government resettlement but would benefit from enhanced training and oversight to mitigate unintended consequences.
“Boosting the Co-Production of Public Goods: Experimental Evidence From a Lebanese Waste Management Program.” (with Kristen Kao and Trevor Incerti). December 2024.
How can we encourage citizens to take costly action for the environment? With waste management systems collapsing in Lebanon, individual action is all the more urgent. We leverage a field experiment in the Lebanese city of Bickfaya to answer this question. Partnering with the local municipality and a grassroots NGO, we evaluate a program that tracks citizens’ waste, inspects their waste bags, and sends them personalized feedback on how to improve their sorting. Two months after the intervention, we find that randomly inviting citizens to join the program improves their sorting quality by an average of 1.5 out of 5 stars (~160% relative to the control group mean). We also find effects on environmentally-conscious behaviors outside of waste sorting – four months after the intervention, treated households are double as likely to sign up for a raffle where prizes are explicitly “green” (4% vs. 8%). These effects disappear at the 12 month mark, however. A survey of the city’s residents explores mechanisms driving the initial effects — and why they did not last. The results suggest that monitoring, combined with knowledge on how to comply, can boost environmentally-conscious behaviors – even against the backdrop of economic and political crisis — but that financial incentives are likely needed to maintain these effects.
“Are Minorities Punished More Harshly for Having a Bad Day? Evidence from Premier League Soccer” (with Ala Alrababah, William Marble, and Alexandra Siegel). November 2024.
Positive intergroup contact has been shown to improve attitudes toward stig-matized minorities. A concern with the contact paradigm is that it may placeunreasonable demands on minorities to be high-performers. Are minoritiesjudged more harshly for under-achieving relative to the majority group? Con-versely, are minorities more readily rewarded for their success? We use evi-dence from English top-tier soccer to answer these questions. We measure howjournalists and fans react to players’ performances, using objective measuresof performance. We find little evidence of discrimination based on nationalityand ethnicity. These results are consistent across three diverse datasets con-sisting of millions of social media posts, hundreds of thousands of newspaperarticles, and tens of thousands of Fantasy Premier League transfers. The dis-crimination we do uncover — when players perform extremely poorly — issmall in magnitude, and often runs counter to the expected direction. Jour-nalists and fans punish poor performances, but not differentially so based onplayer identity. The results suggest that minorities need not uphold ‘modelminority’ myths in order to be accepted.
“Intergroup Contact, Empathy Education, and Refugee-Native Integration in Lebanon.” (with Alexandra Scacco and Lennard Naumann).
Can intergroup contact improve native-refugee relations? Are any positive effects of contact amplified when combined with empathy-building education? We answer these questions using a field experiment that brings together Syrian refugees and native Lebanese for a psychosocial support program in Lebanon, where refugees make up 25% of the population. We randomly assign participants to two treatment arms: (1) homogenous vs. heterogeneous (Lebanese-Syrian) classroom; (2) empathy building vs. a placebo (health and nutrition) curriculum. We ask whether these treatments can improve prejudiced attitudes and behavior among Syrian and Lebanese participants --- as well as spillover effects among their parents --- and psychological integration among Syrians in particular. This study thus tests the potential of contact and educational programs to build social cohesion between refugees and host populations, in a context of ongoing economic crisis and pervasive distrust.
“(Mis)perceptions of inequality, redistribution, and social cohesion: Evidence from Lebanon.” (with Lydia Assouad, Augustin Bergeron, and Giulia Buccione).
In 2022, a depreciating local currency, hyperinflation, and the removal of fuel and medicine subsidies plunged millions of Lebanese into poverty. This economic crisis, coupled with government inaction, has exacerbated social and economic inequalities in Lebanon, which were already the highest in the region. Anecdotal evidence suggest that most Lebanese incorrectly believe that income inequality is high between religious groups, and low within them. In reality, the opposite is true. Can correcting beliefs about income inequality reduce prejudice and sectarianism, and build solidarity across class lines in Lebanon? We plan to conduct a nationally representative survey of 3,000 Lebanese citizens to first document (mis)perception of income inequality at the national level and between religious groups. We then randomly assign respondents to a video treatment describing extreme levels of inequality at the national level (treatment 1), the same information plus information on the relatively low levels of inequality between religious groups (treatment 2), or placebo information about environmental conditions in Lebanon (control). We estimate the effects of these treatments on intergroup prejudice and trust, tax morale, and support for pro-poor policies.
“Edutainment and Gender Equality in Egypt” (with Ahmed Ezzeldin Mohamed and Don Green).
Can edutainment improve gender equality? Working with the UN’s gender agency in Egypt, we run a cluster-randomized RCT to evaluate the effects of exposure to a soap opera portraying the emotional, physical, and financial risks associated with various gender-regressive practices. Participants are invited to watch a 1.5 hour condensed `highlight reel' focused on: (1) FGM and early marriage; (2) family planning, or (3) a placebo reel on a storyline unrelated to gender. We administer a baseline, midline, and endline survey to measure effects on gender-related attitudes, (mis)information, norms, and behaviors. In doing so, we test a scalable and unobtrusive method for changing policy-relevant attitudes and actions.
“Promoting Reconciliation in Conflict-Affected Communities in Mali” (with Chad Hazlett and Daniel Posner).
The ongoing conflict in Mali has deepened inter-group tensions in many communities. In partnership with USAID, we are designing, implementing, and evaluating the impact of an intervention designed to promote reconciliation in conflict-affected communities in the Mopti and Ségou regions of the country. The intervention and accompanying evaluation will allow us to test the relative and joint impacts of cash transfers and more traditional conflict regulating programming on inter-group tensions.
“Can Vouching for Stigmatized Individuals Overcome the Trust Deficit in Post-ISIS Iraq? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Mosul.” (with Vera Mironova).