Abstract
This study investigates the effectiveness and durability of compassion-driven interventions to reduce intergroup animosity toward Jewish, Muslim, and Hispanic communities in the United States. While prior research has explored interventions to reduce partisan hostility, less is known about how such strategies operate in the context of ethnic and religious prejudice. We build on this gap by combining fact-based corrective interventions with a compassion-based perspective-taking prompt designed to evoke empathy and humanize marginalized groups. Participants will be drawn from a pre-screened pool of over 3,000 individuals who previously expressed low warmth toward these groups. In a randomized experiment, they will be assigned to one of four conditions: control, perspective-taking only, factual correction only, or a combined intervention. The primary outcomes are feeling thermometer ratings and levels of dehumanization. To enhance the durability of the effects, we incorporate “accuracy reminders”—short, follow-up prompts that reinforce the core message of the original intervention. Prior work has shown that these reminders can extend attitude change for over two weeks. Together, this study tests not only whether compassion-based strategies can reduce ethnic animosity, but also whether low-cost memory-based reinforcements can sustain those effects, offering scalable solutions for long-term hate mitigation.
