What we can learn from Behavioural Science for peace
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development sets out an ambitious plan for transforming our world by ending poverty around the globe, providing people access to justice and protecting the planet from degradation. Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is fundamentally linked to changing human behaviour. Enabling young girls to attend school, reducing stigma and structural violence, and promoting sustainable consumption are prerequisites for building more peaceful, just and inclusive societies. Within the context of the broad collective effort to achieve the SDGs, different members of the UN family, including the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Children´s Fund, and the Department for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, have started to collaborate with Behavioural Science experts to design, pilot and implement people-centred approaches that seek to change social conduct.
Behavioural Science (BeSci) is a field of study focusing on people’s individual and collective decision-making. Drawing on insights from multiple disciplines, including economics, sociology, and cognitive science, BeSci experts examine the drivers of human behaviour and develop an evidence-based understanding of how to influence it.
Over the last decades, governments, private actors and international organizations worldwide have increasingly applied behavioural insights to improve the effectiveness of public policies, government programs and product advertisement. Today, algorithms aligned to track and trigger human sensations underlie the business model of social media companies. Regulators stipulate graphic warnings on tobacco packaging to drive smoking cessation and the WHO uses behavioural informed interventions to reduce HIV transmission.
Behavioural science is a subject of ongoing debate among peace practitioners. “It is difficult to overstate how much emotion rather than logic influences our societal politics and international wars,” says Andres Casas, a Behavioural Science expert who is advising DPPA’s Innovation Cell. “Traditional approaches to making peace often tend to overlook this fundamental point. They focus mostly on economic, legal and political matters and neglect the central role that group dynamics, social norms and individual behaviour play in conflict.”
BeSci Insights supporting structural change towards more inclusive societies
Reforming a country’s legislative framework to enhance political and economic participation achieves little if existing social beliefs continue to impede women and minority groups from receiving higher education. Meanwhile, challenges faced by the international community to establish inclusive and sustainable peace in countries marked by a legacy of autocracy and internal conflict prove that structural transformation cannot be prescribed politically but needs to be internalized in people’s habits and belief systems. Hence building sustainable peace relies on both the transformation of formal and informal institutions. Methodologies such as social norm nudging and the shifting of civic narratives are behaviourally informed interventions to engage people in social change.
Social norms are rules of behaviour that individuals prefer to conform to, assuming that those around them expect that behaviour to be appropriate for themselves and others. Unspoken social rules such as welcome rituals or conversational manners enable a functional interaction between people based on pre-existing codes of conduct. However, social norms not only regulate interaction between people but also strongly influence different collective practices, not always to the advantage of the people adhering to them.
Ethnic segregation, child marriage, and female genital mutilation (FGM) are typical examples of highly detrimental social norms maintained in many countries, often despite legal prohibition. Long-standing traditions paired with people’s fear of social exclusion underlies FGM rates of more than 70% in Egypt, even though the Egyptian parliament banned the practice back in 2008. To sustainably transform such forms of structural violence, decisive action requires not just legally banning a specific practice but also influencing social expectations around it.
To this end behavioural experts point towards the very mechanism that makes social norms so powerful — people’s desire to imitate or be accepted by a valuable group. The nudging of social norms is hence typically performed by relaying information about what other people do. Awareness campaigns featuring celebrities or religious leaders, popular TV soaps incorporating political issues in their scripts, or the publication of statistics showing a change of conduct within a specific social group are common norm-nudging interventions. It is crucial not only to ensure that the relevant target group is reached, but also to strike the right tone. To substantially reduce FGM rates in northern Africa, the belief system of men and women needs to be influenced without shaming those who are themselves victims of the harmful practice. Norm-nudging is hence best perceived as an effort to promote new social trends and values by subtle and positive messaging.
Against this backdrop BeSci Insights complement policymaking by providing a toolbox of soft-power methodologies that aim to influence collective feelings, thinking and behaviour to enable people to adapt to a changing normative framework.
BeSci Insights complementing peacebuilding practitioners
Emotions and collective belief systems are far from alien to practitioners in the field of peace, conflict and development: shifting anger and resentment towards more productive emotional states of hope and forgiveness are essential pillars of peacebuilding.
Societies marked by a legacy of internal conflict, economic inequalities and structural violence are deeply polarized along major fault lines and characterized by high levels of mistrust and antipathy. Moreover, post-conflict societies often face crucial questions of how to deal with traumatic experiences and war-related identities. The prosecution of war crimes and financial support for reconstruction may both be pursued by national and international actors to lay the ground for future peace. However, enabling people, fellow citizens and neighbors who suffered violence and displacement to come to terms with war-related trauma is also fundamental to ensure the convergence of a conflict-torn society.
After years of violence and structural injustice, narratives have developed on all sides about “how the conflict came about” or what people “on the other side” have done. During times of war, such narratives help to persist amid hardship and loss; they “prove” that the opponent is “inhumane” and provide evidence of “self-victimhood.” They also prevent individuals from perceiving each other’s realities and get passed on to future generations, posing obstacles to all efforts of reconciliation.
In such a context, inclusive dialogue processes between people from adversarial groups are commonly conducted by peacebuilding practitioners to address hostile preconceptions and memories of injustice within society. Learning about the views and needs of the respective “other” can effectively humanize relationships and foster empathetic understanding across conflict divides.
It is here where the Behavioural Science perspective can inform and support the design and methodology of dialogue and reconciliation processes. BeSci scholars such as Elisabeth Paluck, for instance, examined how mass media has been utilized to promote racial tolerance between Hutu and Tutsis in post-conflict Rwanda. She found that radio soap operas featuring messages of reconciliation and traumatic experiences on both sides of the conflict divide reduced prejudices concerning intermarriage and cooperation between Hutu and Tutsi listeners. Meanwhile, recent BeSci studies point towards the difficulties of getting the diaspora engaged in dialogue, as their desire to “prove” their belonging to a particular national identity encourages more uncompromising behaviour regarding outgroup demands. Other BeSci scholars describe the emotional constraints of conflict party representatives within negotiation processes and find that delegates’ fear of losing support from their respective constituencies often impedes their willingness to make concessions.
While these findings are generally not new to experienced peace practitioners, the behavioural science field provides an evidence-based understanding of the mechanisms underlying such behaviour. This in turn allows not only the design of interventions that tackle the drivers of specific behavioural patterns but also the measurement of whether such initiatives do indeed lead to a change of social conduct on a large scale.
As we look to the future, behavioural scientists could more prominently become part of prevention, mediation and peacebuilding initiatives. Where the peace community can draw on rich empirical knowledge and practical experience in the facilitation of dialogue and negotiation processes, behavioural insights add an evidence-based understanding of the drivers of human behaviour and additional instruments for measuring the impact of human-centred interventions.
About the author: Felix Kufus is a consultant with the UN DPPA Innovation Cell. With an academic background in Political Economy and Mediation and Conflict Studies, he started his career in documentary filmmaking before entering the peacebuilding field. With his colleagues at the UN Innovation Cell, he is exploring new tools and methods for conflict prevention, mediation and peacebuilding.
“Futuring Peace” is an online magazine published by the Innovation Cell of the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (UN DPPA). We explore cross-cutting approaches to conflict prevention, peacemaking and peacebuilding for a more peaceful future worldwide.
