Reducing Exclusionary Attitudes Through Interpersonal Conversation: Evidence From Three Field Experiments

Exclusionary attitudes—prejudice towards outgroups and opposition to policies that pro-mote their well-being—are presenting challenges to democratic societies worldwide. Drawing on insights from psychology, we argue that non-judgmentally exchanging narratives in inter-personal conversations can facilitate durable reductions in exclusionary attitudes. We supportthis argument with evidence from three pre-registered field experiments targeting exclusionary attitudes towards unauthorized immigrants and transgender people. In these experiments, 230 canvassers conversed with 6,869 voters across 7 U.S. locations. In Experiment 1, face-to-face conversations deploying arguments alone had no effects on voters’ exclusionary immigration policy or prejudicial attitudes, but otherwise identical conversations also including the non-judgmental exchange of narratives durably reduced exclusionary attitudes for at least four months (d= 0.08). Experiments 2 and 3, targeting transphobia, replicate these findings and support the scalability of this strategy (ds= 0.08,0.04). Non-judgmentally exchanging narratives can help overcome the resistance to persuasion often encountered in discussions of these contentious topics.