Building Social Cohesion in Ethnically Mixed Schools: An Intervention on Perspective Taking
在土耳其小学中实施一项旨在培养儿童观点采择能力的教育项目，通过随机实验发现该项目显著降低了校园暴力和社会排斥，增加了跨种族社交联系，并提升了信任、互惠和利他行为。
Abstract We evaluate the effect of an educational program that aims to build social cohesion in ethnically mixed schools by developing perspective-taking ability in children. The program is implemented in Turkish elementary schools affected by a large influx of Syrian refugee children. We measure a comprehensive set of outcomes that characterize a cohesive school environment, including peer violence incidents, the prevalence of interethnic social ties, and prosocial behavior. Using randomized variation in program implementation, we find that the program significantly lowers peer violence and victimization on school grounds. The program also reduces the likelihood of social exclusion and increases interethnic social ties in the classroom. We find that the program significantly improves prosocial behavior, measured by incentivized tasks: treated students exhibit significantly higher trust, reciprocity, and altruism toward each other as well as toward anonymous out-school peers. We show that this enhanced prosociality is welfare improving from the ex post payoff perspective. We investigate multiple channels that could explain the results, including ethnic bias, impulsivity, empathetic concern, emotional intelligence, behavioral norms, and perspective taking. Children’s increased effort to take others’ perspectives emerges as the most robust mechanism to explain our results.