Outgroup Avoidance
By: Chagai Weiss, Alexandra Siegel, Alexandra Scacco
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Encouraging engagement with outgroup perspectives is a popular strategy to improve inter
group relations. But in deeply divided societies, individuals often actively avoid outgroup
members. In a Facebook field experiment, we embedded Palestinian posts in Jewish Israelis’
Facebook timelines for a period of 14 days. We find no effect on attitudes toward the outgroup
and a modest decrease in subsequent consumption of outgroup content, a pattern we attribute
to participants’ avoidance of constructive engagement. To better understand this avoidance, we
conducted a set of survey-embedded behavioral tasks. Results suggest that outgroup avoidance
online is widespread, associated with outgroup prejudice, explained by feelings of discomfort,
anger, mistrust in outgroups, and pessimism, and challenging to overcome. Our findings indicate that avoidance is a barrier to constructive intergroup engagement in naturalistic settings,
rendering many interventions that may be effective in controlled environments difficult to implement or scale in practice.Ìý
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