Eleven years ago you would have found Betsy Levy Paluck, then a PhD student, chauffeuring her research team through the undulating roads of Rwanda. Those white-knuckle truck rides to study conflict reduction in Rwandan communities set Paluck on a path to receiving one of the world's most prestigious fellowships. Now a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, and the deputy director of the school's Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy, Paluck was recently awarded a $625,000 MacArthur Fellowship—colloquially known as the "genius" grant. The no-strings-attached prize goes to 24 people each year who demonstrate extraordinary creativity and promise for the future.
Paluck's interdisciplinary work lies at the nexus between psychology and political science. Through engaged field research, she studies how mass media, institutions and influential peers can shape social norms in ways that reduce prejudice and conflict.
Paluck has tackled some of the world's most difficult and controversial subjects, such as racial strife in war-torn countries, bullying and harassment in schools, and same-sex marriage in the United States, among other hot-button issues.
"It's a long road to changing people's personal feelings," Paluck says. "But if our institutions and peer groups can shape our ideas about what is acceptable, then we should be targeting that, because it can affect our behavior."
Paluck has stretched the boundaries of traditional social psychology, taking research out of the lab and into the field. "In the lab, we test hypotheses about changing one mental process at a time," she says. "But that's impossible to do out in the world. My team is testing the efficacy of interventions while people are in their distracting homes and while they are taking in other messages. Because, ultimately, we want to know the strength of an intervention as it operates among outside influences."
You spent much of 2003 to 2007 in Rwanda, which still bore the scars of the 1994 genocide—the massacre during which the Hutu-majority killed more than a half million Tutsis and other ethnic minorities. You researched whether mass media could help prevent future violence. What inspired this study?
We think that the popular culture and mass media in Rwanda helped prepare people to execute mass violence—it was one of the ways in which anti-Tutsi discrimination was normalized. My team tested whether a reconciliation radio program could promote racial tolerance and educate people about the causes of violence and how to stand up against violent authority.
Our work focused on a new radio soap opera that entertained Rwandans with a fictional story about two communities at odds with one another and a cast that included Romeo and Juliet-like characters on opposite sides. The program demonstrated that preserving the peace is not only about nonviolence, it's also about speaking out when you disagree with a plan that supports inequality or discrimination.
I partnered with a peace-building NGO and hired a large team of Rwandan researchers to roll out the intervention in more than a dozen communities. Our research found that, after listening to the weekly radio shows, the people in our treatment groups were more likely to engage in healthy discourse to find common solutions (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 96, No. 3, 2009). The radio program did not change people's personal beliefs, but it did alter their perceptions of intermarriage and dissent as more socially acceptable. That shift in perspective coincided with their changes in behavior.
You recently published a study about how the U.S. Supreme Court decision on gay marriage affected perceptions of social norms surrounding this issue. What did your study reveal?
Many political psychologists have been interested in whether government and court decisions change people's opinions. But few people have considered whether these decisions change people's perceptions of norms.
In spring of 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court was about to issue their decision on Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. My student Margo Tankard and I led an online study in which we followed a large group of people in the United States. We constructed a time series data set, asking them the same questions several times before and after the release of the decision. We asked the participants how they felt about same-sex marriage, how they thought other Americans felt about it and whether they thought support for gay marriage would increase or decrease in the future.
We found that after the decision, people's estimates of the number of Americans who supported same-sex marriage jumped. They also thought more Americans would support same-sex marriage in the future.
It was fascinating that for both conservatives and liberals, no one was persuaded by this decision; they felt the same way all along. But both groups changed their minds about the level of support for same-sex marriage in the country (Psychological Science, Vol. 28, No. 9, 2017).
What does this award mean to you?
I am extremely proud that this type of work is being honored. I do behavioral work in the public interest, focusing on field experiments in which my team works with agents of social change: the media, governments, schools and activist networks. Back when I was a graduate student, this type of research was often dismissed as secondary applied work, but to me it is some of the most difficult theoretical research you can do. And I think that the MacArthur Foundation is recognizing that.
I hope that this award serves as a notice to the field of psychology that it is important to get out in the world and to develop and test theories outside of the laboratory. It might mean that our research takes longer and that we publish fewer articles, but maybe that's OK. Maybe that's a wise way to do research.
What you are your plans for the grant money?
I want to support students' training in this kind of research. I'm really concerned that we have a next generation of diverse and energetic students to carry on this work. I'd also like to get the public more involved. Much like we have artists-in-residence at universities, I'm interested in having activists-in-residence here at Princeton, so that people who are deeply involved in the practice of social change have an opportunity to develop and sharpen their ideas.
Theory gets us very far, but not as far as I think it needs to take us. We need to hear from people who are working in the world. And I am looking forward to broadening that feedback loop.
