Imagine the United Nations throwing together a summer camp for all members to actually sit down and get to know each other—could that be the key to world peace? A new study out of the Booth School of Business has found that befriending one member of an ‘enemy’ group can predict long-term attitudes toward whole group. According to findings by Professor Jane Risen and Booth doctoral student Juliana Schroeder that may at least be a start to setting aside global differences.
Risen and Schroeder conducted research on Seeds of Peace, a peace-building program that brings together teenagers from conflict regions every year for three weeks in rural Maine. Each participant’s feelings and attitudes toward the other national group where monitored for three years with three separate cohorts of campers.
The results found that the camp did have an effect on relationships: Campers who formed a close relationship with someone from the “other side” of their conflict (such as a Palestinian forming a relationship with a Jewish Israeli) developed more positive feelings toward all members of that group, and were more likely to retain those feelings long after returning home. Risen and Schroeder’s paper, “Befriending the enemy: Outgroup friendship longitudinally predicts intergroup attitudes in a co-existence program for Israelis and Palestinians,” was published recently in Group Processes and Intergroup Relations.
“Nearly every camper has a more positive attitude on the last day of camp than he or she did on the first day,” Risen says. “Of course, once the teenagers get home, the positive emotions they developed during their time away fades, but most showed more positive feelings toward the outgroup — even months later — than they did before they attended the program.”