Chris Blattman

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Randomizing peace radio!

This Saturday I’m on a panel with Betsy Paluck of Harvard’s Weatherhead Center. She is presenting the most amazing research, sure to put mine to shame. Somehow she managed to convince a radio station in Eastern DRC (ground zero for ethnic conflict) to randomize a talk show on interethnic tolerance.

This study was an attempt to measure the impact of radio talk shows
experimentally, in a setting known for a vibrant but contested radio culture.
The Democratic Republic of Congo is also known for its high levels of conflict,
its newborn democracy, and its vast poverty and underdevelopment. We designed a
radio talk show to encourage dialogue about conflict reduction and ethnic
cooperation, two themes presented in a new radio soap opera broadcast in the
violent eastern Kivu region.

How she managed to pull this off, I don’t know, but the results are amazing:

The results show that discussion inspired by talk radio had some positive
impact on democratic attitudes, but that discussions also inflamed negative
attitudes regarding the utility of violence in politics and decreased the amount
of cross-ethnic helping measured by donations of food aid.

A talk show encouraged the belief that violence is sometimes justified in Congolese politics! Just think what Rush Limbaugh is doing to America now!

My big question is whether we can generalize anything from this study. How much had to do with the radio personality, or the specific topics discussed? If we ran the same experiment 15 minutes later in the same place but with a different DJ, would we get the same result? Worth investigating further…

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