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Building social cohesion between Christians and Muslims through soccer in post-ISIS Iraq - Science Magazine
Aug 13, 2020 4 mins, 54 secs
Mousa randomized Christian Iraqi refugees to soccer teams that were composed of either all Christian players or a mixture of Christian and Muslim players (see the Perspective by Paluck and Clark).

Playing on the same team as Muslims had positive effects on Christian players' attitudes and behaviors toward Muslims within the context of soccer, but these effects did not generalize to non-soccer contexts.

Can intergroup contact build social cohesion after war.

The intervention improved behaviors toward Muslim peers: Christians with Muslim teammates were more likely to vote for a Muslim (not on their team) to receive a sportsmanship award, register for a mixed team next season, and train with Muslims 6 months after the intervention.

The intervention did not substantially affect behaviors in other social contexts, such as patronizing a restaurant in Muslim-dominated Mosul or attending a mixed social event, nor did it yield consistent effects on intergroup attitudes.

Although contact can build tolerant behaviors toward peers within an intervention, building broader social cohesion outside of it is more challenging.

At the same time, Muslim communities from neighboring villages have been migrating into Christian enclaves, leading Iraq’s Christians to fear the dilution of their culture and identity (3).

Meaningful intergroup contact represents one such grassroots approach.

Here, I provide causal evidence on whether meaningful contact between groups can build social cohesion after war.

Using a field experiment among Iraqis displaced by ISIS, I randomly assigned amateur Christian soccer players to an all-Christian team or to a team mixed with three Muslims for a 2-month league.

The leagues largely met the conditions considered key for activating successful intergroup contact: Teammates had to cooperate to achieve their shared goal, players were subject to the equalizing effect of team sports, and local Christian leaders and organizations endorsed the leagues.

This study thus serves as a proof of concept that near-optimal contact can build tolerant behaviors after violent conflict—at least toward those encountered in the intervention.

The positive effects of contact among Christian study participants did not, however, generalize to Muslim strangers, highlighting a potentially important limitation of contact after war.

Methodological constraints also limit our knowledge of intergroup contact.

Forty-two of the ~45 teams in the area were recruited on a first come, first served basis, resulting in a sample size that varied between 183 and 459 Christian players depending on the outcome (see the supplementary materials and methods).

Participants were told that community-building was one of the leagues’ aims and, as such, each team would be allocated an additional three players who may or may not be Christian in an effort to include diverse groups.

Treated teams received additional Muslim players drawn from local Muslim teams, whereas control teams received fellow Christians.

Christian and Muslim added players were indistinguishable in baseline skill (table S4), and league guidelines ensured that they played roughly the same number of minutes per game (see the supplementary text).

To mitigate the power differentials between Muslims and Christians, and to increase the comfort of Christian participants, discussions between the research team and coaches concluded that Muslim players should remain a numeric minority (~25%) of each squad.

Figure S1 and table S5 show the balance on baseline demographics and attitudes between the treatment and control groups.

In addition to these experimental leagues, I also created a comparison league without any Muslim players to explore the effects of no intergroup exposure at all.

Second, the end-line survey asked players if they agreed to register for a mixed team next season.

Looking first at tolerance on the field, treated players were 13 percentage points more likely to report that they would not mind being assigned to a mixed team next season (P = 0.044), 26 percentage points more likely to vote for a Muslim player (not on their team) to receive a sportsmanship prize (P = 0.003), and 49 percentage points more likely to train with Muslims 6 months after the intervention ended (P < 0.001).

Treated players were not detectably more likely to attend a mixed social event or to patronize a Muslim-owned restaurant in Mosul up to 4 months after the intervention ended.

Conditional on attending the social event, treated players brought their wives at almost identical rates as control players (fig. S6).

First, the treatment improved generalizable behaviors relative to the comparison league, suggesting a beneficial effect to simply having Muslim players in the league itself (figs. S7 to S9).

Success alone had little effect on tolerance, but playing on a successful, mixed team built tolerance toward Muslim strangers (table S7).

Like behaviors toward Muslim strangers, personal beliefs also proved difficult to change.

I found no effect of the treatment on Christians’ reported comfort with Muslim neighbors or blame directed at Muslim civilians for Christian suffering.

As an exploratory analysis, I tested directly whether treatment effects were stronger for on-the-field behaviors relative to off-the-field behaviors.

2, treated players were consistently more likely to engage in on-the-field behaviors (however measured) relative to control players, whereas the two groups engaged in off-the-field behaviors at similar rates.

The left panel shows covariate-adjusted means for the control and treatment groups separately for on-the-field and off-the-field outcomes.

I also ruled out backlash effects among control participants and Muslim players.

Analyzing changes in attitudes over time, neither control participants nor Muslim players became more prejudiced (figs. S12 and S13).

I found that Christians assigned to compete on a soccer team with Muslim teammates were more likely to engage in tolerant behaviors toward Muslim peers encountered in the intervention up to 6 months after the intervention ended.

This pattern could be symptomatic of how contact operates more broadly, compelling researchers to measure long-term, actual behaviors to understand the conditions under which contact effects extend to an entire outgroup [(41); for exceptions from nonconflict zones, see (42) and (43)].

Studies involving soccer teams composed of displaced refugees reveal that intergroup contact has mixed effects on potential peace processes

Studies involving soccer teams composed of displaced refugees reveal that intergroup contact has mixed effects on potential peace processes

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