This is an interactive visual tool that measures the degree to which an individual feels a sense of commonality with another group. Research indicates that increased self-other overlap correlates with compassion and predicts pro-social behavior, i.e. increased willingness to forgo personal rewards to alleviate the suffering of the other (Batson, Turk, Shaw & Klein, ‘95), and is associated with greater trust and cooperative exchange (Zak & Knack, ‘01).

This measure consists of a ‘feeling thermometer’ that is widely used to assess intergroup negativity (Choma, Hodson, & Costello, 2012; S. Paolini, M. Hewstone, E. Cairns, & A. Voci, 2004; Turner & West, 2012) and is employed to measure affect towards the ‘other’.

Responses to another group can be heavily dependent upon how you think that group perceives you (Vorauer and Sasaki, 2009). This has been demonstrated to be particularly important for the perception that the other group listens to and respects your views: research shows that ‘feeling heard’ facilitates positive change in intergroup behaviors, even in groups involved in direct protracted conflict (e.g. Israelis and Palestinians) (Bruneau and Saxe, 2012; Sagy et al., 2002). The Peace and Conflict Neuroscience Lab measures meta-perceptions that the other group ‘listens to’ and ‘respects’ your own group.

Another specific meta-perception that we have found to be particularly damaging to intergroup relations is the view that the other group thinks of your group as less ‘evolved’ than their own (Kteily, Hodson and Bruneau, 2016).

For example, we have shown that the degree to which Americans feel dehumanized by Iranians predicts their resistance to the Iran nuclear accord and their willingness to engage in open warfare with Iran (Kteily, Hodson and Bruneau, 2016); and for Muslim Americans, feeling dehumanized by Donald Trump and Americans in general predicts support for violent versus non-violent collective action, and unwillingness to report suspicious activity in their communities to the FBI (Kteily and Bruneau, in press).

One consequence of feeling dehumanized is the tendency to dehumanize the other group, in turn. We have used a set of items to determine how much people blatantly dehumanize the other group (Kteily, Bruneau, Waytz and Cotterill, 2015).

We have found that this measure predicts real-world outcomes in a number of intergroup contexts: openness to warrantless wiretapping and torture of Arab terror suspects in the U.S. (Kteily, Bruneau, Waytz and Cotterill, 2015), the acceptance among Israelis of Palestinian civilian casualties during the War in Gaza in 2014 (Bruneau and Kteily, in review), the rejection of Muslim refugees in Denmark, Spain, Greece and Hungary (Bruneau, Kteily and Lasse, in review), a bias by Hungarian teachers in placing minority Roma students into low track schools (Bruneau, et al., in review).

Participants are asked to report their agreement with statements that present a range of perspectives toward the other identity group. This measure enables Saxelab to assess whether participants going through the virtual exchange program are able to challenge norms that perpetuate intergroup conflict.

Norms of intergroup conflict (e.g. belief in the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ hypothesis) have been shown to help drive violent intergroup conflict (e.g. in Rwanda), so diminishing these norms is particularly desirable to help buffer against future conflict (Paluck, 2009).

MIT Saxelab is partnering with the Collective Intelligence Group at MIT to develop cooperative online games that are designed to measure communication and collaboration skills across cultures. The games are played before and after the virtual exchange program to gauge whether participants become better able to overcome anxieties and performance inhibitors in cross-cultural environments.