2024年6月25日 ，伟易博行为科学与政策干预交织立异团队举行2024年春季学期第三期（总第二十一次）行为科学分享会。本次讲座约请伦敦大学皇家霍洛威学院（Royal Holloway）经济系副教授、英国财务研究所研究员Abu Siddique带来题为 “Leveraging Edutainment and Social Networks to Foster Interethnic Harmony” 的研究分享。
分享人 The Speaker
Dr Abu Siddique is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at Royal Holloway University of London, Research Associate at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Affiliate at IZA and J-PAL, and an Associate Editor at Frontiers in Behavioral Economics (Health Behaviors). His main research interests lie in the field of development economics, with strong overlaps with behavioural and health economics. His first research strand focuses on understanding the impact of using behavioral interventions to improve physical and mental health in developing countries. His second strand of research examines the impact of investments in human capital during childhood and adolescence. His third strand of research explores interethnic relationships in low-income countries and how behavioural interventions can improve them. Prior to joining Royal Holloway University of London, Abu was an Assistant Professor of Economics and Policy at King’s College London and a Postdoctoral Fellow in Economics at the Technical University of Munich.
分享会 The Seminar
Interethnic tensions pose a significant barrier to the socioeconomic advancement of minority groups. This project investigates the effectiveness of educational entertainment (or edutainment) in promoting interethnic harmony. We carried out a cluster-randomized field experiment involving over 3,300 households across 120 polyethnic villages in Bangladesh. We find that disseminating information through a documentary film designed to educate the ethnically dominant Bengalis about the ethnic minority Santals in polyethnic villages increased the ethnic majority’s prosociality toward minorities. Using emotion-detecting software to analyze facial expressions during the film viewing reveals that empathy played a significant role in this process. On the other hand, we do not find any impacts on the prevalence of negative stereotypes and discriminatory opinions toward minorities. In addition, we find that targeting network-central people with the intervention generated large positive spillovers on others within villages, including Santals. We further corroborate these findings through village-level administrative data showing a reduction in police complaints in treatment villages. Five months after the intervention, we conducted a casual work field experiment involving 720 randomly selected participants from the main intervention. In this casual work task, pairs of ethnic majority and minority participants jointly produced paper bags for a local supplier under a piece-rate compensation scheme. We find treatment effects on productivity for both ethnic groups. For the ethnic majority, exposure to edutainment led to higher productivity, possibly through increased prosociality towards minorities. Among the ethnic minority, reciprocity or peer pressure appears to explain their observed productivity gains. Overall, our findings demonstrate the power of edutainment and social networks in promoting harmony within multiethnic communities.
