Supervisor: Prof. Boaz Hameiri. Accompanying Committee: Dr. Samantha Moore-Berg (The University of Utah). Dr. Nimrod Rosler (Tel Aviv University)

 

Conflict Management and Mediation PhD Program. Tel Aviv University.

 

Intergroup conflict poses persistent challenges ranging from political polarization to protracted violent confrontations worldwide. Over the past two decades, psychological interventions have been increasingly deployed to improve intergroup relations, yet their effects remain heterogeneous and often difficult to sustain.

 

A growing body of evidence suggests that these inconsistencies are not random but instead reflect systematic variation across conflict contexts. Norm-based psychological interventions are increasingly used to reduce prejudice, polarization, and support for violence, yet their effects are often modest, short-lived, and highly heterogeneous. I develop a context-sensitive theory of normative influence in intergroup conflict, asking when and why norm-based interventions succeed, fail, or backfire.

 

I argue that the effectiveness of such interventions depends on the interaction between (a) macro-level conflict conditions, (b) the structure of normative environments, and (c) two distinct psychological mechanisms—norm accuracy and norm credibility.

 

The project advances a three-study design:

 

Study 1 conducts a second-order (umbrella) meta-analysis of psychological intergroup interventions to establish whether heterogeneity in norm-intervention effects is theoretically structured rather than random.

 

Study 2 shifts focus from intervention outcomes to the pre-intervention terrain of norms. I dedicate special attention to Normative Opportunity Structures (NOS), which refer to the institutional, social, and cognitive environments that simultaneously shape what individuals can do and what they perceive as legitimate, expected, or possible in a given context.  Using cross-national survey and conflict data, it maps normative opportunity structures.

 

Study 3 provides the dissertation’s causal test through a factorial experiment that independently manipulates norm accuracy (misperception correction) and norm credibility (legitimacy and enforceability cues) across three contexts selected from Project 2. 

 

Together, the dissertation moves beyond asking whether norm interventions work to specifying which mechanisms operate under which contextual conditions, offering a portable framework for designing conflict-sensitive interventions and clarifying the psychological limits of normative influence in intergroup conflict.