Study Significance
The authors test whether brief, non‑judgmental exchanges of personal narratives in everyday conversations can produce durable reductions in exclusionary attitudes toward unauthorized immigrants and transgender people, offering a low‑cost, scalable alternative to argument‑based persuasion.
Outcome Measurement and Sample
Across three pre‑registered field experiments, 230 canvassers had conversations with 6,869 voters in seven U.S. locations; the primary outcomes were measures of exclusionary attitudes and opposition to policies supporting the target groups, tracked for at least four months after interaction.
Comparison Design
The studies compared otherwise identical face‑to‑face conversations that either (a) presented arguments alone or (b) included the non‑judgmental exchange of personal narratives in addition to arguments, isolating the contribution of narrative exchange to attitude change.
Main Findings and Interpretation
Conversations that included non‑judgmental narrative exchange produced small but durable reductions in exclusionary attitudes: Experiment 1 reported an effect size of d = 0.08 lasting at least four months, and Experiments 2 and 3 (on transphobia) replicated effects with ds ≈ 0.08 and 0.04, supporting scalability of the approach.
These effect sizes are small in magnitude but consistent across settings and outcomes in the reported trials, suggesting that brief interpersonal narrative exchanges can incrementally reduce prejudice at scale rather than delivering large immediate shifts in individual opinion.
