The prevalence of despair in intractable conflicts: Direct messages of hope and despair affect leftists, but not rightists

Abstract

AbstractIn contexts of long‐term conflict, it often seems easier to spread despair than to instill hope. The prevalence of despair, an emotion that promotes apathy, in contexts that so desperately need hope, an emotion that promotes conciliation, calls for further investigation. One possibility is that messages of hope and despair have different effects on people based on their political ideology. In the present research we examined the effect of direct despair‐ and hope‐inducing messages (compared to a control condition involving a neutral message) on participants' experience of hope for peace, their sense of urgency to resolve the conflict, and subsequently their support for concession‐making as a function of political orientation. Two samples of Jewish‐Israelis were collected. Study 1 was collected using snowball methods, while Study 2 replicated and enhanced findings with a more representative sample of Jewish‐Israeli society collected using an online survey platform. In both studies, messages of hope or despair yielded no influence on Rightists, whose baseline of hope is inherently low. However, for Leftists (experiencing higher levels of hope for peace) the despair manipulation significantly decreased support for concession‐making through decreased hope for peace and sense of urgency to resolve the conflict, providing an explanation to the prevalence of despair over hope in conflict.