This project will generate preliminary answers to one of the most pressing questions in the study of ethnic politics: What are the individual determinants of physical interethnic aggression? It seeks to explain why one individual reacts with physical aggression while another does not when faced with what both perceive to be a threat from a member of the ethnic outgroup. The import of answers to this question cannot be overstated: Low-level physical interethnic aggression of the type I seek to explain (i.e. riots, small-group, and individual-level interethnic aggression), plagues an ever-increasing number of countries worldwide. This type of aggression is perhaps nowhere more present than in Israel, the focus of this project. To improve conflict resolution efforts and to promote more peaceful multi-ethnic communities, we must understand what drives the individual decision to engage in physical interethnic aggression.
The project will analyze the interactions between Israel's two largest ethnic groups: Jewish-Israelis and Arab-Israelis (restricted to those 18-yrs. and older who have citizenship within the state). After gathering both qualitative and quantitative data on the number and type of aggressive incidents between members of these ethnic groups during the years 2000-2008, the researcher will invite a stratified sample of 600 university-aged young adults from around Israel to participate in a survey and an experiment. The survey will gather individual-level data that will be used to evaluate various hypotheses that seek to explain interethnic aggression. Four weeks after taking the survey, these same individuals will be invited to a research lab to participate in the experiment to safely gather interethnic aggression data. The resulting aggression data will be analyzed alongside the survey results and qualitative data to reach final conclusions.
Within Israel, most organizational attempts at preventing interethnic aggression rest on some variation of Allport?s "contact hypothesis," the idea that individuals will not aggress against those with whom they have considerable contact. As such, "ethnic encounter" contact groups of various types dot the country. However, many activists and scholars currently doubt that these groups mitigate aggression. This project looks beyond "contact" to identify factors that motivate interethnic aggression in the hope that a more complete understanding of these motivations will provide organizations with new direction as they craft policies and programs to improve or replace these groups. Once the project is completed in Israel, it will be run in other countries and contexts as well.
