Paying Not to Know

Coverage of the ongoing Israel-Gaza war varies enormously across the two sides of the conflict and both sides hold sharply different beliefs about the facts of the conflict. The paper presented in this Mannheim Applied Seminar conducts a survey experiment in Israel and Jordan asking whether individuals try to avoid news about civilian victims from the opposing side, and how such news would affect them if they were to read them. The authors present several key findings. First, Israeli Jews and Jordanian Arabs are substantially less willing to read about outgroup victims compared to ingroup victims. Second, this tendency is driven less by instrumental considerations or universal affective factors, and more by social identification and group norms. Third, reading about outgroup victims increases knowledge, fosters empathy toward the outgroup, and affects policy positions. Fourth, these effects are as pronounced among individuals who typically would avoid such news. Together, these results suggest that avoidance of news about outgroup victims may lead to disagreements about facts and exacerbate hostile attitudes and conflict.