#869 2009 · Radio La Benevolencija & Elizabeth Levy Paluck · Media / peacebuilding
Rwanda tested a soap opera against hatred — it changed norms, not beliefs, and that worked
the problem
After the genocide, perpetrators and survivors lived side by side again — and lectures about unity changed nothing.
background
A decade after the 1994 genocide, Rwanda's Hutus and Tutsis lived door to door again — accusers beside the accused — and the government's official programs preached unity from above. Radio was the country's dominant medium. An Amsterdam-based NGO, Radio La Benevolencija, hired Rwandan writers and actors to make Musekeweya ('New Dawn'), a soap opera about two fictional communities that mirrored the country's own divisions, whose characters cross group lines, defy leaders who stir violence, and speak openly about trauma.
The standard answer to hatred is persuasion — education campaigns, moral argument, messages aimed at what people believe. Elizabeth Levy Paluck, then at Yale, suspected the load-bearing thing was not belief but the norm each person guessed everyone else held. So Musekeweya was built as entertainment and tested as medicine: communities across Rwanda were randomly assigned to gather weekly for a year and listen — half to Musekeweya, half to Urunana ('Hand in Hand'), a soap about reproductive health and HIV. The trial ran in the years before its 2009 publication; the readable public record does not fix its exact dates.
what everyone would do
Persuade the beliefs directly: run education campaigns, broadcast moral arguments, lecture about unity — aim at what people think. That door fails here because belief was not what ran the behaviour: after a genocide, openly changing your mind is itself socially dangerous, so people keep performing whatever they guess the community expects. Arguing head-on also raises defences — the argument itself becomes a threat to be resisted.
what they saw
Paluck's year-long trial found the drama barely moved personal beliefs — and moved behaviour anyway. What changed was the guess everyone makes about everyone else: what Rwandans think of intermarriage, dissent, trust.
the move
A year-long randomised field trial: one group of communities gathered weekly to listen to Musekeweya, the reconciliation drama, while the control group listened to Urunana, the health soap. The message rode inside story rather than lecture — characters modelling cross-group friendship, dissent against violent authority, and talking through trauma — and each week's episode became a communal listening followed by discussion among the listeners themselves.
why it works
Fiction gives the listeners parasocial contact — repeated, intimate exposure to characters from the other side, with none of the risk of real contact. Because it is a story, it can stage what reality cannot yet: a cross-group friendship, a refusal to follow a leader stirring violence, a survivor speaking about trauma. The listener's private view barely moves, but their estimate of the community's view does — and behaviour follows the estimate: intermarriage becomes thinkable, dissent speakable, trauma discussable. Weekly group listening turns each episode into a rehearsal of the new norm out loud, and emotion carries the message past the defences that argument triggers.
the payoff
Twelve communities, one year: listeners endorsed cross-group marriage and open dissent more, talked about trauma — while beliefs stayed put.
where it breaks
It fails wherever the target behaviour is privately motivated rather than norm-governed, and wherever the audience cannot see itself in the characters — an imported script with foreign faces moves nothing; here the writers and actors were Rwandan. It needs a medium people actually share, and time: the shift took a year of weekly episodes, not one broadcast. And it changes norms, not convictions — where the obstacle is hard misinformation or genuine belief, a story is not enough on its own.
what came after
Published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2009 — the yearlong field trial, randomised at community level — it became one of the landmark studies in prejudice reduction, cited nearly a thousand times, and covered by the New York Times. Musekeweya stayed on the air, and the finding that norms, not beliefs, carry behaviour has since travelled into public-health and peacebuilding program design far beyond Rwanda. The study's own honest caveat is the case's moral: personal beliefs barely moved — the peace was built on what people thought their neighbours believed.
references
- [1]Reducing intergroup prejudice and conflict using the media: A field experiment in RwandaJournal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2009doi.org
- [2]Between Fiction and Reality in Post-Genocide Rwanda: Reflections on a Social-Psychological Media Intervention for Social ChangeJournal of Social and Political Psychology, 2014jspp.psychopen.eu
- [3]Radio Soaps Stop Hate (solution summary)Stanford University (SPARQ), 2009sparq.stanford.edu