Mitigating the Social Exclusion of Refugee Children: An Intervention on Perspective Taking
We evaluate a unique program that aims to foster cohesion between refugee and host children in the school environment. The program, implemented as a randomized controlled trial, delivered by students' own teachers within the course of an academic year. We evaluate the program with respect to incentivized measures of prosocial attributes, classroom friendship networks, and officially recorded peer violence. We find that treated students exhibit significantly higher trust, reciprocity, and altruism toward their classroom peers as well as toward anonymous out-school peers. The program reduces within-classroom ethnic segregation, measured by the intensity of inter-ethnic friendship ties. The program also lowers the number of high-intensity events of violence and victimization on the school ground.