The barriers to peace in terrorist societies can seem senseless to outside observers, and students of psychology and social sciences aim to gain knowledge to understand why. We present a role play exercise in which students take the perspective of terrorists or landowners based on the N. Ireland conflict, to promote their understanding.
Benefit of this resource and how to make the best use of it
The barriers to peace in terrorist societies can seem senseless to outside observers. A role-play experiment in which students take the perspective of terrorists or landowners based on the N. Ireland conflict is presented. We found this exercise is highly engaging and memorable for students of psychology and social sciences. We recommend its use across the range of social psychology and socio-cultural courses.
Pretext: Students are asked to be either a Plutat (Protestant) or a Camta (Catholic). They each knew that both imaginary societies used bombing and assassination strategies, and that three thousand people had been killed on both sides. Repeat observations of this exercise finds that blame is first apportioned equally, both cease military offensives together, and a map sharing the land equally is chosen. After receiving an envelope containing information randomly labelling one society as ‘landowners’ and the other as ‘terrorists’ they each invariably start to blame one another, expect the other to ceasefire first, and the ‘landowners’ refuse to share the land equally with their ‘terrorist’ counterparts. This role play exercise is relevant for students learning to understand social behaviour in contemporary society, and confirms that perspective taking cannot presuppose that positive rather than negative representations of another will be activated (Epley et al., 2006).
Related OER
This OER provides teaching and learning material in technologies applied to sustainability and resilience system design solutions, in particular, electronics prototypes involving sensors and actuators.
This lecture presents students, and professionals who are training in crime statistics reporting, with a concrete tutorial in how to critically evaluate government crime statistics with reference to public data collected from public surveys on their recounted experiences of crime.
This tutorial explicates three critical examples of how psychology informs legal professionals of the problems that human behaviour brings to law and its practice.
This workbook takes the student on a conceptual journey aiding their understanding of what is meant by the quantitative-qualitative research process in contemporary legal empirical research. Although, of interest to social science students, the particular worked examples relate to how to do research on law, legal policy and review.
