Trial reportProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Changing climates of conflict: A social network experiment in 56 schools.
Trial report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 96 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
96 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Understanding the mechanisms of change in social norms around tobacco use: A systematic review and meta-analysis of interventions.Addiction (Abingdon, England) · 2025Pooled it
- What Works for Whom in School-Based Anti-bullying Interventions? An Individual Participant Data Meta-analysis.Prevention science : the official journal of the Society for Prevention Research · 2023Pooled it
- Differential Effects of Friendship and School Norms on Adolescents' Defending in Cyberbullying Situations: A Randomized School-Based Experiment.Journal of youth and adolescence · 2025Trial
- Effectiveness of an educational intervention targeting homophobic language use by young male athletes: a cluster randomised controlled trial.British journal of sports medicine · 2023Trial
- Physiological linkage among successful high-status women in international teams.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Trial
- Exposure to peers' pro-diversity attitudes increases inclusion and reduces the achievement gap.Nature human behaviour · 2020Trial
- Trial
- Article
- The Illusion of Disapproval: Pluralistic Ignorance and Attitudes Toward Tattooed Teachers.European journal of investigation in health, psychology and education · 2026Article
- An Experimental Study on the Influence of Friends and Popular Peers on Adolescents' Risky Decisions in a Private and Public Context.Journal of youth and adolescence · 2026Article
- The effect of praise from peers on empathy and political inclusion towards racial or ethnic outgroups.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Integrating behavioural experimental findings into dynamical models to inform social change interventions.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- The Social Sources Adolescents Consult for Daily Life Choices: Variations in Age and Decision Domains.Journal of adolescence · 2026Article
- The evolution of zero-sum and positive-sum worldviews.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Embedding violence prevention in existing religious and education systems: initial learning from formative research in the Safe Schools Study in Zimbabwe.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Early insight into social network structure predicts climbing the social ladder.Science advances · 2025Article
- A wolf in sheep's clothing? The interplay of perceived threat and social norms in hierarchy-maintaining action tendencies towards disadvantaged groups.The British journal of social psychology · 2025Article
- The Loneliness of the Odd One Out: How Deviations From Social Norms Can Help Explain Loneliness Across Cultures.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
- Emotion regulation contagion drives reduction in negative intergroup emotions.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Accounting for the adolescent social context in school mental health interventions.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2025Article
36 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Theories of human behavior suggest that individuals attend to the behavior of certain people in their community to understand what is socially normative and adjust their own behavior in response. An experiment tested these theories by randomizing an anticonflict intervention across 56 schools with 24,191 students. After comprehensively measuring every school's social network, randomly selected seed groups of 20-32 students from randomly selected schools were assigned to an intervention that encouraged their public stance against conflict at school. Compared with control schools, disciplinary reports of student conflict at treatment schools were reduced by 25% over 1 year. The effect was stronger when the seed group contained more "social referent" students who, as network measures reveal, attract more student attention. Network analyses of peer-to-peer influence show that social referents spread perceptions of conflict as less socially normative.
Indexed as
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.