Too good to be true: The effect of conciliatory message design on compromising attitudes in intractable conflicts

The aim of this article is twofold: first, to demonstrate how the use of experimental methods challenges the implicit assumption of progressive discourse analysts that ‘inspiring’ messages will have a positive effect on political attitudes and trust regardless of the recipients’ early political dispositions, and second, to examine the power of conciliatory message design to change political attitudes in favor of a peaceful solution to intractable conflicts such as the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. By employing the conceptual frameworks of progressive discourse analysis and experimental critical discourse analysis, we examined the most comprehensive hypothesis formulated thus far in the lit…