Intergroup Contact, Empathy Education, and Refugee-Native Integration in Lebanon

Intergroup contact interventions often yield limited results in deeply divided societies. We test contact and empathy education in Lebanon, where Syrian refugees comprise a quarter of the population. In a fully cross-randomised field experiment with 887 Lebanese and Syrian youth embedded in a psychosocial support programme, we find that contact has little effect on outgroup attitudes and behaviour, while empathy education consistently improves attitudes for Lebanese youth and behavioural engagement for both. The combined treatment achieves little beyond empathy alone, with no evidence of spillovers to parents (n = 595). In polarised settings, empathy education should precede — or replace — contact.