Welcome to the Prejudice Reduction Evidence Database

May 22, 2023

A decade ago, Betsy Levy Paluck, currently a professor of psychology and public policy at Princeton University, and Donald P. Green, currently a professor of political science at Columbia University, composed an essay for the Annual Review of Psychology1 that addressed the vast literature on prejudice from a new vantage point. Instead of reviewing leading theories of how prejudices are formed and expressed, Paluck and Green summarized theory and evidence on how to reduce prejudice. The review article immediately attracted scholarly attention and earned a "highly cited" badge on ISI Web of Science. 

That essay’s most salient contribution was to put prejudice reduction on the map as a central object of study that speaks to both social science theory and real-world policymaking. Importantly, they linked their essay to a resource that proved to be equally if not more influential—a database that listed and made available for thematic searching the comprehensive list of over 900 studies that they had compiled for the purposes of writing the essay. The database was hosted on Paluck’s personal website and received hundreds of hits per month and has been cited in subsequent work as a resource for scholars reviewing the literature on prejudice reduction and developing new interventions to be tested. In short, the need for a database of studies curated by an expert in the field was clear.

The rapid growth, internationalization, and increasing interdisciplinary status of the field of prejudice reduction has caused this original prejudice reduction database and searchable website resource to become out-of-date. Moreover, the technology used to host this database was decommissioned in 2019.

Following a new, updated meta-analysis of prejudice reduction interventions2, Paluck and Princeton behavioral sciences librarian Meghan Testerman, were awarded funding from the Princeton Data-Driven Social Sciences Initiative for the creation of a new enduring database of prejudice reduction literature. This database contains the 251 published and unpublished reports from the 2009 review, 309 reports from the 2021 meta-analysis, and will be updated regularly with new literature which reports on the outcomes of prejudice reduction interventions. 

Footnotes

  1. Paluck, E. L., & Green, D. P. (2009). Prejudice reduction: what works? A review and assessment of research and practice. Annual Review of Psychology, 60, 339–367. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.60.110707.163607 
  2. Paluck, E. L., Porat, R., Clark, C. S., & Green, D. P. (2021). Prejudice Reduction: Progress and Challenges. Annual Review of Psychology, 72, 533–560. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-071620-030619