Should Conflict Reconstruction Budgets Include Empathy?

It took about eleven years and roughly $15.5 million to put Mostar’s Old Bridge, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, back where it had stood for 427 years. Destroyed in November 1993 during the Croat-Bosniak War, rebuilt stone by stone, the magnificent bridge reopened in July 2004 to fireworks and visiting heads of state. Over twenty years later, the city it was meant to reunite still educates many of its children under the “two schools under one roof” arrangement, where pupils from different communities share a building and are taught separately. Rebuilding Ukraine will eventually pose similar challenges, on a vastly larger scale. Estimates suggest reconstruction could cost around $588 billion and take decades.

Often, post-war reconstruction looks like this: the concrete, tractable, is rebuilt with money and patience. Intractable and unbudgeted is a population’s willingness to care enough about the people on the other side. Yet that matters just as much. Ask Ukrainians how much they hate the other side and, on a six-point scale, where six is strong agreement, the average answer is 5.1. Ask how much they feel for that side’s suffering and it collapses to 1.8, which almost means they don’t feel it. Jewish Israelis look much the same: hate towards Palestinians is at 4.8, empathy 2.1. Both are among the lowest empathy scores anywhere in data analysed in a new MORES study. Imagining Ukrainians and Russians coexisting peacefully in disputed territories is, then, a far more distant prospect than rebuilding what the war destroyed.

Our study suggests that people’s feelings do shape which policies they support.

These emotion scores come from the Emotions and Norms in Conflicts Project (ENP). It ran a cross-national survey of 14,440 people across 12 conflict settings around the world, from active conflicts in Ukraine and Israel to post-conflict societies such as Kosovo and Bosnia. Our research in MORES looked at these very different conflicts to test whether different emotions would point people towards expected policy preferences.

In theory, each emotion should lead to its own type of policy support: hope draws people towards compromise, hate justifies exclusion, fear pushes towards security, anger fuels confrontation, guilt motivates repair, empathy invites reconciliation. The research—the broadest cross-national test of its kind to date—is now available as part of MORES’s working paper series (download below).

According to our analysis, the hostile emotions behaved much as expected. Fear was tied to support for security measures, and rarely spilled over into unrelated policy preferences. The surprise was hate. Rooted in the appraisal of others as irredeemably evil, this emotion, rather than anger (which arises from the perception of injustice), was the strongest predictor of both exclusionary attitudes and support for aggression. Anger still mattered, but mainly for security rather than for aggression itself, once we accounted for hate.

But the conciliatory emotions did not stay in their lanes. Hope, not empathy, was the strongest predictor of five of the six conciliatory policies—including reconciliation and humanitarian aid, both linked in theory to empathy. Empathy still spread wider across people’s policy preferences than theory alone would predict; it ran second to hope across most of the conciliatory set, and its largest effect landed on reparation, the policy that theory assigns to guilt.

Our study suggests that people’s feelings do shape which policies they support, largely in the directions theory predicts. But to understand—and change—conflict-related attitudes, we must look not only at the hate and empathy a conflict evokes, but also at the social and situational contexts in which those emotions become politically consequential.

What changes the strength of these links

To do that, we examined what strengthens or weakens the connections between emotions and policy preferences. Three factors mattered most: conflict stage, group norms, and perceptions of the other side.

Conflict stage mattered first. Whether a conflict was still active or had ended changed the picture considerably. For instance, fear and guilt were more strongly tied to policy preferences in post-conflict societies than in active conflicts, while hope showed the reverse pattern, mattering more while the outcome of a conflict is still uncertain.

Next came group norms. When people believed an emotion was widely shared or expected within their own group, their personal emotion mattered less for predicting their policy views. Personal feelings seem to carry the most weight precisely when they diverge from what the group is assumed to feel.

Finally, perceptions of the other side mattered. Believing that the outgroup shares one’s hope or fear reduced the influence of one’s own hope or fear on policy preferences, suggesting people partly calibrate their positions based on what they think the other side feels.

Political ideology played a more limited role, shaping only the links between fear and security policy and between hate and exclusionary attitudes, and even then, the pattern likely reflects where people start on these emotional scales rather than a fundamentally different way of reasoning.

Hope’s effect on conciliatory policy was the largest we found, but also the most conditional: it bent to conflict stage, to group norms, and to what people thought the other side felt.

Hate’s link to exclusion and empathy’s link to conciliatory policy barely moved. Empathy’s link held across every factor we tested; hate’s link held against all but one, political ideology. That robustness makes them promising targets for interventions aimed at turning public support towards, or away from, particular conflict policies.

The question then is whether these emotions can be changed—and, if so, how. Research shows that hate rests on the belief that the other side is immutably bad. Interventions that attack this belief have shown promising results. In one study, teaching people that groups in general are capable of change, without mentioning the adversary at all, increased willingness to compromise among both Israelis and Palestinians.

Empathy is trickier—not because there is a wrong moment to intervene, but because there is least of it to work with exactly where conflicts are hottest. Nor is working with empathy painless or cheap. A 2016 randomised study of community reconciliation ceremonies in Sierra Leone found that they did increase forgiveness and rebuild social capital, while worsening participants’ depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress. Asking people to feel for those who harmed them extracts a heavy toll.

Still, our data show that empathy was the one emotion whose link to conciliation held whatever the stage of the conflict, whatever people’s politics, whatever their group expected them to feel. The psychological costs, that toll, are an argument for designing this work to weigh less heavily on the people in it. They are not an argument for neglecting it, or for deferring it until the scaffolding comes down.

Meet the Authors

Noga Mostovoy Elzafan is a MORES researcher and PhD candidate in psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her doctoral research focuses on the politicization of climate change and on how emotions, norms, and political context shape policy support. For over a decade, she has bridged psychology and environmental studies, including managing public participation projects and volunteering with environmental NGOs.

Mabelle Kretchner is a PhD student in Political Science supervised by MORES co-investigator Eran Halperin, Julia Elad-Strenger & Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler, affiliated with Bar Ilan University, Hebrew University, and Reichman University.

Research Information

Kretchner, M., Mostovoy, N., & Halperin, E. (2026). Conflict, emotions, and policy preferences: How intergroup feelings shape support for peace and punishment across 12 active and post-conflict societies. Working Paper Series, 7. Download this open-access MORES publication here.

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