We test the effectiveness of a behavioral program grounded in the idea that status granting and self-persuasion might yield a robust behavioral change in disadvantaged adolescents. We enlist socially connected senior middle school students with high emotional intelligence as “student-teachers” and entrust them with delivering a curriculum to their junior peers. The program empowers student-teachers, leading them to improve their social environment. It reduces disciplinary incidents and antisocial behavior among student-teachers and their friendship networks. The intervention significantly enhances the likelihood of admission to selective high schools for student-teachers, offering a cost-effective way to help disadvantaged adolescents escape neighborhood disadvantages.

We evaluate the effect of an educational program that aims to build social cohesion in ethnically mixed schools by developing perspective-taking ability in children. The program is implemented in Turkish elementary schools affected by a large influx of Syrian refugee children. We measure a comprehensive set of outcomes that characterize a cohesive school environment, including peer violence incidents, the prevalence of interethnic social ties, and prosocial behavior. Using randomized variation in program implementation, we find that the program significantly lowers peer violence and victimization on school grounds. The program also reduces the likelihood of social exclusion and increases interethnic social ties in the classroom. We find that the program significantly improves prosocial behavior, measured by incentivized tasks: treated students exhibit significantly higher trust, reciprocity, and altruism toward each other as well as toward anonymous out-school peers. We show that this enhanced prosociality is welfare improving from the ex post payoff perspective. We investigate multiple channels that could explain the results, including ethnic bias, impulsivity, empathetic concern, emotional intelligence, behavioral norms, and perspective taking. Children’s increased effort to take others’ perspectives emerges as the most robust mechanism to explain our results.

Using data on primary school children and their teachers, we show that teachers who hold prejudicial attitudes towards an ethnic group create socially and spatially segregated classrooms. Leveraging a natural experiment where newly arrived refugee children are randomly assigned to teachers within schools, we find that teachers' ethnic prejudice, measured by an implicit association test, significantly lowers the prevalence of interethnic social links, increases homophilic ties among host children, and puts refugee children at a higher risk of peer violence. Our results highlight the role of teachers in achieving integrated schools in a world of increasing ethnic diversity.