Intervention (Hidden)
This study implements a school-based behavioral intervention designed to reduce bullying, racism, classism, and gender-based violence (GBV) among secondary school students in La Paz, Bolivia. The intervention is grounded in a behavioral economics framework that conceptualizes bullying as a peer-driven coordination problem, where bystander responses and social incentives determine whether aggressive behaviors persist or dissipate.
The core intervention consists of structured behavioral games that simulate real-world social interactions within a controlled environment. These games are designed to elicit revealed preferences over prosocial versus antisocial actions under conditions of peer observation, social pressure, and repeated interaction. The intervention does not rely on direct instruction or punitive framing; instead, it modifies the choice architecture through embedded visual and emotional nudges that influence how participants perceive and evaluate their decisions.
The study includes three experimental conditions:
Control condition:
Students participate in a neutral, chance-based game (Chutes and Ladders) that preserves engagement and emotional variability but minimizes strategic interaction and social decision-making. This condition serves to isolate the behavioral impact of social interaction and nudging present in the treatment arms.
Treatment 1 – Racism and Classism (Capiescuela):
Students play a card-based behavioral game that replicates bullying dynamics. In each round, participants can assume roles as aggressors, victims, or bystanders. Players choose among actions such as initiating aggression, defending others, or reinforcing bullying. The game incorporates four types of cards: bullying actions, bystander responses, defensive actions, and empathy-based prompts. Players accumulate points associated with either prosocial (empathy) or antisocial (reinforcement of bullying) behaviors. The game is repeated over multiple rounds, allowing for learning and adaptation. The structure captures key elements of real-world interactions, including social costs of intervention, reputational incentives, and peer influence.
Treatment 2 – Gender-Based Violence (La Noche del Cóndor):
Students participate in a role-playing, hidden-identity game that models bullying and GBV dynamics under incomplete information. Participants are randomly assigned roles (aggressors, victims, bystanders) with asymmetric information. In each round, aggressors select a victim, and bystanders decide whether to intervene at a personal cost. Intervention decisions have immediate and observable consequences, including changes in group composition and voting power. The game introduces strategic uncertainty, moral trade-offs, and collective accountability mechanisms, requiring participants to form beliefs about others’ behavior and update them over time.
Across both treatment arms, the intervention integrates behavioral nudges through visual elements, narratives, and card content. These nudges are designed to:
Increase the salience of victims’ experiences (affective framing)
Enhance the perceived moral and social rewards of defending behavior
Reduce ambiguity about appropriate responses to bullying
Shift expectations about peers’ willingness to intervene
Importantly, the nudges do not alter the formal rules or payoffs of the games but instead target beliefs, emotions, and normative expectations, consistent with nudge theory.
The intervention is implemented in small groups (typically 4–10 students), with multiple rounds of interaction to allow for behavioral reinforcement and social learning. The repeated nature of the games enables the emergence of equilibrium dynamics, where groups may converge toward either prosocial (high intervention) or antisocial (high reinforcement of bullying) patterns depending on early actions and expectations.
To capture both direct and indirect effects, the study employs a two-stage randomized design. Schools are first randomly assigned to treatment or control conditions. Within treated schools, classrooms are further randomized into direct exposure (participation in the behavioral games) or indirect exposure (no direct participation but shared school environment with treated peers). This design allows for the identification of spillover effects, including social imitation, norm diffusion, and peer influence across classrooms.
The intervention is complemented by a structured debriefing and educational session following gameplay. This session reinforces key concepts such as empathy, respect, and institutional resources, and provides a safe space for reflection. However, because all experimental arms receive a similar thematic framing, differences in outcomes can be attributed to the behavioral mechanisms embedded in the games rather than to information provision alone.
Data collection combines behavioral measures derived from in-game decisions with survey-based instruments administered at baseline and one-month follow-up. Behavioral measures include choices related to defending, reinforcing, or ignoring bullying, as well as cooperation and fairness in incentivized allocation tasks. Survey measures capture attitudes, norms, and self-reported behaviors related to discrimination and violence.
Overall, the intervention tests whether low-cost, scalable behavioral tools that reshape social incentives and peer expectations can shift group dynamics toward prosocial equilibria, reducing the prevalence and acceptance of bullying, racism, classism, and gender-based violence in school environments.