Preaching to the Choir: A Problem of Participatory Interventions

Scholars and policymakers alike have endorsed dialogue as a remedy for the global crisis in police–community relations. But the community members who choose to engage in dialogue with police officers, we find, are those who trust the police to begin with (i.e., those who are hardest to impress and easiest to disappoint). In a large-scale field experiment in Medellín, Colombia, we discover that those who most trusted the police at baseline were twice as likely to attend police–community meetings as those who least trusted the police. We document similar patterns using survey data from 23 countries: people who most trust a given institution (e.g., city government) are the most likely to show up at that institution’s public meetings. This preaching-to-the-choir problem undermined the effect of the intervention in Medellín and, we argue, poses an under-recognized threat to related initiatives across the globe.