Co-narrating a conflict: An interactive tabletop to facilitate attitudinal shifts

A multi-user tabletop interface was designed to support reconciliation of a conflict aimed at shifting hostile attitudes and achieving a greater understanding of another viewpoint. The interface provided a setting for face-to-face shared narration and support for the management of disagreements. The interface allows for escalation and de-escalation of the conflict emerging in the shared narration and requires that participants perform joint actions when a contribution to the story is to be removed from the overall narration. A betweensubjects experiment compared the tabletop interface and a desktop multimedia interface with mixed pairs (male Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian-Arab youth). The results demonstrated that the experience with the tabletop interface appears to be motivating and, most importantly, produces at least a short-term shift of attitude toward the other.