For a Moment, Maybe: An Exploratory Study of the Incidence and Duration of Art Exhibition-Induced Prosocial Attitude Change Using a Two-Week Daily Diary Method

The use of art installations to mediate people’s responses toward societal challenges— climate change, refugees, general prosocialness—is emerging as a main interest for arts institutions, artists, policy, and, recently, empirical study. However, there is still much need for data regarding whether and in what ways we might find detectable change. Even more, important questions concern whether typical methods, with two data points and theoretical question constructs, can reliably detect subtle impacts and, even if we do find change, how long effects last—a question which is almost completely unanswered in empirical research. We assessed an exhibition focused on power imbalances and acceptance for refugees, employing both a pre-post design (Study 1) and (Study 2) a daily diary method, which tracked participants’ reports, over two weeks, regarding how they had actually felt or acted each day and employing multilevel modeling to assess estimating changes from a first baseline week. The pre-post paradigm detected some reduction in self-assessed xenophobia and increased negative mood. However, effects were small/inconsistent with also some intriguing suggestions that people self-assessed as less empathic/prosocial than before visiting. The diary detected, inversely, several significant quadratic trends involving increased empathic concern and prosocialness-related thoughts and actions, but which returned to baseline by the next day. Only ‘trying to consider others feelings’ and ‘reflecting about oneself’ showed increases into the following week. Although non- significant, the diary changes also suggested some negative relations with the hypothetical self- assessment answers for the same questions, within participants, providing intriguing findings for much future research