Adolescents do not only learn attitudes from curricula; they learn them from peers. The “Together for Tolerance” feasibility work, embedded in the broader Volkswagen Foundation INCLUSIVITY program, asked whether identifying social referents and seeding norms of equality-based respect can shift intergroup tolerance in diverse German schools.
The intervention approach sits at the intersection of developmental psychology, network science, and political psychology. Follow-up papers now link perceived inclusivity norms to opinion polarization over time, and related school experiments examine defending behavior in cyberbullying contexts.
For practitioners: the takeaway is not a single “magic workshop,” but a design principle—norms travel through real social structure. For researchers: multi-level, multi-wave designs with clear theoretical mediators remain essential if we want interventions that outlast a single semester.