Testing the Moderating Effect of Anti-Prejudice Motivation and Peer Attitudes on the Effectiveness of a School-Based Vicarious Contact Intervention.

Vicarious contact has often been used for studying prejudice-reduction in school contexts due to its relatively accessible application through written or audiovisual portrayals of positive intergroup contact. However, these interventions may sometimes prove ineffective, thus restricting their ecological validity and independent use in education. To contribute to the understanding of factors that might facilitate or mitigate the efficacy of vicarious contact in reducing ethnic prejudice among adolescents, the present study tested for the moderating effect of anti-prejudice motivation and friends' outgroup attitudes. Participants were Finnish secondary school students (N = 334; M = 13.38 years, SD = 0.53; 48% female; 19% ethnic minority) allocated into cluster-randomized intervention (N = 149) and control (N = 185) groups. Participants in the intervention group took part in 4 × 45-min teacher-led intervention sessions. A pretest-posttest design was employed to assess the outgroup attitudes three weeks before the intervention and the follow-up two weeks after. The results showed that adolescents' intrinsic, but not extrinsic, anti-prejudice motivation and the pre-intervention attitudes of their reciprocal classroom friends positively predicted post-intervention attitudes towards people from different ethnic and cultural groups. However, only extrinsic motivation moderated the intervention effect as the results indicated the intervention to have a detrimental effect on outgroup attitudes among adolescents with less motivation to be non-prejudiced in order to gain social acceptance. This attitudinal backlash among adolescents less susceptible to the social influence of others implies that motivational aspects should not be overlooked when developing school-based intervention programs, especially when social norms are used as a mechanism of attitude change.

Improving outgroup attitudes in schools: First steps toward a teacher-led vicarious contact intervention.

Despite the urgent need for promoting positive intergroup relations in schools, research on intergroup relations is not systematically translated into prejudice-reduction interventions. Although prejudice-reduction interventions in schools based on indirect contact have been conducted for decades, they have all been carried out by researchers themselves. In a field experiment in Finland in autumn 2015, we tested for the first time a vicarious contact prejudice-reduction intervention for its effectiveness among adolescents (N = 639) when implemented independently by school teachers instead of researchers. In addition, we tested the extent to which the intervention's effect depends on initial outgroup attitudes, previous direct outgroup contact experiences, and gender, hypothesizing that the intervention improves outgroup attitudes particularly among adolescents with more negative prior attitudes and less positive prior direct contact, and more among girls than among boys. We found an unanticipated overall deterioration in the outgroup attitudes during intervention in both the experimental and control groups. However, attitudes seemed to deteriorate somewhat less in the experimental than in the control group, and the intervention had a significant positive effect on outgroup attitudes in one experimental subgroup that needed it most: girls who had negative rather than positive outgroup attitudes at the outset. We discuss our results in light of previous research and contextual particularities.

A teacher-led vicarious contact intervention in culturally mixed classrooms with in- and outgroup role models of intergroup friendship.

Existing prejudice-reduction interventions in schools mainly target majority students and are mostly conducted by researchers, which limits their use for anti-discriminatory practices in culturally mixed schools. We tested a teacher-led intervention aiming at prejudice-reduction among both minority and majority adolescents through vicarious contact. The effects of indirect vicarious contact rest on observed ingroup role models of intergroup contact who have positive attitudes towards the outgroup, and vice versa. However, the specific impact of vicarious contact exerted by outgroup role models in comparison with ingroup role models has never been studied in interventions conducted in naturalistic school settings. To fill these gaps, a field experiment was conducted among secondary school students in Finland (Nmajority = 437; Nminority = 146). The experiment consisted of two stages, between which the ethnic status of the role models (majority vs minority) in stories read during the intervention sessions was changed. This was done to explore the impact of the in- and outgroup role models after the first stage, and to test the overall effect of the intervention on out-group attitudes and perceived in- and outgroup norms after participants were presented with both majority and minority storytellers after the second stage. The intervention affected the perceived outgroup norms among the minority participants as they perceived norms prevailing in the majority group to be more positive after the intervention. However, the ethnic status of the role models made no difference for any outcome variable. Ways to implement scientific knowledge into practice by providing research-based tools for multicultural education are discussed.