Can you stop prejudice

Aboud et al carried out a systematic review of 32 studies published from - of various types of interventions to reduce prejudice in early childhood. Interventions took place in various different countries, and all were delivered to young children under the age of eight.

Of course such figures should be treated with caution - the different studies will each have had different evaluation methods, and the recurring problem of short-term vs. Nonetheless, it is a positive indication that media can be used successfully as part of educational strategies to reduce prejudice.

Their evidence also strongly suggests that the type of media content very much matters. For example, in relation to using media as part of educational curriculum, "scenes and stories of intergroup contact among peers" fared far better than 'multicultural education Using media as a form of indirect contact, as opposed to focusing on the culture of a minority group, may therefore be a more effective approach.

Media campaigns - for example, by campaign organisations, the Government, or criminal justice agencies - are also extremely popular, and frequently used with the intention of promoting change through raising awareness and challenging attitudes and stereotypes. Some academic research has looked into the effectiveness of such campaigns, and the results are mixed.

Sutton et al suggest that despite the frequency of such campaigns, there is little evidence of their effectiveness. To date there has been very little research, and the authors point out that we cannot easily evidence effectiveness in terms of changing attitudes. Abrams suggests that 'informational' media messages might not be the most efficient way of influencing people and that normative pressure can be much more successful.

The normative communication functions of media can be considered more controversial to libertarians, and again the issue of to what extent Government has the right to intervene in this way is contentious. There is also the issue of the 'credibility of the messenger'. Abrams points out that it matters where the attempt to persuade comes from:. We are more likely to be persuaded to change attitudes if there is a general consensus amongst our own group.

Findings in the educational initiatives discussed in the previous section strongly supported peer engagement, suggesting that change is best affected from within peer groups where possible.

Similar lessons could perhaps be learned for media-based interventions. The campaign's objectives were to celebrate multiculturalism, create empathy for victims of racism, and state a moral appeal for equality and tolerance. However, a retrospective evaluation carried out by Sutton et al found that the campaign was not based on the key theories and evidence from the social-psychological literature and empirical studies. One significant consequence of this was that the campaign conformed to minority ethnic stereotypes, such as 'Asian shopkeepers and doctors and Black footballers' Theory tells us that prejudice-reduction interventions can backfire if they are regarded as 'favouring' certain groups, or if they reinforce stereotypes, yet this does not appear to have been fully appreciated.

This is a common problem with media interventions in general. The authors also discuss some of the media campaigns on racism in football, noting that:. Moreover, when designing interventions the pre-existing opinions of the audience should be given careful consideration. Maio et al carried out an experimental study on how people respond to anti-racism messages in the media, and found that results are greatly dependent on existing opinions.

Crucially, existing opinions or attitudes could result in messages backfiring. Reinforcing stereotypes and failing to properly consider the target audience and what messages the campaign wishes to get across are problems frequently raised in studies on diversity training and educational initiatives too. Such oversights risk alienating audiences, so this highlights the importance of utilising the available academic evidence when planning interventions.

There is also a tendency to lean towards 'hard-hitting' messages, provoking anger, fear, or guilt, with the premise that triggering powerful emotions such as these will capture people's attention.

This may be appropriate in certain contexts, such as health promotion or crime awareness. It perhaps falls into the what 'should' work category when talking about reducing prejudice, but the theoretical research encourages us to be careful in this respect. Abrams warns that making people feel guiltier about inequality seems unlikely to be a useful solution - people are prone to reacting defensively similar to the findings noted in the section on short-term diversity programmes.

As noted earlier, the social psychological theories state that inducing empathy and compassion are the most effective ways of challenging attitudes, so when designing media interventions it is important to bear this in mind.

Hard-hitting messages are also in some cases based on exaggerated interpretations of an issue, and as such are not necessarily accurate. If it appears that facts are being distorted and what is being depicted is not a true reflection of reality, there may be a risk of alienating the intended audience.

An example may be plays or films about a particular type of prejudice. We have established that prejudice often exists in subtle, everyday manifestations.

However in order to maximise appeal, particularly dramatic interpretations of a problem may be deployed. Initiatives that use such methods should be aware of these risks. As well as making best use of the available evidence and social theory when designing interventions, Sutton et al note that evaluation is often not properly considered:.

This lack of evaluation echoes problems raised in previous sections. The 'One Scotland Many Cultures' project was criticised for poorly-designed surveys which made evaluation even more difficult.

Sutton et al propose that initiatives should be tested with target audiences in pilot projects before launching, then monitored throughout. One recommendation of this report would be academic evaluations of prejudice-reduction initiatives, which may well have a more thorough approach. Finally, the literature on media interventions suggests that repetition is an important point - repeating an argument continually may have a greater effect than one-off campaigns, similar to the finding regarding educational interventions discussed in the previous section, in that short-term one-offs are less effective than on-going programmes.

It is reasonable to suggest that, at best, media campaigns might be deemed effective in relatively 'vague' ways. However it is possible to draw from the available evidence some suggestions of what is most likely to have positive effects and least likely to potentially 'backfire'.

Given the popularity of such campaigns, effectiveness might be increased by taking into account some of the lessons discussed in this section. Home Publications. What works to reduce prejudice and discrimination? Section Four: Prejudice-Reduction Interventions. Supporting documents. Contents Close. Section Four: Prejudice-Reduction Interventions Having summarised some of the important theoretical contributions to prejudice-reduction, I will now present a summary of the main types of interventions with evidence on effectiveness, drawing on case studies and suggesting some principles which may be usefully applied elsewhere.

For the purposes of summary and analysis, the interventions that are most frequently studied and that are useful for this report can be roughly divided into three categories: Educational strategies including but not limited to school-based interventions Short-term diversity training courses Media campaigns 1. Education and Re-education Unsurprisingly, education has long been a key area of interest for scholars in all disciplines who have looked at 'what works' to reduce prejudice.

Shared education curriculum A recent intervention with a rigorous longitudinal evaluation is the 'Promoting Reconciliation through a Shared Curriculum Experience Programme' report, published Secondly, one concern raised by teachers taking part in the study in Northern Ireland was that by raising sectarianism as an issue, it could in a sense worsen the situation by creating a problem where one does not exist: "…many children, particularly those from more rural areas were 'unaware' of sectarianism and found the concept difficult to grasp; that the programme appeared to direct children to 'defend their own culture' instead of 'accepting the culture of others'; and in so doing, 'encouraged sectarian identifications".

Sharing perspectives: conflict resolution Unsurprisingly, many of the key prejudice-reduction interventions have taken place in areas in which ethnic or other prejudice results in or is exacerbated by overt conflict, or at least has done in recent times.

According to Bargal, group facilitators played a crucial role: "Facilitators point out the similarities as well as the differences between the two groups.

Peer-based learning The final real-life case study is an intervention developed and tested as part of a psycho-educational initiative at various universities across the United States. This theory was supported by the example outlined here: "The present study has also provided evidence supporting the positive impact of promoting youth to become engaged in interventions targeting attitude and behavioral changes among their peers.

Lab-based study: 'A prejudice habit-breaking intervention' Although this report focuses on real-life interventions in order to get a sense of what might be most straightforwardly transferred to other contexts, findings from lab-based studies can also be applied carefully elsewhere. Short-term 'diversity training' courses In many ways, the interventions discussed in the previous section could be termed 'diversity training' because the objective is to help people value diversity, as opposed to fearing difference - a key cause of prejudice.

It is also important to reiterate the point that real change is only possible if people are motivated to change: "Unfortunately, field research on prejudice reduction does not have much to say about influencing those who do not sign up for anti-prejudice interventions Paluck and Green Similarly, Bodenhausen, Schwarz, Bless, and Wanke found that when White American students thought about positive Black role models—such as Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan—they became less prejudiced toward Blacks.

One variable that makes us less prejudiced is education. People who are more educated express fewer stereotypes and prejudice in general.

The effects of education on reducing prejudice are probably due in large part to the new social norms that people are introduced to in school. Social norms define what is appropriate and inappropriate, and we can effectively change stereotypes and prejudice by changing the relevant norms about them.

Jetten, Spears, and Manstead manipulated whether students thought that the other members of their university favored equal treatment of others or believed that others thought it was appropriate to favor the ingroup. They found that perceptions of what the other group members believed had an important influence on the beliefs of the individuals themselves.

The students were more likely to show ingroup favoritism when they believed that the norm of their ingroup was to do so, and this tendency was increased for students who had high social identification with the ingroup.

Sechrist and Stangor selected White college students who were either high or low in prejudice toward Blacks and then provided them with information indicating that their prejudiced or unprejudiced beliefs were either shared or not shared by the other students at their university.

Then the students were asked to take a seat in a hallway to wait for the next part of the experiment. A Black confederate was sitting in one seat at the end of the row, and the dependent measure was how far away the students sat from her. As you can see in Figure On the other hand, students who were initially low in prejudice and who believed these views were shared sat closer to the Black confederate in comparison with low prejudice individuals who were led to believe that their beliefs were not shared.

These results demonstrate that our perceptions of relevant social norms can strengthen or weaken our tendencies to engage in discriminatory behaviors. White college students who were low in prejudice toward Blacks sat closer to the Black confederate when they had been told that their beliefs were shared with other group members at their university. On the other hand, White college students who were high in prejudice sat farther away from the Black confederate when they had been told that their beliefs were shared with other group members at their university.

Data are from Sechrist and Stangor The influence of social norms is powerful, and long-lasting changes in beliefs about outgroups will occur only if they are supported by changes in social norms. Prejudice and discrimination thrive in environments in which they are perceived to be the norm, but they die when the existing social norms do not allow it.

And because social norms are so important, the behavior of individuals can help create or reduce prejudice and discrimination.

Discrimination, prejudice, and even hate crimes such as gay bashing will be more likely to continue if people do not respond to or confront them when they occur. What this means is that if you believe that prejudice is wrong, you must confront it when you see it happening.

Czopp, Monteith, and Mark had White participants participate in a task in which it was easy to unintentionally stereotype a Black person, and as a result, many of the participants did so. You know what I mean? The students who had been confronted expressed less prejudice and fewer stereotypes on subsequent tasks than did the students who had not been confronted. One of the reasons that people may hold stereotypes and prejudices is that they view the members of outgroups as different from them.

What this suggests is that a good way to reduce prejudice is to help people create closer connections with members of different groups. People will be more favorable toward others when they learn to see those other people as more similar to them, as closer to the self, and to be more concerned about them. The idea that intergroup contact will reduce prejudice , known as the contact hypothesis , is simple: If children from different ethnic groups play together in school, their attitudes toward each other should improve.

And if we encourage college students to travel abroad, they will meet people from other cultures and become more positive toward them. One important example of the use of intergroup contact to influence prejudice came about as a result of the important U. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education in In this case, the U. Supreme Court agreed, based in large part on the testimony of psychologists, that busing Black children to schools attended primarily by White children, and vice versa, would produce positive outcomes on intergroup attitudes, not only because it would provide Black children with access to better schools, but also because the resulting intergroup contact would reduce prejudice between Black and White children.

This strategy seemed particularly appropriate at the time it was implemented because most schools in the United States then were highly segregated by race. The strategy of busing was initiated after the Supreme Court decision, and it had a profound effect on schools in the United States. For one, the policy was very effective in changing school makeup—the number of segregated schools decreased dramatically during the s after the policy was begun. Busing also improved the educational and occupational achievement of Blacks and increased the desire of Blacks to interact with Whites; for instance, by forming cross-race friendships Stephan, Overall, then, the case of desegregating schools in the United States supports the expectation that intergroup contact, at least in the long run, can be successful in changing attitudes.

Nevertheless, as a result of several subsequent U. Supreme Court decisions, the policy of desegregating schools via busing was not continued past the s. Although student busing to achieve desegregated schools represents one prominent example of intergroup contact, such contact occurs in many other areas as well.

Taken together, there is substantial support for the effectiveness of intergroup contact in improving group attitudes in a wide variety of situations, including schools, work organizations, military forces, and public housing. Pettigrew and Tropp conducted a meta-analysis in which they reviewed over studies that had investigated the effects of intergroup contact on group attitudes. They found that attitudes toward groups that were in contact became more positive over time.

Furthermore, positive effects of contact were found on both stereotypes and prejudice and for many different types of contacted groups. The positive effects of intergroup contact may be due in part to increases in other-concern. Galinsky and Moskowitz found that leading students to take the perspective of another group member—which increased empathy and closeness to the person—also reduced prejudice. And the behavior of students on college campuses demonstrates the importance of connecting with others and the dangers of not doing so.

Sidanius, Van Laar, Levin, and Sinclair found that students who joined exclusive campus groups, including fraternities, sororities, and minority ethnic organizations such as the African Student Union , were more prejudiced to begin with and became even less connected and more intolerant of members of other social groups over the time that they remained in the organizations.

It appears that memberships in these groups focused the students on themselves and other people who were very similar to them, leading them to become less tolerant of others who are different. Although intergroup contact does work, it is not a panacea because the conditions necessary for it to be successful are frequently not met. Contact can be expected to work only in situations that create the appropriate opportunities for change.

For one, contact will only be effective if it provides information demonstrating that the existing stereotypes held by the individuals are incorrect. But if our interactions with the group members do not allow us to learn new beliefs, then contact cannot work. However, when we get to know the individual well e. Thus contact is effective in part because it leads us to get past our perceptions of others as group members and to individuate them.

Successful intergroup contact tends to reduce the perception of outgroup homogeneity. Contact also helps us feel more positively about the members of the other group, and this positive affect makes us like them more. Intergroup contact is also more successful when the people involved in the contact are motivated to learn about the others.

The jigsaw classroom is an approach to learning in which students from different racial or ethnic groups work together, in an interdependent way, to master material. The class is divided into small learning groups, where each group is diverse in ethnic and gender composition. The assigned material to be learned is divided into as many parts as there are students in the group, and members of different groups who are assigned the same task meet together to help develop a strong report.

Each student then learns his or her own part of the material and presents this piece of the puzzle to the other members of his or her group.

The students in each group are therefore interdependent in learning all the material. A wide variety of techniques, based on principles of the jigsaw classroom, are in use in many schools around the world, and research studying these approaches has found that cooperative, interdependent experiences among students from different social groups are effective in reducing negative stereotyping and prejudice Stephan, Combating prejudice is the oxygen mask on an airplane, Thapar-Olmos explained.

Thapar-Olmos recommends the framework below to start building internal resilience against prejudice and discrimination. But there are some things you should do before trying to spring into action.

Listen to their story. Stop everything else and take time to let them talk. Practice active listening and ask questions, paraphrase back, and watch for non-verbal cues. Validate their experience. In situations of prejudice, there can be a lot of unknowns: What was the intent? Do they realize what they said? If you witness an act of prejudice happening, there are ways you can act in the moment.

The 4 Ds of bystander intervention are often used to address instances of sexual harassment or assault but can be applied for all kinds of scenarios. The direct method can be simple and effective, but it can also be uncomfortable or seem confrontational.

Sometimes, this works better if you have a relationship with one or all of the people involved. Only intervene directly if you feel safe. Try saying:. Distract: Sidetrack either person with a new conversation, question, or activity.

This is a more casual method than Direct, but can still be effective. Delegate: Find someone who can help. Delay: Check in with the person later. Sometimes, you may not feel comfortable or safe intervening in the moment. When that happens, reach out when you can and see how you can help. Thapar-Olmos recommends finding agency and voice where you feel comfortable.

Identify ways you can support, speak, and act on behalf of causes and people you care about. Allyship, advocacy, and activism are not mutually exclusive for any person or act.

Allyship is support for a particular group, especially a marginalized group that you are not a member of. Advocacy is public support for a cause or movement.

Activism is action for social or political change in the form of campaigning, protesting, and the like. Everyone can still be surprised by their own biases, and that can make people feel vulnerable or defensive. Data on seven participants were excluded from the study due to different types of human errors in the execution of the tests; consequently, the final sample was made up of 63 university students with an average age of The Spanish version used in this study was the one adapted by Cordero, Pamos and Seisdedos , who reported alpha reliability coefficients of.

The instrument used for data collection on values was based on the theory of basic human values of Schwartz Empathy and attribution were measured with scales designed on an ad hoc basis, although the format was similar to that used by Vescio et al. In the case of the first variable, participants were asked to what extent the Moroccan person that appeared in a series of twenty onscreen images inspired an emotion in them sympathetic, compassionate, warm-hearted, tender, and moved.

Reliability was very satisfactory with a Cronbach's alpha of. With regard to the last potentially moderating variable attribution , a brief on-screen narrative presented the story of a Moroccan immigrant with a positive outcome, after which the participants were asked to judge the relevance that various factors might have had in the success of the immigrant.

Five items pointed to internal factors e. Differential attribution was calculated by subtracting average internal attribution from average external attribution.

Thus, a positive score indicated a tendency by the participant to attribute the immigrant's achievements to external causes, whereas a negative score reflected a preference for attribution to internal causes. In this now classical procedure, the task consists of writing a narrative essay in which participants of experimental and control groups have to describe a day in the life of a stereotyped group member shown in a picture on the computer's screen.

The manipulation is robust —it has been proved to be effective in the cited previous studies, so that it was reproduced in the current experiment.

Having completed the random distribution between the two design conditions experimental and control , 20 participants at a time except for the last group, which numbered ten participants were invited to attend the computer laboratory, where PCs that processed the manipulation and the tests were equipped with Intel Dual Core E 1. MediaLab software version Once the participants were seated in front of the screen, the experimenter explained that it would be interesting to know how they imagined daily life events from visual information, and a black and white picture of a Moroccan man's face was then displayed on screen, accompanied by written instructions.

All participants were asked to imagine a day in the life of the person in the image, and write a three-minute description about that person on the piece of paper next to the keyboard. They were also asked to write fluidly and not to stop to think or to organize what they had already written. Try to imagine how this Moroccan immigrant might feel. When the participants had read the instructions, they pressed the space bar and were asked to begin writing. Once the time had elapsed, a flickering screen displayed a message to inform them that their time was over.

Ten seconds later, the presentation of on-screen instructions for the first test began. After the session had drawn to a close, participants were informed about the true nature of the study. Therefore, perspective taking failed to explain any variation in the level of explicit prejudice. Table 1 shows the means and standard deviations corresponding to the total sample and to each of the two groups experimental and control in the 15 variables that were tested as potential moderators between perspective taking and prejudice.

Twotailed t -tests were used to examine the difference between the group means in each of the variables. The correlations among all the variables measured are included in table 2. The critical analysis carried out to verify the second set of expectations was based on moderation.

The OLS regression effects due to the interaction between the predictor condition: perspective taking vs. Therefore the effect of the condition on explicit prejudice depends on the degree to which participants are agreeable, empathetic, universalist and conformist. The conditional effects of the focal predictor condition at three different moderator values were computed in order to characterize the interaction.

The selected values, as recommended by Hayes and Matthes , were the sample mean moderate position , and one standard deviation below low position and above high position the mean. Regions of significance where the manipulation was effective are colored gray in figures 1 to 4. Participants who took the perspective of the immigrant and scored low on agreeableness, empathy, universalism, and high on conformity, informed about lower levels of prejudice than control participants with similar scores on the four moderators.

One possible alternative explanation of the moderator effects of agreeableness, empathy, universalism, and conformity on the perspective taking-prejudice relationship is that prejudice was uniformly high among people less agreeable, empathetic, and universalistic, and among those more conformist, while the dependent variable scores were homogeneously low among the participants more agreeable, empathetic, and universalistic, and among those less conformist.

To examine this possibility, we divided the sample into four groups, using the quartiles, in any of the distributions of the four moderators, and calculated the variances of prejudice. Thus, we may conclude that the moderator effects of agreeableness, empathy, universalism, and conformity are not due to ceiling or floor effects.

Figures 1 - 4 also suggest that the relation between prejudice and the moderators in the control group is not the same as it is in the perspective taking group. The results suggest that perspective taking, as put into practice in this study, turned out to be a strategy of moderate effectiveness, in general terms, for the reduction of prejudice.

This type of intervention would basically serve to control explicit prejudice in those older adults with a less sensitive and altruistic personality agreeableness , less prone to affectively identify with the lives of others empathy , less comprehensive and tolerant universalism value , and in those people who show more restraint in their behaviors so as not to violate social norms conformity value.

In consequence, although a generalized positive effect of perspective taking on prejudice has not been evidenced, at least it has been confirmed that certain types of older adults benefit from adopting the point of view of an outgroup member. These results are particularly encouraging because they suggest that the strategy is useful for those in greatest need, where as it did not benefit more agreeable, empathetic, universalistic people, and those who were less conformist.

In this way, our study joins the body of research that supports that some interventions to reduce prejudice are effective in people most prone to being prejudiced, as is the case of contact e.

A more analytical review of the study's partial conclusions and the points that they raise is presented below. In the first place, older people agreed slightly with the statements that upheld racist attitudes. This fact, linked to self-regulatory failings in older people, would as a result position them in the middle of the response scale for the explicit prejudice test. The following topic is even more crucial in this study: determination of the effectiveness of perspective taking at reducing intergroup bias.

In general terms, the intervention is likely to have been neither capable of achieving the overlap between the self and the other, nor between the ingroup and the outgroup. Therefore, the self-concept, which appears as a mediator in the cognitive processing of information in a situation of perspective taking, appears to not have been activated in a generalized way among older adults affected by the intervention and, were it activated, it would not have produced the transition to the second phase of the model proposed by Epley and his colleagues Epley, Keysar et al.

The latter contends that an adjustment mechanism would come into play that would serve to explain the differences between participants and targets. Simultaneously, our results suggest that it is necessary to replace the conclusion that perspective taking is globally ineffective by a certain partial effectiveness. In other words, there are conditions in which this strategy is useful to combat prejudice; the individual differences in this context being very relevant Hodson, Among the moderations that have been demonstrated, the theoretical framework did anticipate the one that relates to empathy.

The findings of Vescio et al. This study has extended the scope of action of empathy by studying its role as a moderator variable. In this latter role, not every older person takes advantage of perspective taking a general mediational effect was found in Vescio's study , but only those who are less empathetic. An analysis of the mediation and moderation roles of empathy in the same study could provide a more complete picture in this area of research. It should also be highlighted that some values are authentic regulatory factors of the effectiveness of perspective taking Schwartz, Now the moderating roles of a self-transcendence value - universalism-and a conservation value -conformity- have also been proved in the field of prejudice reduction strategies.

This study has provided a parallel innovation that presents a personality trait-even though the relation between prejudice and agreeableness has been previously demonstrated Akrami et al.

These conclusions make this research both relevant and useful, since they may be used as the groundwork to draw up guidelines for the design of training programs directed at the control of intergroup bias in older participants. More particularly, it has been made clear that not all participants will potentially benefit from adopting the perspectives of outgroup members; therefore any program will need a selective filter that identifies the potential beneficiaries. Nevertheless, it is evident that our results should achieve greater consistency before considering the development of any type of application.

The scarce global effectiveness reached by perspective taking could be explained by the difficulty of transferring interventions from one cultural milieu to another, and even by theoretical frameworks that have been developed in contexts that differ from the application.

Consequentially, exploration of the transculturality of perspective taking will also have to continue, as a strategy for the reduction of prejudice in diverse settings. Aberson, C. Contact, perspective taking, and anxiety as predictors of stereotype endorsement, explicit attitudes, and implicit attitudes.

Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 10, Adesokan, A. Diversity beliefs as moderator of the contact-prejudice relationship. Social Psychology, 42,