The ups and downs of online intergroup contact interventions: popular narratives and secondary transfer effect

Abstract

Narrative texts may represent a specific form of indirect contact, i.e., vicarious contact between the members of different groups. The present study introduces an online reading intervention promoting intergroup trust between children from the majority Czech population and the Vietnamese minority, reducing their perceived social distance and intergroup anxiety, as well as improving their behavioral intentions towards the minority. Forty-three primary school children were either part of a control group or participated in an online study, where stories about intergroup relations were read in three individual sessions. Selected stories represented the daily experiences of a same-aged boy from a Vietnamese minority. The control group only filled in the pre- and post-test questionnaires. The intervention group exhibited improvements in positive attitudes and reduction of negative attitudes with strong effect size. The subsequent goal of the study was to test whether secondary transfer would be manifested towards eight other minorities living in the country, i.e., whether the shift in attitudes would also generalize to minorities about whom the stories were not read. The manifested transfer varied from weak to very strong. The most profound change was exhibited in explicit attitudes towards Muslim and Roma, followed by the Ukrainian minority and homosexuals. The online reading intervention is therefore a promising tool for prejudice reduction in primary school children.