Harry Potter and the mystery of discussion: Testing indirect contact interventions in a school context

0580046 - PSÚ 2024 eng A - Abstract
Oľhová, Simona - Lášticová, B. - Kanovský, M.
Harry Potter and the mystery of discussion: Testing indirect contact interventions in a school context.
[General Meeting of the European Association of Social Psychology /19./. Krakow, 30.06.2023-04.07.2023]
Method of presentation: Poster
URL events: https://easp2023krakow.com/program/ 
Institutional support: RVO:68081740
Keywords : attitudes * attitudes and behaviour * intergroup contact * stereotypes * prejudice
OECD category: Psychology (including human - machine relations)

The study investigates whether popular fictional stories can improve intergroup attitudes in schools by providing vicarious contact with fictional minorities. It focuses on the context of anti-Roma prejudice among Slovak children, and reveals the critical role of discussion in addition to reading. The aim of the study was to evaluate the efficacy of an intervention using indirect intergroup contact for improving intergroup attitudes in schools, in particular anti-Roma prejudice. Vicarious contact—a form of indirect intergroup contact—can be experienced through fictional book characters, who can serve as positive role models in terms of intergroup attitude improvement. A vicarious contact experiment was conducted with sixth grade students (N = 177) from three Slovak elementary schools, using passages from the Harry Potter series. A three-group pretest-posttest design was adopted, experimental condition 1 involved reading passages without subsequent discussion, experimental condition 2 involved reading the same passages followed by a discussion, while the control group was not involved in any activities. There was a significant improvement of intergroup attitudes in experimental condition 2 compared to the control group, while condition 1 did not show any such improvement. The first contribution of the study is in tackling conceptually distinct mediators of the intervention’s effect – perspective taking and narrative transportation. The second contribution is in demonstrating the added value of discussion in interventions focused on prejudice reduction in schools.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0348835