THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYgroups. While this is true, longitudinal research has been conducted
showing that inter-group contact really does have a beneficial effect on
people’s attitudes. To take one example, Jens Binder at the University of
Manchester surveyed hundreds of school students in England, Germany
and Belgium, and found that kids who were members of the majority
ethnic group, and who had more contact with ethnic-minority students,
exhibited reduced prejudice towards that group when re-tested six
months later.
What’s particularly promising about research in this area is that
so-called “extended” social contact also appears to help reduce prejudice.
That is, having a friend who has a friend from another social group can
dissolve prejudice. In fact, a 2009 study by Rhiannon Turner and Richard
Crisp showed that merely imagining having positive contact with out-
group members could have a beneficial effect. Turner and Crisp asked
one group of students to think about Muslims for two minutes while
another group spent the same amount of time imagining a positive
encounter with a Muslim person. Afterwards, the latter group exhibited
reduced prejudice towards Muslims as measured using both explicit
tests and implicit tests (see box below).
The Implicit Association Test
When psychologists conduct research into prejudice they soon
encounter an awkward problem. Participants will often conceal their
true feelings so as to give the appearance of being more tolerant
than they really are. They may even hide their true feelings from
themselves. One way researchers overcome this problem is using
so-called “implicit measures”. Perhaps the best-known is the Implicit
Association Test. This is a computer-based task based on the premise
that a person will find it easier to use the same computer key to
respond to two categories which they subconsciously associate. So,
for example, the logic of the test predicts that an Islamophobe will
be quicker when the same key is used to respond to Muslim names
and negative words than when the same key is used to respond to
Muslim names and positive words. The standard format for these
tests is to have four categories, two allocated to one key and two
allocated to another, for example: one key for Muslim names/
negative words; another key for Western names/positive words, and
then the reverse, Muslim with positive, Western with negative. There
are plenty of examples online for you to try out yourself, for example
at implicit.harvard.edu/implicit.