From imagery to intention: A dual route model of imagined contact effects

By R. Crisp, Shenel Husnu, Rose Meleady, S. Stathi, Rhiannon N. Turner. 2010

114 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Imagined intergroup contact (Crisp & R. Turner, 2009) is a new indirect contact strategy for promoting tolerance and more positive intergroup relations. In this chapter, we review existing research on imagined contact and propose two routes—cognitive and affective—through which it can exert a positive influence on contact-related attitudes and intentions. We first review research that has established the beneficial impacts of imagined contact on intergroup attitudes via reduced intergroup anxiety, supporting its efficacy as an intervention where there exists little or no opportunity for direct contact. We then review more recent research showing that imagined contact not only improves attitudes, but can also enhance intentions to engage in future contact. These studies suggest that contact imagery provides a behavioural script that forms the cognitive basis for subsequent judgements about future contact intentions. Collectively, the findings from this research programme support the idea that imagined contact can complement more direct forms of contact—providing a way of initially encouraging an interest in engaging positively with outgroups before introducing face-to-face encounters. We discuss the implications of these findings for future theory and research, and how they can inform prejudice-reduction interventions seeking to capitalise on the beneficial effects of mental imagery.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3b9a527094f55863620a69424c8799ef962ab49d

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Citations in the corpus

Improving implicit and explicit intergroup attitudes using imagined contact: An experimental intervention with elementary school children (2012, background): “*p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001. imagined contact for improving intergroup relations (Crisp et al., 2010; Crisp & Turner, 2009).”
The Imagined Contact Hypothesis (2012, background): “Just as people have scripts for a wide range of everyday scenarios (queuing, parking, eating in a restaurant) we have argued that they can have intergroup contact scripts (Crisp et al., 2010; Husnu & Crisp, 2010a).”
Increasing outgroup trust, reducing infrahumanization, and enhancing future contact intentions via imagined intergroup contact. (2012, background): “The finding that imagined contact, by enhancing outgroup trust, improved behavioral intentions toward the outgroup, further supports the idea that this strategy is useful as a pre-contact tool, so as to encourage people to approach outgroup members with positive intentions (Crisp et al., 2010).”