A meta-analytic test of the imagined contact hypothesis

By E. Miles, R. Crisp. 2014

380 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Imagined intergroup contact (Crisp & Turner, 2009) is a new indirect contact strategy for promoting tolerance and more positive intergroup relations. Despite its relatively recent inception, there have now been over 70 studies showing that imagining a positive interaction with an outgroup member can reduce prejudice and encourage positive intergroup behavior. With this meta-analysis, we provide the first quantitative review of imagined contact effects on four key measures of intergroup bias: attitudes, emotions, intentions, and behavior. We also test for moderators arising from both group and study design characteristics. The analysis found that imagined contact resulted in significantly reduced intergroup bias across all four dependent variables (overall d+ = 0.35). The effect was significant for both published and unpublished studies, and emerged across a broad range of target outgroups and contexts. The effect was equally strong for explicit and implicit attitude measures, but was stronger on behavioral intentions than on attitudes, supporting the direct link between imagery and action proposedly underlying mental simulation effects. Most design characteristics had no significant impact, including valence of the imagined interaction, type of control condition, and time spent imagining contact. However, the more participants were instructed to elaborate on the context within which the imagined interaction took place, the stronger the effect. The imagined contact effect was also stronger for children than for adults, supporting the proposition that imagined contact is a potentially key component of educational strategies aiming to promote positive social change.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a7400fb48cdaa7acfc119c71da619dcc976f1b23

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In Applied Psychology

In Social Psychology

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Confidence in Contact: A New Perspective on Promoting Cross-Group Friendship Among Children and Adolescents (2016, positive): ““Indirect contactˮ refers to measures or interventions based on the principles of intergroup contact (Allport, 1954), but which do not involve a face-to-face intergroup interaction (see Lemmer & Wagner, 2015; Miles & Crisp, 2014; Turner et al., 2007c; Vezzali et al., 2014).”
Reducing intergroup bias through intergroup contact: Twenty years of progress and future directions (2017, background): “Research on mediating mechanisms has been prominent over the past two decades (see Table S1). In this work, affective processes have emerged as particularly important; Pettigrew and Tropp’s (2008) meta-analysis of intergroup contact mediators demonstrated that reductions in group-based anxiety and i”
The Power of Goal-Directed Processes in the Causation of Emotional and Other Actions (2017, background): “Whereas classic dual-process models focus on automatizing the suppression of prejudice and the installation of new habits (e.g., approach training toward minority members), the alternative view bets on strategies such as imagining the positive outcomes of increased contact (Miles & Crisp, 2014).”