Brief Media Exposure, Ideological Beliefs and Perception of the ‘other’. Exploration and Intervention to reduce outgroup prejudice.

This thesis aims to understand the process of media consumption against the backdrop of ideological beliefs when participants are presented with information about an established outgroup member or issue. More specifically, given people’s belief systems, I explored how brief media manipulations impacted viewer/reader’s evaluations of people and issues pertaining to people of colour, immigrants and Muslims. To this end, five studies were conducted. The first three comprised adults, and the final two comprised children. In the three adult studies, I examined the extent to which biased news media (manipulated via headline or picture captions) as opposed to pre-existing ideological beliefs impacted on attitudes towards a variety of socio-political issues. In the first experiment (Chapter 3), it was revealed that the manipulation of news media headlines had little impact on attitudes. Rather, the primary determinants of outcomes were participant’s prior levels of Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO). The headlines in this experiment were pertaining to the following four issues: Donald Trump, Immigration, Honour Killing and Killing to safeguard religion. In the second experiment (Chapter 4), I investigated the importance of biased descriptive captions which appeared with neutral images of men and women of colour engaging in everyday activities (e.g. talking, playing sport). Unlike the first experiment, this one introduced the audience to an unknown commoner about whom the participants had no prior knowledge. Participants displayed a shift in attitude in the predicted direction i.e. positive captions resulted in more favourable ratings of the pictured individuals than negative captions. I also found that in the absence of biased stimulus, RWA was negatively correlated with outgroup person evaluations. Therefore, participants relied on pre-existing attitudes when no biased media was presented, but in the presence of strongly-valenced (positive or negative) captions, relied more on them. I further found that these effects were transitory. When I re-tested the sample six months later, I could not observe any effect of biased captions but the ratings for pictures individuals correlated negatively with RWA and SDO. Finally, in the last exploratory study with adults, I chose to examine the impact of media manipulation on celebrity news. Thus, participants would have some knowledge about them but perhaps not excessively fixed ideas. I found that when participants were exposed to positive and negative news captions regarding Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton, they were not affected by these biased captions. In this experiment, I also found that SDO was a significant predictor for low ratings of Meghan Markle as well as Prince Harry. Therefore, for celebrities, brief media exposure was not sufficient to cause any attitudinal change and instead prior knowledge and ideological beliefs emerged as more important predictors of the ratings towards royal members. Studies 1 through 3 with young adults indicated that attitudes were fixed and hard to shift in this age group. Further, the studies also suggested that young adults relied heavily on their ideological beliefs and prior information. I conducted the next two studies with children to test whether they would be more impacted by media manipulation. In the first experiment (Chapter 6), I used cross-race friendship books (experimental group) in an attempt to reduce children’s racial prejudice (using customized picture books where the cross-group friendships were clearly demonstrated) . . .. The experiment did not yield desired outcomes and a few times of reading a picture book was not enough to reduce racial bias, at least when the books were read to them by their own parents. Further, I found that children’s implicit attitudes correlated positively with parent’s racist attitudes. Lastly, given that racial bias was fairly resistant to change, even in pre-schoolers and school-aged children, I examined gender stereotypical attitudes using short video clips to shift children’s attitudes regarding gender-role attitudes. The results indicated that short, animated video clips successfully shifted gender-role attitudes in school-aged children. In this experiment, unlike the racial bias one, parents were not included in the experimental process. Secondly, video clips were used instead of story books and lastly, gender bias, not racial bias, was measured. The results of this study provided evidence that if children view role models engaging in a variety of activities (for instance if boys were shown cooking and cleaning and girls were shown sword fighting) then children would be more accepting of individuals engaging in counter stereotypical activities. The results also indicated that attitude change generalised to events and attributes that were not featured in the videos. Therefore, this study provided evidence that children are influenced by what they consume at least via TV and supported the idea that TV may be used to reduce gender related stereotypes amongst school-aged children. All in all, this thesis provides some evidence that brief media exposure may effectively reduce outgroup prejudice in adults and in children under specific conditions. More importantly, it outlines some implications of repeated media consumption and provides a direction for future research