Comparing the Effects of Informational, Role‐playing, and Value‐discrepancy Treatments on Racial Attitude1

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Previous studies of educational approaches to reducing ethnic prejudice have suffered due to the confounding of techniques that could account for the results obtained. The present study was designed to overcome this problem by testing the effectiveness of three separate and relatively unconfounded educational treatments: informational, which presented evidence challenging the current stereotype that blacks generally trail whites in socioeconomic achievement because they are lazy; role playing, in which subjects wrote an essay urging that good jobs be created to help the poor advance; value‐discrepancy, which pointed out that the subjects valued their own freedom more than the welfare of others and that such values worked against minorities. These three treatments and a control condition were administered to intact classes at an eastern, nearly all‐white college. A measure of antiblack prejudice administered immediately after the experimental inductions showed the three treatment groups to be significantly lower in prejudice than the control group. On a delayed posttest the treatment groups were still lower in prejudice than the control group though the difference was not significant. The demand characteristics counter‐explanation for the results on the immediate posttest was evaluated and found not supported, thus suggesting the potential efficacy of the three treatments.