The Effect of Contact on Stereotyping

Sammanfattning: The intensity of contact with foreigners and its influence on the degree of stereotyping in foreign judgments was tested with a procedure developed by Dr. Bert Westerlundh (2001). This is the first time that Dr. Westerlundh's procedure is used. It consists of a questionnaire with (1) 12 racially-ethnically explicit pictures, in this work classified as White, Black and Yellow; (2) six cartoon illustrations, three depicting mixed racial-ethnic interaction and three depicting homogenous (White) interaction. Ten positive and ten negative adjectives were designated to each picture and illustration. The participants rated the corresponding adjectives on a scale of 1 to 7. (3) A Modern Racism Scale based on the Uppsala version designed by Dr. Bo Ekehammar (1996), rated on a scale of 1 to 5. (4) Two sets of instructions, one indicating that the participants were testing Stereotyping, the other that they were testing Anxiety and the Halo Effect. We tested 120 high school students, 60 from a school in an area with 13% foreigners and 60 from a school in an area with 4% foreigners. We made two groups of girls and two of boys at each school. One group of boys and one of girls got the Anxiety & Halo instructions, the other two groups the Stereotyping instructions. We hypothesized that there was a difference between the populations of the schools which would show up independent of the instructions. We obtained mixed results, among them, girls showed less prejudice than boys. Also, the halo effect showed that it can conquer the boundaries of race and color, in this case, leading to positive judgments of black faces.