Improving outgroup attitudes in schools: First steps toward a teacher‐led vicarious contact intervention

Despite the urgent need for promoting positive intergroup relations in schools, research on intergroup relations is not systematically translated into
prejudice-reduction interventions. Although prejudice-reduction interventions in schools based on indirect contact have been conducted for decades, they
have all been carried out by researchers themselves. In a field experiment in Finland in autumn 2015, we tested for the first time a vicarious contact
prejudice-reduction intervention for its effectiveness among adolescents (N = 639) when implemented independently by school teachers instead of
researchers. In addition, we tested the extent to which the intervention’s effect depends on initial outgroup attitudes, previous direct outgroup contact
experiences, and gender, hypothesizing that the intervention improves outgroup attitudes particularly among adolescents with more negative prior attitudes
and less positive prior direct contact, and more among girls than among boys. We found an unanticipated overall deterioration in the outgroup attitudes
during intervention in both the experimental and control groups. However, attitudes seemed to deteriorate somewhat less in the experimental than in the
control group, and the intervention had a significant positive effect on outgroup attitudes in one experimental subgroup that needed it most: girls who had
negative rather than positive outgroup attitudes at the outset. We discuss our results in light of previous research and contextual particularities.