Which narrative strategies most effectively reduce outgroup prejudice

Determine which narrative strategies used in interpersonal conversations are most effective at reducing outgroup prejudice, distinguishing among approaches such as perspective-taking and perspective-getting, to clarify mechanism-specific effectiveness in prejudice-reduction interventions.

Background

The paper surveys how researchers often use intermediate outcome tests to infer mechanisms behind treatment effects and illustrates this with applications. In the context of prejudice reduction, a substantial literature has explored interpersonal conversations as an intervention to reduce intergroup prejudice, but clarity is lacking on which narrative strategies are most effective.

This unresolved question motivates examining different narrative strategies (e.g., perspective-taking versus perspective-getting) and assessing their relative impact on prejudice outcomes, as done in the referenced experiments, while being cautious about assumptions underlying mechanism inference.

References

An approach that has garnered empirical support in a growing literature is the use of interpersonal conversations \citep{galinsky2000perspective, bruneau2012power, broockman2016durably, adida2018perspective, simonovits2018seeing, audette2020personal, lowe2021types, williamson2021family}, but an unresolved question in this recent work is which ``narrative strategies'' are most effective at reducing prejudice.

— Assumption Smuggling in Intermediate Outcome Tests of Causal Mechanisms  (2407.07072 - Blackwell et al., 2024) in Section 2.1 (Reducing Outgroup Prejudice)