关键词: 想象接触, 先前接触, 多数群体, 少数群体, 内隐态度, 外显态度

Abstract: In recent years, many studies proved that imagined intergroup contact is a new, effective indirect contact strategy for improving intergroup attitudes and promoting more positive intergroup relations. Beneficial effect of imaging contact was significant for published studies, and emerged across a broad range of target outgroups and contexts. Previous research has shown that majority and minority group members react differently to intergroup contact. However, prior actual contact experiences with an outgroup member may impact implicit and explicit intergroup attitudes. Based on these considerations, this study designed two experiments to explore whether simply imagining positive contact with outgroup members is able to improve explicit and implicit intergroup attitudes for both majority and minority groups who have different prior contact experiences. In these two experiments, we selected two different ethnic groups. All participants were allocated randomly either to be in an imagined positive contact condition or no-contact control scenes, and finished dependent measures including prior contact, explicit attitudes and implicit attitudes assessed by Single Category Implicit Association Test(SC-IAT). Experiment 1 was conducted with a 2 (imagined contact: imagined positive contact, neutral imagined scene) × 2 (prior contact: low, high) between-subjects design. Participants were 96 Han undergraduates (46 females) as majorities, but 8 participants who got high error rate in SC-IAT or univariate outliers were excluded from the analysis. On the basis of experiment 1, experiment 2 altered participants who were 104 Uyghur undergraduates (52 females) as minorities, but 9 participants were excluded from the analysis. Dependent variables were the aggregate score of explicit attitudes and the SC-IAT score (D-measure). The valid data was analyzed using ANOVA. Results of experiment 1 and 2 showed: (1) There was a main effect of the imagined contact on the implicit attitudes in both majorities and minorities. Imagined positive contact was significantly positive than the imagined neutral scene condition on the implicit attitudes (D-measure) for both majority and minority groups, but not on the explicit attitudes. (2) There was a main effect of the prior contact on the explicit attitudes in majority and minority groups. High prior contact was significantly positive than low prior contact on the explicit attitudes for both majority and minority groups, but not on the implicit attitudes. Prior contact experiences had more influence on attitudes than the efficacy of imagined contact. These results indicate that imagined positive contact is an effective manner for improving implicit intergroup attitudes in majority and minority groups. However, exlplicit attitudes are mainly affected by prior contact, and its efficacy is stronger than imagined contact. If ingroup has had low prejudice for out-group members, explicit attitudes would be very difficult to be further improved by imagined contact. Therefore, these findings are highlights of theoretical and practical possibilities for future imagined contact research.

Key words: imagined contact, prior contact, majority groups, minority groups, implicit attitudes, explicit attitudes