We conducted two studies involving two different age groups (elementary school children and adults) aimed at integrating imagined contact and common ingroup identity models. In the first study, Italian elementary school children were asked to imagine interacting with an unknown immigrant peer as members of a common group. Results revealed that common ingroup imagined contact, relative to a control condition, improved outgroup helping intentions assessed one week and two weeks after the intervention. In the second study, common ingroup imagined contact led Italian university students to display higher intentions to have contact with immigrants compared to control conditions. In conclusion, results from both studies demonstrate that imagining an intergroup interaction as members of the same group strengthens the effects of imagined contact. These findings point to the importance of combining the common ingroup identity model and the imagined contact theory in order to increase the potentiality of prejudice reduction interventions.Keywords: imagined intergroup contact, common ingroup identity, intergroup relations, prejudice reduction, behavioral intentions.
IMAGINED CONTACT AND COMMON INGROUP IDENTITY 5Research over the past 60 years has convincingly demonstrated that positive contact between members of different groups is a powerful strategy to reduce prejudice (Hodson & Hewstone, 2013). There is also evidence that positive contact is especially effective when it is structured so that ingroup and outgroup members perceive themselves as belonging to a common superordinate group, instead of completely separate and distinct groups (Gaertner & Dovidio, 2000). However, intervention strategies based on direct intergroup contact can be anxiety arousing and difficult to implement due to practical constraints. A highly flexible and easily implemented indirect contact strategy which can overcome these difficulties and which has been successful at reducing prejudice is imagined contact. According to Crisp and collaborators (for reviews, see Crisp, Husnu, Meleady, Stathi, & Turner, 2010;Crisp & Turner, 2009; for a meta-analysis, see Miles & Crisp, 2014), the mental simulation of positive intergroup contact is an effective way to improve relations between groups. In the two studies reported herein, we aim to explore the utility of integrating the common ingroup identity model (Gaertner & Dovidio, 2000) with the imagined contact theory (Crisp & Turner, 2009) on reducing intergroup bias. Our expectation is that common ingroup imagined contact, which combines imagined contact with principles derived from the common ingroup identity model, will have stronger effects than both standard imagined contact and classic control conditions used in imagined contact research. A further aim is to shed light on the processes underlying the effects of common ingroup imagined contact. Hypotheses will be tested both among young children (Study 1) and adults (Study 2), in order to examine the generalizability of the effects and the utili...