Tackling children's anti-refugee bias with social norm framed imagined contact interventions

As the effects of the ‘refugee crisis’ continue to diversify society, children of refugee backgrounds emerge as a vulnerable minority group with increasing presence in Irish schools. Demographic changes can give rise to intergroup tensions and increase prejudices. The school setting provides a fertile ground to actively foster inclusive attitudes among the emerging generations. Across three studies, this thesis develops and tests a field intervention integrating normative influence and imagined intergroup contact with the aim to reduce children’s anti-refugee bias in schools. The first study (N = 266) compares children’s normative influences from different ingroups to determine their relative importance for children’s anti-refugee bias. Perceived support for inter-ethnic contact from children’s family and religious ingroups were revealed to significantly predict anti-refugee bias above the contributions of other ingroup norms. The second study (N = 545) experimentally tests a novel variant of imagined contact intervention – norm-framed imagined contact. Compared to a control scene, children who imagined contact framed in contexts of supportive family, class-peer and religious ingroup norms had significantly lower anti-refugee bias. The final study (N = 269) examines the longevity of the effects of norm-framed imagined contact as a field intervention across ten classes. Anti-refugee bias was measured before and two-weeks after a series of four imagined contact activities conducted over four weeks. Though the long-term efficacy of norm-framed imagined contact was minimal, children in the class-peer norm-framed condition showed significantly reduced bias on one outcome compared to children in the standard imagined contact condition. Findings from this study and the second study above reveal the particular importance of class peer contexts in relation to children’s anti-refugee bias. These studies collectively advance our understanding of the role of social norms for children’s intergroup bias by first illustrating that normative influences can derive from multiple sources, including religious ingroups, as well as family and peers. This research also demonstrates the power of particular normative climates to enhance prejudice-reduction interventions based on imagined contact. Lastly, it sheds light on the utility of norm-framed imagined contact as a teacher-led, class-based activity to address bias against refugees, an emerging vulnerable group in Irish society.