How to design mediated contact against anti-immigrant prejudice: a systematic review

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the consistent alignment of mediated intergroup contact and persuasive communication in prejudice reduction. Through a systematic review of literature, it provides a comprehensive overview of indirect mediated contact research (parasocial/vicarious contact) within the immigrant minority outgroup context. The study draws insights, particularly in message design, from persuasive communication for anti-immigrant prejudice reduction. Utilizing O'Keefe's [2016a. Communicator factors. In D. J. O’Keefe (Ed.), Persuasion: Theory and research (Third edition, pp. 130–157). SAGE] classification (message variables, recipient variables, and communicator variables), the review illuminates prevalent variables in current mediated contact studies and identifies opportunities and challenges for future research. The findings underscore the need for a more rigorous application of variables and geographical expansion in mediated contact empirical research. These results are discussed along with implications and recommendations for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Mediated contact
• persuasion
• prejudice
• migration
• intergroup relations
• parasocial
• vicarious

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Data. The data are openly accessible at .

Acknowledgements

I would like to express special appreciation and thanks to anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my manuscript and their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The codebook is available at Open Science Framework repository: https://osf.io/jfhrx/?view_only=9a7c09b7f9a94191a53458ba8f3f8845

2 Report available at: https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/

3 Recipient-related variables are highlighted in bold and italics.

4 The letter N represents narrative evidence, and nN shows non-narrative evidence.

5 The letters (V) and (P) show whether the message theme aimed at a vicarious or a parasocial contact.

6 This is the only study in which the message structure is also explored. The message order is manipulated by presenting two versions of the mixed report: one introducing the negative information first versus the other introducing the positive information first.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Swiss Government Excellence Scholarships under the grant [2019.0512]