"I Feel You!": The Role of Empathic Competences in Reducing Ethnic Prejudice Among Adolescents

A war on prejudice: The role of media salience in reducing ethnic prejudice

INTRODUCTION

Ethnic prejudice poses a great challenge to the cohesion of current multicultural societies. Prior research has found that media portrayals of immigration-related issues might skew individual attitudes and feelings toward ethnic minorities. While these studies have focused on negative representations of ethnic minorities, less is known about the effects of media reports of unfortunate events affecting the victims of war, as in the case of the Ukrainian group in the Russia-Ukraine war. Therefore, the current research aims to examine whether media salience of this situation might change adolescents' ethnic prejudice against the Ukrainian minority.

METHODS

A total of 1016 ethnic-majority Italian adolescents (Mage = 15.66, SDage = 1.17, 49.61% females) completed online questionnaires during school hours before (T1: January/February 2022) and after (T2: April/May 2022) the Russia-Ukraine war onset. Additionally, the media salience of the war was quantified separately for the national newspaper and Twitter.

RESULTS

Levels of prejudice significantly decreased from T1 to T2 for multiple ethnic minority groups but especially so for the Ukrainian group. The results of bivariate Latent Change Score models highlighted that increased salience of the war in the national newspaper was significantly associated with decreased prejudice against Ukrainians, regardless of adolescents' levels of self-reported newspaper consumption. Conversely, changes in the salience of the war on Twitter were not associated with changes in prejudice.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings highlight the importance of media attention for the war's victims in skewing individuals' outgroup perceptions and feelings.

Addressing ethnic prejudice in youth: Developmental trajectories and associations with educational identity

Studying how attitudes develop in the transition from late adolescence to emerging adulthood offers unique insights into future generations’ perceptions of society and of others. However, findings on ethnic prejudice during this life period are mixed. The current research aims to examine the development of affective and cognitive ethnic prejudice, adopting a person-centered approach. Furthermore, it examines the associations between educational identity processes and prejudice. A sample of 297 Italian adolescents ( Mage = 17.48, SDage = 0.79, 37.8% males) participated in a five-wave longitudinal study. At the mean level, cognitive prejudice decreased slightly over time, while affective prejudice remained stable. Additionally, rank-order stability coefficients were high ( r ≥ .526). Moreover, for each dimension of prejudice (i.e., cognitive and affective) taken separately, three groups of participants were identified based on their high, moderate, or low scores, respectively. Finally, higher levels of educational identity in-depth exploration at baseline significantly increased the chances of adolescents falling into the low rather than the moderate group for both cognitive and affective prejudice. Conversely, it significantly reduced the chances of being in the high compared to the moderate group for affective prejudice. This study highlights the importance of considering multiple components of prejudice and their reciprocal associations with identity processes to identify at-risk segments of the adolescent and emerging adult populations.