The Reduction of Racial Prejudice Through the Use of Vicarious Experience.

Abstract

This study investigated the relationship between three teaching approaches to the study of racism and the actual reduction of racial prejudice. A total of one hundred and forty-two Southfield-Lathrup High School, Southfield, Michigan, students were involved in this study. Sixty-four were enrolled in a general sociology course that stressed a cognitive underst and ing of racism and prejudice with little or no use of empathy. Twenty-six students in one of the three classes in a course called Minority Groups, studied the plight of minorities with a more traditional approach that stressed group presentations, a cognitive awareness of the issues, and a moderate degree of empathy as the students played the role of civil rights advocates for their chosen minority. A third group of fifty-two students who were the remaining two classes of Minority Groups, studied the struggles and problems of the disadvantaged through a technique of using vicarious experience as the students live out the life of a minority group member. It was hypothesized that during a nine week period in the Spring of 1982, this last group that stressed a high degree of empathy through struggling vicariously as an oppressed minority, would have a far greater reduction in racial prejudice than either the sociology students who were not exposed to any use of empathy in their study or the traditional approach which used a moderate level of empathy in a basically cognitive approach. The study used a quasi-experimental design in an applied research, classroom setting which did not allow for complete r and om assignment and some other experimental controls. The dependent variable (reduction of prejudice) was measured using the Multifactor Racial Opinion Inventory (MROI) developed in its final form by the Institute of Behavioral Science of the University of Colorado in Boulder. Both the short form (C-4) and the long form (C-8) of the MROI were used. The research design was a pretest/post test three group analysis of covariance. The vicarious experience approach was more effective in reducing prejudice than the sociology-cognitive approach (p .03). The moderate empathy (traditional minority group approach) and the high empathy (vicarious experience) did not differ statistically although there was a trend in the predicted direction (p .18).