Author's personal copy A dual identity-electronic contact (DIEC) experiment promoting short- and long-term intergroup harmony Fiona A. White a, ⁎, Hisham M. Abu-Rayya b a School of Psychology, The University of Sydney, Australia b School of Psychological Science, La Trobe University, Australia abstract article info Article history: Received 5 August 2011 Revised 18 January 2012 Available online 24 January 2012 Keywords: Intergroup relations Dual identity recategorization Contact Prejudice reduction Minority and majority groups Existing intergroup harmony programs have been short in length with little long-term evaluation of their true effectiveness. This experiment addresses this limitation through the development and evaluation of a new intergroup harmony program that integrates dual identity and contact tenets. At Time 1, 116 Australian Muslim and 104 Australian Christian first-year high school students attending religiously segregated schools completed pre-test measures of intergroup bias, intergroup anxiety, prejudice, and outgroup knowledge. Eight months later, in the next year of school, these students were allocated to either the nine-week dual identity-electronic or E-contact (DIEC) program that involved Muslim and Christians interacting via a syn- chronous internet chat tool, or the control condition where they completed the program within their religious groups with no recategorization. All participants completed the same pre-test measures at two weeks (Time 2) and 6-months (Time 3) post-program. At Time 2, for students in the DIEC condition, intergroup bias and intergroup anxiety decreased significantly, and outgroup knowledge increased significantly, compared to the control condition. In the case of intergroup bias, the decrease was maintained at Time 3. Moderation effects of ingroup identification and outgroup friendship, and mediation effects of intergroup anxiety were also found. These encouraging findings highlight that carefully designed E-contact programs can successfully promote intergroup harmony in both the short- and long-term. Crown Copyright © 2012 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Introduction After 80 years of social psychology researchers identifying and evaluating the underlying mechanisms, formation, and measurement of prejudice (Allport, 1954; Tajfel & Turner, 1979), research attention would benefit from turning to the more challenging and pressing need to develop and evaluate long-term interventions to promote harmony between minority and majority groups. Longitudinal studies have always been recognized as important vehicles for obtaining high-quality evidence about the causes of particular psychological attitudes and behaviors. Despite the fact that it can track critical periods, test models of causal relationships, and provide evidence on optimal times for interventions to promote positive development (Sanson & Smart, 2011), longitudinal prejudice reduction research has been surprisingly rare. Several leading scholars in prejudice reduction recognize the im- portance of longitudinal studies as the key to future progress in the field. For example, Dovidio, Gaertner, and Saguy (2009, p. 16) have argued that “Future research would profit from studying the dynamic processes over time from the perspective of majority and minority group members… interventions emphasizing commonality and shared fate may be valuable for reframing relationships between the groups”. Similarly, in their prejudice reduction review and recommendations paper, Paluck and Green (2009, p. 357) stated that “The strength of field experimentation rests not only in its ability to assess causal rela- tionships but also its ability to assess whether an intervention's effects emerge and endure….”. Finally, Pettigrew's (1998) pioneering advocacy for longitudinal prejudice reduction research is best exemplified in his reformulation of Allport's intergroup Contact theory. A modest number of longitudinal intergroup research studies have been conducted. Sherif's (1966) Robber's Cave study was one of the first to show that only after repeated attempts to achieve the common goal, did the conflict between the groups eventually reduce. Other longitudinal studies examining contact and intergroup attitudes followed (Brown, Eller, Leeds, & Stace, 2007; Eller & Abrams, 2003, 2004; Hamilton & Bishop, 1976; Levin, van Laar, & Sidanius, 2003; Maras & Brown, 1996; Stephan & Rosenfield, 1978; Vezzali, Giovannini, & Capozza, 2010). Recently, Binder et al. (2009) con- ducted a large cross-national study that examined the relationship be- tween contact and prejudice reduction involving European minority (n = 512) and majority (n = 1,143) groups. They found that amongst majority group members only, that contact (as measured by outgroup friendship) reduced prejudice (as measured by negative intergroup emotions and desire for social distance), and that prejudice reduced Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48 (2012) 597–608 ⁎ Corresponding author at: School of Psychology (A18), The University of Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia. E-mail address: fiona.white@sydney.edu.au (F.A. White). 0022-1031/$ – see front matter. Crown Copyright © 2012 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2012.01.007 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Journal of Experimental Social Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jesp