Flores Andrew R, Haider-Markel Donald P, Lewis Daniel C, Miller Patrick R, Taylor Jami K
Department of Government, School of Public Affairs, American University, Washington, DC, United States.
School of Law, The Williams Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States.
Front Psychol. 2021 Aug 19;12:729322. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.729322. eCollection 2021.
Political advertisements can shift attitudes and behaviors to become more exclusionary toward social out-groups. However, people who engage in an antidiscrimination exercise in the context of an experiment may respond differently to such ads. What interventions might foster inclusive attitudes in the presence of political communications about social policy issues like transgender rights? We examined two scalable antidiscrimination exercises commonly used in applied settings: describing a personal narrative of discrimination and perspective-taking. We then showed people political ads that are favorable or opposed to transgender rights to determine whether those interventions moderate how receptive people are to the messages. Relying on two demographically representative survey experiments of adults in the United States (study 1 = 1,291; study 2 = 1,587), we found that personal recollections of discriminatory experiences did not reduce exclusionary attitudes, but perspective-taking had some effects, particularly among those who fully complied with the exercise. However, both studies revealed potential backfire effects; recalling a discriminatory experience induced negative attitudes among a subset of the participants, and participants who refused to perspective-take when prompted also held more negative attitudes. Importantly, political ads favorable toward transgender rights consistently resulted in more positive attitudes toward transgender people. Future work needs to carefully examine heterogeneous responses and resistance to antidiscrimination interventions and examine what particular aspects of the political ads induced the attitude change.
政治广告可以改变态度和行为，使其对社会外群体更具排他性。然而，在实验背景下参与反歧视活动的人可能会对这类广告有不同的反应。在有关跨性别权利等社会政策问题的政治宣传中，哪些干预措施可能会培养包容的态度呢？我们研究了应用场景中常用的两种可扩展的反歧视活动：描述个人的歧视经历和换位思考。然后，我们向人们展示支持或反对跨性别权利的政治广告，以确定这些干预措施是否会调节人们对这些信息的接受程度。基于对美国成年人进行的两项具有人口统计学代表性的调查实验（研究1 = 1291人；研究2 = 1587人），我们发现，对歧视经历的个人回忆并没有减少排他性态度，但换位思考有一些效果，特别是在那些完全遵守该活动要求的人当中。然而，两项研究都揭示了潜在的反效果；回忆歧视经历在一部分参与者中引发了消极态度，而且在被提示时拒绝换位思考的参与者也持有更消极的态度。重要的是，支持跨性别权利的政治广告始终会使人们对跨性别者产生更积极的态度。未来的研究需要仔细审视对反歧视干预措施的异质反应和抵触情绪，并研究政治广告的哪些具体方面引发了态度的转变。
