My Imaginary Black Friend

Image by J$ via Flickr

This is innovative: Combatting racism with imaginary multi-racial friends.

Sounds stupid? Well, it’s science!

Here’s what we know about breaking down racism:

* It can happen when people of different races or groups come into regular contact — that is, when they become neighbors, colleagues, friends.

* It can even happen through extended contact — that is, when you have a friend who has a black friend, say, your attitudes toward African Americans will improve (assuming you’re non-African American — if you’re black and only have a friend who has a black friend, that sounds like a sad and confusing situation).

Now, however, a new study finds that merely imagining positive contact with a member of an out-group can improve attitudes toward that group.

The study was run on young people, regarding their attitudes toward old people. Here’s a description from BPS Research Digest:

In an initial experiment, Rhiannon Turner and Richard Crisp had half of 25 students aged between 18 and 23 spend two minutes imagining a positive encounter with an elderly person, whilst the remaining students imagined an outdoor scene. These were the specific instructions for the imagined contact group: “imagine yourself meeting an elderly stranger for the first time. Imagine that during the encounter, you find out some interesting and unexpected things about the person.”

Afterwards, the students who’d imagined meeting an elderly person subsequently showed more positive attitudes towards elderly people than did the control group. This was true whether their attitudes were tapped using an explicit questionnaire, or using a test of implicit, subconsciously held, attitudes – the IAT. Briefly, this measures how easily people associate pairs of categories, such as old people and negative words, or young people and positive words, by allocating the categories to the same or different response keys.

The study was also run on non-Muslims, regarding their attitudes toward Muslims. Similar results were found.

I’m not sure exactly how this could be put into practical use. The problem, it would seem to me, is that the people who need to do it would never implement it. Say, it’d be nice to make kids in Gaza stop hating Jews. But Hamas takes — well, let’s call it sort of the opposite approach to the one described in the study. Likewise, would a 99% white school district in Idaho do an exercise like this? If it’s a community where negative racial attitudes are deeply ingrained, it’s pretty hard to imagine anyone undertaking something like this.

And, of course, there’s the question of how enduring an effect like this is. Let’s see a study where they re-run the IAT a year later, without repeating the “imagine you have a Muslim friend” part. Can an effect like this stick without constant reinforcement? And, again, in a community that actually needed this sort of thing, would such reinforcement ever happen?

Our only hope, it seems to me, is for America to adopt President Obama as everyone’s imaginary black best friend. I’ll kick things off by imagining me and Barack renting a movie together and watching it on my couch.

Pass the popcorn, Barry. Thanks.

Yeah, I love Bill Murray, too.

Yeah, gophers are funny when they dance.