Reducing ethnic prejudice by public campaigns: An evaluation of a present and a new campaign

Most Western governments consider it their responsibility to counteract eth nic prejudice and discrimination, and they sometimes instigate persuasive c ommunication programmes to achieve this aim. Generally, these campaigns do not have the desired effects possibly because designers of such persuasive communication programs have ignored relevant social-psychological theoretic al insights concerning prejudice. In this experiment, a present campaign (l aunched by the British Commission for Racial Equality) and a new campaign ( developed by us) were evaluated. We hypothesized that our campaign would le ad to lower levels of prejudice than the present campaign, because when des igning our campaign relevant theoretical insights were more sufficiently ta ken into account. White participants (n = 190) were randomly assigned to on e of two experimental conditions or to the control condition. Those in the experimental conditions were exposed to either the present campaign or the new campaign before completing a questionnaire about ethnic minorities. Par ticipants in the control condition were not exposed to a campaign. Results supported the hypothesis and some implications for designing campaigns are discussed. Copyright (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.