Neuroscience
Students’ racial prejudice is reduced when they share their university accommodation with roommates from a different ethnic group.
Colette Van Laar at Leiden University in The Netherlands and her American colleagues measured the racial prejudice of 3,877 students the summer before they started at the University of California in Los Angeles, and then measured it again at the end of the academic year. The researchers took advantage of the fact that most students are randomly allocated their first year accommodation, so they don’t choose their roommates. They then looked at how a student’s racial attitudes changed, depending on who they had been sharing with. Thirty-six per cent of the student sample were White, 36 per cent were Asian American, 18 per cent Latino, 6 per cent African American and 8 per cent were of another ethnicity.
Overall, students who shared accommodation with one or more people from a different ethnic background, expressed reduced racial prejudice at the year’s end compared with the previous summer, particularly towards the ethnic group to which their roommate(s) belonged. There was also some generalisation of this effect towards other racial groups. In particular, students who shared with someone of African American descent showed reduced prejudice towards people of Latino descent, and vice versa.
“Roommates have equal status, must work cooperatively and have the common goal of maintaining a home environment that is mutually satisfactory”, the authors said. “… the familiarity and mere exposure afforded by living together is likely to generate positive affective ties between roommates”.
Also on a positive note, the researchers found no evidence that a student’s racial prejudice was increased by sharing accommodation with people who had the same ethnicity as them.
_________________________________
Laar, C.V., Levin, S., Sinclair, S. & Sidanius, J. (2005). The effect of university roommate contact on ethnic attitudes and behaviour. Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology, 41, 329-345.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
No room for prejudice
Students’ racial prejudice is reduced when they share their university accommodation with roommates from a different ethnic group.
Colette Van Laar at Leiden University in The Netherlands and her American colleagues measured the racial prejudice of 3,877 students the summer before they started at the University of California in Los Angeles, and then measured it again at the end of the academic year. The researchers took advantage of the fact that most students are randomly allocated their first year accommodation, so they don’t choose their roommates. They then looked at how a student’s racial attitudes changed, depending on who they had been sharing with. Thirty-six per cent of the student sample were White, 36 per cent were Asian American, 18 per cent Latino, 6 per cent African American and 8 per cent were of another ethnicity.
Overall, students who shared accommodation with one or more people from a different ethnic background, expressed reduced racial prejudice at the year’s end compared with the previous summer, particularly towards the ethnic group to which their roommate(s) belonged. There was also some generalisation of this effect towards other racial groups. In particular, students who shared with someone of African American descent showed reduced prejudice towards people of Latino descent, and vice versa.
“Roommates have equal status, must work cooperatively and have the common goal of maintaining a home environment that is mutually satisfactory”, the authors said. “… the familiarity and mere exposure afforded by living together is likely to generate positive affective ties between roommates”.
Also on a positive note, the researchers found no evidence that a student’s racial prejudice was increased by sharing accommodation with people who had the same ethnicity as them.
_________________________________
Laar, C.V., Levin, S., Sinclair, S. & Sidanius, J. (2005). The effect of university roommate contact on ethnic attitudes and behaviour. Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology, 41, 329-345.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- Could Lessons In Genetic Variation Help Reduce Racial Prejudice?
Richard Dawkins called it "the curse of the discontinuous mind" - our tendency to lump things into discrete categories. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our perception of ethnic races, which we tend to see as reflecting absolute dividing lines in...
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They say you should walk a mile in a person's shoes before judging them. Virtual reality technology offers this possibility by allowing us to control a digital representation of another person. Unfortunately, the first ever investigation of racial...
- Learning To Distinguish Between Other-race Faces Could Help Beat Racism
Most of us find that people from other races look more similar to each other than people from our own race - a phenomenon dubbed the 'other race effect'. Sophie Lebrecht and colleagues reasoned that this perceptual bias could feed into people's...
- How Ambiguous Racism Can Be More Harmful Than The Blatant Variety
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