How Mediated Intergroup Contact Works: Exploring Mechanisms of Music and Language Learning Activities’ Effects

Positive mediated intergroup contact improves outgroup perceptions–at least in the short term. We argue that exposure to outgroup characters engaging in specific activities affects outgroup perceptions via activity-specific mechanisms. We investigated whether watching an outgroup character engaging in a musical or language learning activity evokes a music-specific mediator, empathy, or a language-specific mediator, knowledge. We conducted a pretest-posttest experiment and employed a multiple-message design to improve the generalizability of our findings. The sample (N = 421 American adults) was recruited in the United States from both an online panel and undergraduate subject pool. Results indicated that both music and language learning activities improved outgroup perceptions from the pretest to posttest. Furthermore, we confirmed that such effects were driven through the activity-specific mechanisms. In particular, different activities led to responses specific to the nature of the activities, serving as the process of mediated contact effects (e.g., empathy mediates the effect of musical activities on changes in outgroup perceptions). We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.