What people do matters during intergroup communication: Immediate and delayed effects of intergroup contact via cognitive, affective, and behavioral mediators

Positive intergroup communication reduces outgroup prejudice. Attempting to decompose the effect of intergroup contact more precisely, we argue that engaging in different activities during intergroup communication influences prejudice through different pathways. We investigated whether exposure to interactive videos involving cognitive, affective, and behavioral activities reduces outgroup prejudice through relevant mediators (knowledge, empathy, and synchronization). We found support for the effect of dancing (behavioral activity) and language learning (cognitive activity) on outgroup prejudice through the relevant mediators: synchronization and knowledge, respectively. Also, we demonstrated a long-term effect of mediated intergroup contact: the mediation path from dance through synchronization lasted a week after the intervention. We discuss the importance of the content of intergroup communication and its implications for creating prejudice-reduction interventions.