Leveraging literacy to reduce prejudice and improve group relations

• In Event: Promoting literacy and indigenous language education

Proposal

Ensuring children and adults develop basic literacy skills has become a global focus, reflected in institutional priorities such as the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal #4 (UN General Assembly, 2015) and international foreign assistance agencies like USAID (USAID, 2019). Simultaneously, these institutions share an interest in the promotion of international stability and peace. This paper reviews the emerging body of research demonstrating that reading can serve as a form of indirect or extended contact between groups to improve group relations and reduce prejudice. This paper discusses the implications of this research for educators, including what strategies teachers can employ within educational spaces.

For groups with little ability to interact with stigmatized populations reading narrative fiction can serve as a form of indirect contact to reshape group relations at an individual level. Importantly, when conducted correctly, students can begin to revise their own negative stereotypes, gain improved attitudes towards stigmatized groups, and desire to interact with them. For highly prejudiced individuals, reading may serve as a safe space enabling them to rethink their prejudices without a need to react defensively (Johnson, Jasper, Griffin, & Huffman, 2013).

Drawing upon research from social psychology and intergroup conflict studies, this paper identifies the conditions demonstrated to facilitate prejudice reduction from reading and the cognitive mechanism that underpin this process. Specifically, these include, 1) perspective-taking (Johnson, et al. 2013), 2) identification (Vezzali, Stathi, Giovannini, Capozza, & Trifiletti, 2015), and 3) transportation (Green & Brook, 2000).

While compelling, the current body of literature suffers from methodological limitations that restrict practitioners and policy makers’ ability to use it to inform programing with confidence: 1) short intervention durations, including a lack of longitudinal studies, 2) simplistic operationalizations of prejudice, and 3) overemphasis on explicit prejudice with insufficient attention paid to implicit prejudice.

Furthermore, reading as a form of indirect contact between groups may only be effective as a proactive strategy for curbing in-group favoritism and might not be successful for more extreme prejudiced contexts characterized by out-group derogation bias and violent conflict.

This paper will conclude with a conceptual framework to guide future research and practice that aims to utilize reading to improve group relations and reduce prejudice.

Author

• Lukas Winfield, University of Massachusetts, Amherst