Abstracts Psychology

Fighting zombies together : a longitudinal experimental test of prejudice reduction through media exposure to non-human villains

by Xuejing Yao

Increasing the salience of shared human identity has been demonstrated as an effective mechanism to reduce interracial prejudice (e.g., Ellithorpe et al. 2018; Yao et al., 2022a). Previous research has found that watching racially diverse human heroes fighting against non-human villains increased the strength of viewers' human identity, and their stronger human identity is in turn associated with more positive attitudes toward racial minority groups. This dissertation replicated Ellithorpe et al.'s (2018) research through a longitudinal controlled experiment with three waves of stimuli exposure and a posttest. The longitudinal design also made it possible to test the chronic accessibility of the human identity. Overall, minimal support was found for the longitudinal mediation with the current data and the human identity showed relatively short salience. However, this set of findings provided important information about the property of the superordinate human identity. Implications of the current findings as well as directions for future research were discussed.