Changing your attitutde with imagination

We have seen in What is Attitude? that attitudes are a complex mixture of behaviors, knowledge and beliefs. Attitudes are changing all the time depending on input to behaviors, knowledge and beliefs. In Changing Attitudes it was seen that it is possible to change attitudes through education and role models. Attitudes can be changed in opposition to prevailing social forces. In Contact Hypothesis we have seen that the best way to acclimatize an ingroup to an outgroup is through a controlled meeting. Is it possible that we can change our own attitudes to disability through the imagination?



I was intrigued to discover this from the chapter on Attitudes Toward People with Disabilities in the 2013 book, The Social Psychology of Disability by Dana S. Dunn: 

An emerging and intriguing set of studies indicates that having people imagine social interactions with outgroup members can actually produce positive perceptions while reducing prejudicial feelings. Crisp and Turner (2009) argue that having people mentally simulate positive contact with outgroup members promotes more favorable attitudes toward those outgroups while reducing the propensity to engage in stereotyping. In addition, imagined intergroup contact reduces the anxiety that majority group members often feel while simultaneously allowing their social perceptions of outgroup members to become more positive (for more detail, see Crisp & Turner, 2013).
What makes this approach compelling is its inherent simplicity and applicability. Imagined intergroup contact can be used to prepare people for future encounters (a first step toward actual contact and prejudice reduction) as one of several approaches to reducing prejudice or as a basic way to reduce people’s inhibitions about others who are different from themselves. As Crisp and Turner claim, “. . . we assert the value in imagined contact is in its ability to encourage people to engage outgroups with an open mind” (p. 231).
The typical instructions for imagined intergroup contact are quite minimal. Here is a standard set from Crisp and Turner (2009, p. 234) revised (by me) to account for disability:

We would like you to take a minute to imagine yourself meeting a stranger who has a disability for the first time. Imagine that the interaction is positive, relaxed, and comfortable.

Crisp and Turner note that two critical features are required in such instructions: The encouragement to engage in a mental simulation (just thinking of an outgroup person is not sufficient—imagined interaction must occur; Turner, Crisp, & Lambert, 2007, Study 2). Beyond that, the affective tone of the instructions must be positive, just as an actual interaction between people from different groups must be positive (Stathi & Crisp, 2008, Study 1).
Moreover, the impact of the imagined intervention can affect both explicit and implicit attitudes, as Turner and Crisp (2010) found when they had young people imagine speaking to an older stranger. Participants who did so reported more favorable, explicit attitudes toward older people generally, but also had more positive implicit attitudes as assessed on a “younger–older” version of the IAT (Implicit Association Test).

The Implicit Association Test is described as follows (see The Social Psychology of Disability by Dana S. Dunn):

Many investigators of implicit, prejudiced attitudes rely on a measure known as the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998; Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhlmann, & Banaji, 2009). The IAT is a covert measure of unconscious attitudes that assesses the extent to which two concepts are associated with one another by having participants rapidly determine whether word or image pairings are either positive or negative. The working assumption underlying the IAT is that people’s reaction times (i.e., response latencies) to particular stimuli reveal how they actually feel about some target or target group (e.g., race, nationality, ethnic group, religion, sport). When studying implicit racism toward African-Americans, for example, researchers examine how quickly participants respond to black-bad/white-good word pairings (e.g., black-failure, white-joy) relative to black-good/white-bad pairings (e.g., black-wonderful, white-evil) delivered on a computer screen. Images (e.g., white or black faces), too, are paired with descriptive words as part of the IAT (there are several stages involved in completing the measure). Where race is concerned, people tend to make decisions about the former pairings much more quickly than the latter, revealing that they tend not to mentally connect pairings of black-good and white-bad. In other words, quicker response times reveal actual (implicit) attitudes: If a target associated with positive terms elicits a faster response than a target associated with negative ones, then the implicit attitude is presumed to be positive. If the reverse is true, then the attitude is deemed to be negative.

The authors continue their description of how imagination can change attitudes (see The Social Psychology of Disability by Dana S. Dunn):

Cameron, Rutland, Turner, Holman-Nicolas, and Powell (2011) examined whether having nondisabled children aged 5 to 10 years imagine interacting with a disabled child reduced intergroup bias. Compared to peers in a control condition, the mental simulation group of children did indeed show less bias in their general attitudes as well as higher ratings of competence and warmth concerning disability. The youngest children (ages 5 to 6 years) in the simulation condition also reported having more positive intended friendships with children with disabilities than did their control group peers (this result was not found in children ages 7 and older). The researchers suggested that the findings offer reasonable support for their hypothesis that younger children are apt to reap considerable benefit from imagined contact with outgroups precisely because they have little or no experience with them and therefore have not formed stereotypes.
A related line of research deals with what is known as the extended contact hypothesis (Wright, Aron, McLaughlin-Volpe, & Ropp, 1997), in which the beneficial results of intergroup contact develop by way of vicarious learning opportunities. For example, we may never have personally interacted with individuals from a particular outgroup, but perhaps someone we know well—a friend or neighbor or even a relative—has done so. Wright and colleagues (1997) found that individuals who had such extended contact (again, through people theyknew) were found to have lower levels of racial prejudice than members of a control group who did not have any friends with extended outgroup connections.
What about extended contact and disability? Research by Cameron and Rutland (2006) explored the impact of the extended contact hypothesis among a group of nondisabled children who participated in a 6-week intervention in which they read stories about friendships between children with and without disabilities (i.e., extended contact was operationalized by reading and hearing about other children—all positive characters—who interacted with peers with disabilities). This form of extended contact led to more positive attitudes toward PWDs, particularly in one condition in which the children heard the category membership of the characters (i.e., nondisabled child or a child with a disability) emphasized (for more on the extended contact hypothesis, see Crisp & Turner, 2009; Vonofakou, Hewstone, & Voci, 2007).

The above thought experiment provides the intriguing possibility of people reducing their own stigma and prejudice towards people with disabilities (PWDs). There is no requirement for a non disabled person to meet a disabled person. This exercise can therefore be used as a prelude to a real meeting, reducing the anxiety of intergroup contact, by reducing prejudice and stigma in preparation for a longer real life contact.