Abstract
Political advertisements can shift attitudes and behaviors to become more exclusionary toward social out-groups. However, people who engage in an antidiscrimination exercise in the context of an experiment may respond differently to such ads. What interventions might foster inclusive attitudes in the presence of political communications about social policy issues like transgender rights? We examined two scalable antidiscrimination exercises commonly used in applied settings: describing a personal narrative of discrimination and perspective-taking. We then showed people political ads that are favorable or opposed to transgender rights to determine whether those interventions moderate how receptive people are to the messages. Relying on two demographically representative survey experiments of adults in the United States (study 1 N = 1,291; study 2 N = 1,587), we found that personal recollections of discriminatory experiences did not reduce exclusionary attitudes, but perspective-taking had some effects, particularly among those who fully complied with the exercise. However, both studies revealed potential backfire effects; recalling a discriminatory experience induced negative attitudes among a subset of the participants, and participants who refused to perspective-take when prompted also held more negative attitudes. Importantly, political ads favorable toward transgender rights consistently resulted in more positive attitudes toward transgender people. Future work needs to carefully examine heterogeneous responses and resistance to antidiscrimination interventions and examine what particular aspects of the political ads induced the attitude change.
Highlights
Social movement organizations, like those that promote transgender rights, spend considerable effort communicating about issues while working to change prejudicial attitudes (Tadlock, 2014; Flores, 2019)
This is surprising because public safety concerns tend to be one of the overarching opposition arguments used in mass media to generate opposition to transgender rights (Tadlock, 2014), so people likely should be more receptive to such arguments
A source for this difference may be the differences between the two samples, as MTurk workers tend to be more politically progressive such that pro-transgender arguments may approach a ceiling so greater movement may be available in the negative direction7
Summary
Like those that promote transgender rights, spend considerable effort communicating about issues while working to change prejudicial attitudes (Tadlock, 2014; Flores, 2019). One strategy is to encourage people to recall a time when they have been discriminated against in order to make them aware of multiple forms of bias (Gorski and Pothini, 2018; Kalla and Broockman, 2021). Another strategy is to ask participants to take the perspective of others (Broockman and Kalla, 2016; Gorski and Pothini, 2018). These approaches tend to be resource intensive and time consuming. Our intent was to find effective but less resource intensive interventions that would reduce prejudices toward transgender people and transgender rights
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