Abstract
The effects of intergroup dialogues on intercultural relations in digital societies and the growing conflict, inflammatory and hate speech phenomena characterizing these environments are receiving increasing attention in socio-psychological studies. Based on Allport’s contact theory, scholars have shown that online intercultural contact reduces ethnic prejudice and discrimination, although it is not yet clear when and how this occurs. By analyzing the role of the Dialogical Self in online intercultural dialogues, we aim to understand how individuals position themselves and others at three levels of inclusiveness—personal, social, and human—and how this process is associated with attitudes towards the interlocutor, intergroup bias and prejudice, whilst also considering the inclusion of the Other in the Self and ethnic/racial identity. An experimental procedure was administered via the Qualtrics platform, and data were collected among 118 undergraduate Italian students through an anonymous questionnaire. From ANOVA and moderation analysis, it emerged that the social level of inclusiveness was positively associated with ethnic/racial identity and intergroup bias. Furthermore, the human level of inclusiveness was associated with the inclusion of the Other in the Self and ethnic/racial identity, and unexpectedly, also with intergroup bias. We conclude that when people interact online as “human beings”, the positive effect of online dialogue fails, hindering the differentiation processes necessary to define one’s own and the interlocutor’s identities. We discuss the effects of intercultural dialogue in the landscape of digital societies and the relevance of our findings for theory, research and practice.
Highlights
Intercultural relations in digital societies, especially when characterized by phenomena such as inflammatory and hate speech, are an issue of pregnant social and political relevance
Filip and Kovářová [48,62] suggested running a principal component analysis on the external positions for each Positions Repertoire (PPR) sheet separately, and consider the percentage of variance explained by the first latent factor of the model as an index whose high values indicated monologicity and whose low values indicated dialogicity
We must not forget that according to the literature reviewed, e.g., [24,29], the greater inclusion of the Other in the Self mediates the relationship between the contact and the variables linked to the quality of intergroup relationships, e.g., [24]. This could mean that to shift among positions considering the interlocutor as a human being could influence the prejudice by only including the Other in the Self. This interpretation is in line with other studies on online intergroup contact, e.g., [52], our results show that a lack of relation between humanization and prejudice that could be due at least partially to the limited time of dialogue interaction
Summary
Intercultural relations in digital societies, especially when characterized by phenomena such as inflammatory and hate speech, are an issue of pregnant social and political relevance. For this reason, it is urgent that psychosocial research focuses on strategies useful for reducing these negative online phenomena. Since its formulation, many scholars have applied the contact theory in order to reduce prejudice towards different target groups (i.e., ethnic and sexual minorities or people with illnesses) and in different contexts (i.e., schools, workplaces). Given the difficulty involved in making people from different groups meet face-to-face, and given the growing pervasiveness of the Internet, contact theory has recently been applied to online contexts as well. Imperato et al.’s [7] meta-analysis on this topic demonstrated that many moderation and mediation variables classically considered in the literature on offline intergroup contact could not be applied in online environments, or, when applied, fail to explain the process by which online contact reduces prejudice
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