I Help You, You Help Me: Interracial Reciprocity in Situation Comedies Influences Racial Attitudes

ABSTRACT

In this manuscript, three studies examined the effects of viewing situation comedies on attitudes toward Black Americans. Study 1 was a content analysis of sitcoms that had either predominately Black casts (PBC) or predominately White casts (PWC) and showcased interracial interaction. It is found that positive cross-racial interaction (interracial reciprocity) occurs in both types of shows but is more common with PBC sitcoms. Study 2 was a survey that found watching PBC sitcoms was associated with reduced prejudice, while watching PWC sitcoms was associated with increased prejudice. These effects were mediated by positive reciprocity expectations for Black Americans, as explicated by Bounded Generalized Reciprocity theory. Study 3 was an experiment that found exposure to increased scenes of interracial reciprocity in PBC was associated with less negative attitudes toward Black Americans through the mechanism of reduced negative reciprocity expectations. Overall, we found sitcoms are associated with activating racial prejudice. However, the direction of these beliefs is in part determined by if the casts of these shows are predominantly Black or White.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. More details for the sample selection in Study 1 can be found on OSF: https://osf.io/48swm/?view_only=d319459fa64d48eab6427010777de3b4.

2. This decision was made due to research suggesting that racial and ethnic identity matter in the context of vicarious learning from interracial interaction in media (Kim & Harwood, 2020). The small number of participants reporting each racial identity aside from White made it difficult to statistically draw accurate conclusions about those groups. Rather than make unsubstantiated claims about individuals with those racial and ethnic identities, we opted to remove them from analysis. There were no substantive differences in the interpretation of results when only those who identified as White were included compared to when all people in the sample were included, across both studies with human subjects (Study 2 and Study 3).

3. Our content analysis from Study 1 was used to choose the shows for Study 3; these shows were the only ones from that content analysis that all provided episodes with 0, 2, and 5 interracial reciprocity instances. No other combinations of shows allowed us to vary the number of reciprocity instances with precision while still having the manipulation of Black and White casts and stimulus sampling of multiple shows within the Black/White categories. Therefore, the choice to use these shows was practical and necessary. Future research may wish to determine whether more current shows would have similar effects.

4. For conceptual clarity, the reciprocity manipulation is treated as a continuous predictor for this analysis. However, a version was also run where it was treated as a multicategorical variable in order to confirm the pattern of results. When this is the case, the interaction between cast racial composition and reciprocity instances is significant in predicting negative reciprocity expectations when comparing 5 reciprocity instances to 0 reciprocity instances, b=-1.24, p = .02, 95% CI(−2.28, −0.20), but not when comparing 2 reciprocity instances to 0 reciprocity instances, b=-0.59, p = .27, 95% CI(−1.64, 0.46). Given that the interpretation of these interactions leads to the same conclusions as when the continuous version is used (that there is a significant difference by cast racial composition when reciprocity is high, but not when reciprocity is low or zero, and there is no significant simple main effect of reciprocity in either cast racial composition condition), we report the more parsimonious – if less ideal for statistical assumptions – continuous version in the main text and use that version for the moderated mediation model and indirect effects testing.