Addressing anti-Gypsyism with context-dependent psychological tools: Research review, meta-analysis and secondary analysis of prejudice against the Roma

ABSTRACT

Anti-Gypsyism is a deeply entrenched form of ethnic bias in Europe, characterised by realistic conflict perceptions, social norms approving bias, unacknowledged historical victimisation, and denial of cultural autonomy. Mainstream prejudice reduction interventions may have limited applicability to anti-Gypsyism, because prejudice is normative, hence people are not motivated to change their views; interventions focusing on increased liking, but not competence perception consolidate status differences; stereotypes are resistant to change because of the overlap with low SES stereotypes and assimilation of counter-stereotypical members. With the help of a meta-analysis with 169 effect sizes from 18 countries in 14 languages we showed that contact frequency was indeed only associated with affective (liking), but not cognitive and behavioural prejudice. However, we found the expected negative association between positive contact and prejudice. Eurobarometer data also showed the salience of counter-normative experiences, as friendships had a stronger impact in countries with higher overall means of anti-Gypsyism.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-Gypsyism
• meta-analysis
• Eurobarometer
• prejudice
• social norms

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Open Science Framework repository at https://osf.io/384sx/?view_only=50b1d7433f5e4974bd4c0dc05ca6d703

Notes

¹ We conducted the search in the following languages: Albanian, Bosnian, Croatian, Czech, English, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Montenegrin, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, and Spanish. We also ran a search in French and Turkish but did not find relevant publications.

2 The reference list is not integrated with the manuscript’s reference list, because of the many irregular and unpublished sources that were used in the meta-analysis

Additional information

Funding

The research was supported by the European Union’s Rights, Equality and Citizenship [REC] Programme [2014-2020] [Grant. No. 963122 — ENGAGE — REC-AG-2020/REC-RDIS-DISC-AG-2020], the National Research and Innovation Research Grant. Grant Number: NKFI-K138429 and by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under contract no. APVV-23-0119.