Promoting intergroup openness and support for equality in a new cultural context: Replicating the effects of internal criticism

ABSTRACT

Exposure to an outgroup member voicing criticism of his or her own group fosters greater openness to the outgroup’s perspective. Research suggests that this effect owes its influence to a serial process in which participants’ perception of the risk involved in voicing internal criticism leads to an increase in the perceived credibility of the speaker. The credibility makes it possible for the speaker to be viewed as open-minded, which subsequently inspires greater hope. This process culminates in an increased openness to the outgroup. These findings have been restricted to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but here we examine their generalizability to racial conflict in the United States. Results reveal that White Americans exposed to internal criticism expressed by a Black authority figure express greater openness to African-American perspectives on race relations and are more willing to support policies of racial equality. Replicating past research, this effect is serially mediated by risk, credibility, and hope.

KEYWORDS:

• Credibility
• criticism
• culture
• hope
• intergroup relations
• intervention
• openness
• prejudice
• risk

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Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/vk4hp/

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/vk4hp/

Notes

1. All analyses were also conducted excluding the high-risk criticism condition and comparing instead only the control and pure criticism condition. This produced a very similar pattern across the three sets of mediation models. Some of the models did drop to non-significance at the .05 alpha level, however, relaxing the confidence intervals to 90% (α = .10) produced significant effects in all but one of nine tests of mediation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Israeli Science Foundation [1772/14]