Effect of valenced vicarious online contact on out‐group prejudice and perceived out‐group variability: A study of online poker

Abstract

Online poker has become a multibillion dollar industry, with millions of people from around the world both playing and watching online poker each year. Unlike live poker, players and watchers, typically cannot rely on physical cues of other players; in fact, the only information often available to poker players is others’ nationality. Because these poker games often involve members of different national groups, it constitutes a context of indirect contact that has considerable potential to examine how attitudes and beliefs about people from other nationalities can be influenced by interactions in online poker. In the current research, we examined how observing an in‐group player have positive or negative contact with a player of another nationality impacted one’s own attitudes and beliefs about the out‐group nation. Participants (N = 157) watched an online poker video recording of a fellow in‐group member have negative, positive, or no intergroup contact with an out‐group member at an online poker table. Subsequent affective (out‐group attitudes) and cognitive (perceived out‐group variability) measures of intergroup bias were taken. Data revealed that while observing negative contact increased out‐group prejudice, observing positive contact reduced prejudice (all relative to no intergroup contact). However, no differences were found in perceived out‐group variability. Implications for online poker and future research intergroup contact are discussed.

Reducing prejudice in the society at large: A review of the secondary transfer effect and directions for future research

“…With respect to vicarious contact, Joyce and Harwood (2014) showed that observing a positive (vs. negative or neutral) intergroup interaction generalized to more positive attitudes toward secondary outgroups by means of attitude generalization. Andrews (2018) tested the effects of observing a positive, a negative, or a neutral interaction between an ingroup poker player and a Russian (outgroup) player among New Zealand participants. Attitudes toward Chinese people—the secondary outgroup—were more positive in the positive versus the negative and neutral conditions (but no STE emerged for the secondary outgroups of Arabs or Americans).…”

May the odds be ever in your favor: The Hunger Games and the fight for a more equal society. (Negative) Media vicarious contact and collective action

“…Findings from these studies parallel those of direct contact, showing that negative contact has detrimental effects on intergroup relations that are opposite to the effects of positive contact (Graf & Paolini, 2017). Specifically, negative, in contrast to positive, vicarious contact has been found to negatively impact on outgroup attitudes (Andrews et al., 2018; Castelli et al., 2012; Joyce & Harwood, 2014).…”

The Effect of Intergroup Contact in Gaming on Improving Empathetic Feelings and Reducing Stereotypes Toward Immigrants

“…Even the vicarious observation of a positive interaction between online poker players from different national groups online increases positive attitudes towards the outgroup. In this study, the reverse was also true, where witnessing negative interactions led to more negative attitudes towards the outgroup [30].…”

“…Many studies, however, examined the effect of positive contact versus the absence of contact [10,[27][28][29]. A few studies have found that when compared, negative contact increases prejudice, while positive contact plays a restorative role and decreases prejudice [6,30].…”