Living together: An integrated acculturation-contact strategy to promote ethnic harmony between young British Muslims and Anglo-Britons

Background: Cultural diversity is one of the most engrossing and perplexing intergroup phenomena in the contemporary Western world, with social cohesion and the mutual acceptance of different groups being promoted as major goals by social psychologists and policy-makers for culturally diverse societies, such as the UK. Worryingly, recent research reports a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment in the UK. Anti-Muslim sentiment and behaviours may ultimately lead to social segregation and undermine the social inclusion of Muslims in the UK, eventually destabilising social relations between British Muslims  and White British people. While there are no simplistic solutions to alleviating these societal problems, there is nevertheless a need to safeguard Britain’s multicultural values and provide applied cultural-social psychologists and educators with a way forward that fosters the required cultural skills in Muslims and Anglo-Britons to endorse Integrationist views and develop into multicultural citizens. Any potentially impactful intervention needs to be theory-driven. The theoretical work of this project integrates tenets of Acculturation Theory and Intergroup Contact Theory. 

This study: i) develops an indirect intercultural contact strategy intended to promote endorsement of an Integration orientation among British Muslim and White British youths through an intervention bringing about vicarious intercultural contact. This form of contact defines a situation whereby one observes, or is made aware of, a positive interaction between ingroup and outgroup members and can be achieved through different means – for instance, by story-reading or through audio-visual media, such as listening to, or observing, intergroup interactions via radio- and video- casts; ii) applies an experimental design that evaluates the effects of the intervention on respondents’ intergroup anxiety,  intergroup emotions, inclusion of the others in the self, perceived group norms, and intergroup attitudes; and iii) assesses whether the latter variables mediate the intervention’s effects on intergroup attitudes.

Methods: To address these objectives, the study develops and experimentally tests a vicarious intercultural contact strategy designed to promote Integration endorsement among a sample of 379 British youths (aged between 18 and 21 years), of whom 172 were British Muslims and 207 White British. The study was conducted online via the Qualtrics platform, and respondents were randomly allocated to conditions, resulting in half being in the experimental condition which involved an episode of vicarious intercultural contact designed to facilitate Integration endorsement. Specially developed short stories (about one page long) comprised the vicarious contact intervention. The stories were prepared and written by an expert story writer in coordination with the authors to align the stories’ contents with acculturation integration principles. Participants were required after reading each story to reflect on the interaction it narrated before they could move to the next stage in the study. Respondents in the Control condition read two short stories (one page each), made up of neutral content not connected to Muslim or White British cultures, and they were then required to answer reflection questions.

Results: All data analyses were conducted using IBM SPSS 25 and SAS 9.4 statistical software packages. A series of Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA), 2 Way ANOVAs, and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was carried out. Study results showed that the vicarious contact intervention promoting integration significantly reduced respondents’ intergroup anxiety, and negative emotions, compared to the Control condition, and increased their scores on positive emotions, IOS, on the outgroup feeling thermometer, in their behavioural intentions toward the outgroup, and in the importance they placed on future contact with the outgroup. No intervention effects were observed on perceived ingroup norms, and outgroup norms. All of these intervention effects were only significant in the Muslim group and were moderate in size. The intervention did not have any impact on White British youths’ intergroup attitude scores.

In line with theoretical expectations, results showed that the intervention improved Muslim respondents’ outgroup thermometer scores, their behavioural intentions towards the outgroup, and the importance they place on future contact with the outgroup by reducing their negative emotions (and anxiety) and increasing their positive emotions towards the outgroup. The increase in respondents’ IOS attributed to the intervention also mediated the intervention effects on outgroup outcome measures (See Table 2).

Keywords: Acculturation, integration, vicarious contact, intergroup relations

Funding: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no: 785931.