Contact-Emotion-Prejudice Model: The Role of Colorblindness and Perceived Ethnic Density

Abstract

Objectives. In this study examined the moderation effect of colorblindness and perceived ethnic density (PED) on the relationship between negative intergroup contact between Russians and four ethnic outgroups (Belarusians, Uzbeks, Chechens, Chinese) and negative intergroup emotions towards them and generalized prejudice. Background. One of the central issues on the current agenda for plural societies is how we shall live together. The ethnic majority usually has a culturally dominant group status and sets the character of intercultural relations in countries. Study design. Cross-sectional one-sample correlation design using data from socio-psychological survey. Participants. 360 ethnic Russians from the Central Federal District of Russia. Measurements. Colorblindness (Rosenthal & Levy, 2012), PED (Jurcik et al., 2015), negative intergroup contact (Reimer et al., 2017) and emotions (Seger et al., 2017), frequency of intergroup contact (Visintin et al., 2017), prejudice (Grigoryev et al., 2018). Results. (1) the negative emotions fully mediated the relationship between the negative contact and generalized prejudice; (2) the negative contact was positively associated with the negative emotions; (3) the negative emotions were positively associated with generalized prejudice; (4) colorblindness moderated the relationship between the negative emotions and generalized prejudice by weakening this relationship excluding PED and including PED but only in the context of high PED, as well as colorblindness was a negative predictor of generalized prejudice directly. Conclusions. These findings are consistent with those obtained previously that colorblindness in the Russian context has particular benefits for harmonizing intergroup relations with culturally distant outgroups.