ICAPEH · LIVING TOGETHER: AN INTEGRATED ACCULTURATION-CONTACT STRATEGY TO PROMOTE ETHNIC HARMONY BETWEEN BRITISH MUSLIMS AND ANGLO-BRITONS

LIVING TOGETHER: AN INTEGRATED ACCULTURATION-CONTACT STRATEGY TO PROMOTE ETHNIC HARMONY BETWEEN BRITISH MUSLIMS AND ANGLO-BRITONS

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. The 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. Refer to Figure 1 for the conceptual model guiding the study.

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