Canterbury researchers looking at impacts of prejudiced comments on line

April 13, 2014

University of Canterbury psychology and management researchers have been looking at the impact of online and social media prejudice toward ethnic groups.

The increased use of online communication and social media in peoples’ daily lives presents a growing need to understand how people are affected by it, Canterbury researchers psychology postgraduate student Mark Hsueh, Dr Kumar Yogeeswaran and Dr Sanna Malinen say.

They have been investigating the impact of reading prejudiced and anti-prejudiced online comments for the last year in a lab experiment.

Dr Yogeeswaran says they found that simply scrolling through prejudiced online comments placed by other users increased the extent to which participants’ own comments became prejudiced.

The comments used in their research were taken directly from online news articles on stuff.co.nz last year.

``More importantly, we found that exposure to such prejudiced online comments made users personally more prejudiced toward an ethnic group later on. These prejudiced sentiments reveal themselves in both self-report measures and reaction time measures, even after a user was offline suggesting that reading bigoted comments placed by users can directly impact feelings toward a group at both a conscious and unconscious level.

``By contrast, exposure to anti-prejudiced online comments made by others could reduce prejudice toward an ethnic group at both a conscious and unconscious level. Our experiment selected real comments to online news articles that were prejudiced or anti-prejudiced for participants to scroll past before placing their own comments.

``The findings of the current research suggest that the comments people place in a given online setting can breed negative outcomes. By continually maintaining an environment where prejudice and stereotypes about others are expressed in such an online forum, people are more likely to display such sentiments and, even worse, carry over these negative sentiments themselves in their everyday lives.

``On the flip side, anti-prejudiced social norms established in such online settings can actually reduce people’s prejudice toward others.

``The responsibility falls to each internet user to promote and maintain a positive and constructive environment, free from negative and uncivil remarks.

``An optimistic outlook can be derived from the current study in terms of how malleable people’s attitudes are, and how relatively simple it could be to promote anti-prejudiced feelings. However, a more pessimistic message is that online users can be negatively impacted by the anti-social and harmful messages left by other users,’’ Dr Yogeeswaran says.

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