The following is an excerpt of the intervention methodology. For more information, please see the full text of the article on the publisher's website or through your institution's library.

The primary purpose of the study is to examine the impact of perspective-taking on participants’ LIB toward a stereotyped outgroup member. [...] Thus, in the experimental design, conditions where the manipulation of perspective-taking is expected to produce differences in the level of abstraction of the terms used are compared with conditions in which this variable are not expected to produce any effect.

After giving their consensus to take part in the experiment, participants were presented with a series of vignettes. In all the vignettes there were two people talking: one in front of the other. The topic of the dialogue was migration from Maghreb [...] The conversation was incomplete, and we asked participants to fill in the empty dialogue in response to the sentence of the other characters. Playing the role of one of the conversation partners, participants described migrants’ behavior either from the point of view of his/her outgroup (the Maghrebian character) or ingroup (the Italian character). We asked half of the participants to assume the perspective of the character whose dialogue they were going to complete and the other half to fill in the dialogue box in a logical way. [...]

Participants and Design. The sample consisted of 80 students and workers, 36 men and 44 women, (mean age = 28.04; SD = 4.5), who were randomly assigned to the conditions of a 2 (perspective-taking: presence vs. absence) × 2 (group: ingroup vs. outgroup) between-participants design.

Procedure and Measures. We contacted the participants individually and invited them to take part in the experiment without knowing the study’s real aim. [...] We printed three vignettes on different sheets of paper and gave them to the participants. [...] We constructed the vignettes so that the dialogue of one of the characters was already written inside the balloon, the dialogue of the other was missing, and in its place were some dots. Which of the dialogues was missing and which was already present (that of the Italian or that of the Maghrebian) depended on the experimental condition. The participants’ task was to fill in the missing dialogue. [...] We considered the terms used to compose the missing parts of the conversation, coded the level of abstraction of the positive and negative terms about outgroup characteristics and behavior according to the LCM and submitted them to subsequent analysis. There was no limit on either time or the number of sentences to insert.