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.

METHOD

Selection of subjects [...] Subjects were chosen from one controlled (Protestant) and one maintained (Catholic) school in an area to the north of the city of Belfast. [...] Twenty-four pupils (average age: 15 years) were invited from a Protestant secondary school: fourteen for the Protestant condition and ten for the Mixed condition. Twenty-four pupils (average age: 15 years) were invited from a Catholic secondary school: fourteen for the Catholic condition and ten for the mixed condition.

Procedure [...] Subjects were made to believe that according to their performance on a dot-estimating task they belonged to either a high-group (over-estimators) or a low-group (underestimators). They were told that the two groups were not different in terms of their degree of accuracy. In fact unknown to the subjects assignation to the groups was done randomly. Subjects were then told that the experimenters wanted them to allocate money to members of their own group (in-group) and the other group (out-group) using a booklet containing a number of matrices for recording their decisions. [...] In the mixed condition the Catholic and Protestant children met for the first time in the laboratory, but they were afforded an opportunity to mix and talk in a waiting room between the dot-estimating task and the rewards allocation experiment. [...]