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Experiment 1

Participants and design One hundred twenty-one undergraduates at a British university (97 women, 24 men, mean age=18.26) were randomly assigned to the four cells of a 2 (Font: Easy vs. Difficult)×2 (Condition: Imagined Contact vs. Control) factorial design. [...]

Materials and procedure [...] Participants in both the imagined contact and control conditions received the following information before their respective tasks: [Text Stimulus A]. Participants in the imagined contact condition were then given the following instructions: [Text Stimulus B]. Participants in the control condition were given identical instructions, except that they were told to imagine interacting with Arturo Sandoval instead of Tom Harrell. Participants in both conditions [...] were also given the following instructions: [Text Stimulus C]. [...] We modified the difficulty of the task by changing the font in which the instructions were printed. In the easy font condition, instructions were printed in Arial, font size 11 pt, in the difficult font condition, instructions were printed in Mistral, font size 11 pt. After completing the imagined tasks, participants then completed measures of prejudice against people with schizophrenia. All dependent measures were printed in Times New Roman, an easy to read font. [...] To assess the participants' meta-cognitive experience of doing the task, we asked another independent rater (also unaware of hypotheses and blind to condition) to indicate their impression of how “difficult” and “unpleasant” each participant found the task to be, based on what the participant wrote. [...] Thus the rater also indicated how “detailed” (reversed) the participants' descriptions were. All three items were on 7-point scales (1=Not at all, 7=Very). [...] We measured prejudice against people with schizophrenia using nine items that included measures of dangerousness, fear and avoidance. [...]

Experiment 2

In Experiment 2 we made the same predictions as in Experiment 1 — that, compared to control conditions, an easy (i.e., perceptually fluent) imagined contact task would decrease prejudice, while a difficult imagined contact task would increase prejudice. [...]

Participants and design Eighty-one female and twenty male German first year psychology students (mean age=20.02) who had indicated their religious affiliation as Christian [...]. Participants were randomly assigned to either the imagined contact or the control condition. For four different seminar sessions, font style (Easy vs. Difficult) varied randomly between sessions such that participants in one session all received materials printed in the same font. In a fifth session, materials printed in the two different font styles were distributed from two different sides of the classroom so that participants always sat next to somebody with materials printed in the same font.

Materials and procedure [...] We asked participants in the imagined contact condition to take 3 min to imagine meeting a Muslim stranger for the first time. [...] Participants in the control conditions were given the same instructions, except that they were simply told to imagine meeting a stranger (no intergroup context) instead of a Muslim stranger. [...] As in Experiment 1, in the easy font condition, instructions were printed in Arial, font size 11 pt, and in the difficult font condition, instructions were printed in Mistral, font size 11 pt. In addition, in the easy font condition the empty lines for notes were spaced wide enough for participants to comfortably write on, while we used a more narrow spacing in the difficult font condition. Also as in Experiment 1, an independent rater unaware of the hypotheses indicated whether the participants imagined an interaction (yes/no) and the number of words the participants wrote. [...] To measure participants' attitudes towards Muslims, we asked them to indicate on 7-point semantic differential scales how they felt about Muslims in general. [...] Participants indicated on 7-point Likert scales how much they wanted to react in each of the following ways to Muslims: “talk to them” (reversed), “avoid them”, “confront them”, “learn more about them” (reversed), “keep them at a distance”, “spend time with them” (reversed), “have nothing to do with them”, and “oppose them” [...]. [...]