How does contact valence and group salience affect outgroup attitudes in asynchronous computer mediated contact? Experiments on intergroup contact via social media posts.

The prejudice reduction potential of face-to-face intergroup contact is widely established, but we know much less about computer-mediated intergroup contact (online contact) specifically via social media where interactions are less controlled and mostly asynchronous. Additionally, much of the work on online contact has focused on positive, controlled contact, neglecting the effect of negative contact. We examined the effects of mediated contact via online posts with differing valence (positive, negative, and neutral) in three experimental studies, in an imaginary scenario (Study 1:  = 120) and a real intergroup scenario with South and North Indians (Study 2:  = 296, Study 3:  = 336).