Impacts of Racial and Gender Identities on Individuals' Intentions to Seek a Counselor.

To understand the theoretical impact of racial and gender identities on counselor selection, an online experiment was conducted with 527 participants in which both the race and gender of a perspective counselor's online profile were manipulated. Results showed that participants had a higher intention to seek counseling when the counselor was from the same racial and/or gender group. These preferences existed above and beyond other identity-based evaluative metrics, such as those tied to group stereotypes (e.

Secondary transfer effects from imagined contact: group similarity affects the generalization gradient.

An experiment examined the effects of imagining contact with an illegal immigrant on attitudes towards illegal immigrants and subsequent effects of that attitude change on feelings about other groups (secondary transfer). Compared to a condition in which participants imagined negative contact with an illegal immigrant, participants who imagined positive contact reported more positive attitudes concerning illegal immigrants. Using bootstrapped mediation models, effects of positive imagined contact on attitudes towards illegal immigrants were shown to generalize to other groups that were independently ranked as similar to illegal immigrants, but not to dissimilar groups.