A social perspective on the outgroup attitude formation of youth

Abstrakti

This article is based on my doctoral dissertation (Mähönen 2011) on the role of personal contact experiences and perceived social norms in the outgroup attitude formation of youth. As research on qualitatively different forms of outgroup attitudes improves our opportunities to predict intergroup behaviour and improve intergroup relations, the predictors of both explicit (i.e. deliberate, consciously controlled) and implicit (i.e. spontaneous, automatically activated) outgroup attitudes of youth were addressed. In the study, the outgroup attitudes and their predictors of 14-17 year old Finnish majority youth and Russian-speaking minority youth living in Finland were examined. In the article, I discuss the Finnish attitude climate, present the main fi ndings and contributions of the study, and offer some research ethical considerations related to the studying of ethnic intergroup relations among youth.