(Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis)
Media Matters: Exploring the Benefits of Video over Written Narrative Interventions
Despite efforts to recruit and retain more women and ethnic minorities, stark gender and racial disparities remains within science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. This persistent underrepresentation speaks to the importance of developing innovative interventions to reduce harmful biases and to inspire interest in STEM. Previous research suggests that video narrative interventions are effective at reducing sexism in STEM. However, creating videos can be costly, and hence, an important question is whether videos function as better interventions than written stories. During this talk, I will explore the possibility that videos are unique from written stories because they provide important cues about a character’s disposition (e.g., voice, facial expressions, body gestures). This information may easily get lost in a written narrative, which may result in readers relying on stereotypes while imagining a character in the story. I specifically will present a series of experiments demonstrating that relative to the identical written narratives, videos are more effective at reducing racial bias, increasing recognition of gender bias, and inspiring women’s interest in STEM. Across all experiments, participants were better able to recognize characters’ positive (or negative) disposition in the videos than in the written narratives, which helped explain the advantage of the videos interventions.
The colloquium will be held in Psychology Building 035 at 4:00pm.