Rolling minds: A conversational media to promote intergroup contact by countering racial misinformation through socioanalytic processing in adolescence

Within the field of misinformation, the study focuses on the overlooked phenomenon of racial hoaxes (RHs), defined as misleading news in which the protagonist is negatively described in relation to his/her ethnicity. This work aims to investigate the role of socioanalytic processing through the use of a conversational web app (Rolling Minds) designed to promote awareness among adolescents about the risk associated with anti-immigrant RHs. The sociocognitive intervention procedure has been designed from the literature on media biases' reflection, integrating it with studies on mediated intergroup contact which show that reading the narrative from the perspective of the outgroup member can be crucial in reducing prejudice. The study involved 239 adolescents, 144 experimental group and 95 control group (M-age = 14.6), and it demonstrates a significant increase in contact intentions. In particular, a path analysis model-controlled for age and gender-shows that a higher level of analytical reading and rewriting performance increases adolescents' contact intentions toward immigrants, also controlling for individual propensity to engage in analytical reasoning. Overall, these results attest that promoting specific social cognitive processes with the conversational approach of the Rolling Minds web app enables imagining a civic use of media that counteracts discriminatory behaviors potentially emerging from racial misinformation. Public Policy Relevance Statement This study explores the impact of a conversational web app (Rolling Minds) based on the promotion of socioanalytic processing when reading RHs. The intervention procedure is built on insights from the literature on media bias reflection while also incorporating the findings from studies on intergroup-mediated contact. The results show that through the interactive learning experience with conversational agents, a significant increase in contact intentions was found among the participating adolescents.