The present study aims to examine whether by promoting the socio-analytic thinking it is possible to intervene in the reliance on ethnic moral disengagement as a negative consequence of racial misleading news, that can seriously contribute to the diffusion of ethnic prejudice. We focus on the neglected phenomenon of racial hoaxes, which can be defined as misleading news stories dealing with health or safety threats, in which the protagonist is described in terms of ethnicity or nationality. The intervention procedure has been created starting from the well-established literature focused on media biases’ reflection, integrated with the recent studies on ‘mediated intergroup contact’ where the observation of the person belonging to the outgroup is crucial for prejudice reduction. The intervention involved 83 adolescents (M_age = 13.9; SD_age = 0.9) and it was composed of two different parts, one focused on the analytical racial hoax reading, and the other focused on racial hoax rewriting after the ‘mediated contact’, represented by an alternative story given by the African protagonist. The results show that in dealing with misleading news, the promotion of this social-analytic processing reduces ethnic biases of moral disengagement. In particular, it was found that analytical processes are supported by the participants’ level of propensity for analytical reasoning and that these processes directly hinder distorted ethnic beliefs. Overall, these results suggest that improving social-analytic processes related to reflexivity could be an effective intervention to counter those distorted beliefs, such as ethnic disengagement beliefs, associated with discrimination and racial prejudice.

Intergroup contact interventions have been mostly used to foster empathy, promote positive relations, and reduce prejudice and discrimination. However, less is known about the potential of intergroup contact, especially digital, in interventions designed to hinder hate speech and promote counter‐speech. Counter‐speech can be defined as a direct response to hate speech, aimed at refuting or undermining it. This study argues that the quality of intergroup contact may foster counter‐speech responses through empathy for hate speech victims. For this purpose, an ad hoc conversational storytelling web‐app module, named “Let's Make the Difference!”, was developed and administered to a sample of 433 Italian adolescents (278 in the experimental group and 155 in the control group, M_age = 14.33). Through the web‐app, adolescents engaged in a chat with an outgroup avatar, inducing digital intergroup contact. Results show a significant increase in counter‐speech intentions between the pre‐test and post‐test in the experimental condition, unlike in the control group. Moreover, in line with our hypotheses, the quality of contact induced with the conversational agent increased empathy toward the victim, which in turn increased the intention to counter hate speech in the intervention group. In light of these results on digital contact, both theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This paper explores the possibility of preventing prejudice among adolescents by promoting the analytical processing of social media content emerging from racial misinformation. Specifically, we propose, at this aim, an intervention that centers on recognizing stereotypical beliefs and other media biases about a group of people in misleading news. To better understand the variables that contribute to improving socio-analytical performance in the face of such misinformation, we investigated the influence of implicit associations as a tendency toward the automatic labeling of groups, as well as two dimensions of perceived self-efficacy in the face of misinformation, one active and one inhibitory. Our results demonstrate the presence of a negative link between affective prejudice and socio-analytical processing, and that this analytical performance toward misleading news is negatively related to the individual tendency toward implicit activation, and is also explained by the inhibitory factor of the perceived efficacy toward misinformation. The role of the active factor related to the perceived ability of fact-checking is not significant. This research suggests that education focused on the socio-analytical processing of misleading news in social media feeds can be an effective means of intervening in online affective prejudice among adolescents; the implications and limitations of our findings for future research in this area are discussed.

Digital games can be defined as games supported by audiovisual apparatus and based on storytelling. This work aims to frame video games in the recent perspective offered by positive psychology and focuses on risk perception and on the promotion of protective behaviors in adolescent students, by means of a new Italian ad hoc created digital game named ‘Scare-away risks’ (Scacciarischi). In its storytelling, the different characters must defeat monsters that symbolically represent potential risks in home, school and work contexts. On this basis, the present study assumes that playing video games, as an engaging and motivating activity, can improve the adolescents’ psychological perception of home, school and work risks. To verify these hypotheses, a quasi-experiment comparing students who played Scacciarischi (experimental group) with a control group was conducted. At the end of the game, a questionnaire was administered to 149 participants, balanced for gender, investigating (a) the level of engagement during the game, (b) the perceived risks, (c) the locus of control, (d) the protective behavior intentions. The results showed that playing Scacciarischi is related to higher levels of engagement, internal locus of control, risk perception and protective behavioral intentions. In addition, both engagement and internal locus of control act as precursors of the other two variables. Finally, reflections about the importance of the engaging experience of Scacciarischi in the domain of safety, prevention and health issues are proposed.

In the climate of great uncertainty characterizing the COVID-19 pandemic, health communication played a significant role: several communicative strategies and channels were used to inform, educate and alert. Entropy-related risks were soon translated into the “infodemic”, a wide-spread phenomenon with psychosocial and cultural roots. Therefore, new challenges for public institutions occurred: public health communication, especially expressed through advertising and audiovisual spots, was engaged to offer key support in combatting the disease, mitigating its effects and supporting health and psychological wellbeing. This work aims to investigate how the Italian public institutions addressed those challenges by employing institutional spots. We tried to answer two main research questions: (a) in line with the literature concerning persuasive communication, what were the main variables that social advertising concerning health attitudes and behaviors relied on; and (b) how the different variables were combined to propose specific communicative pathways following both the different waves/phases of the COVID-19 pandemic and the elaboration likelihood model. To answer these questions, 34 Italian spots were analyzed by means of qualitative multimodal analysis (including scopes, major narratives themes, central and peripheral cues). The results enabled us to individuate different communicative pathways, oriented by inclusivity, functionality and contamination, in line with different rounds as well as with the holistic configurations of cultural narratives, central and peripheral cues.