Alysse C. Baker, Elizabeth L. Cohen, Christine Kunkle
No scholarly consensus exists on the amount of media exposure necessary to encourage social prejudice reduction; however, drawing on work on cross-group friendships, this study provides evidence that contact quality is instrumental for facilitating parasocial intergroup contact when the length of character exposure is held constant. In an experiment on intergenerational parasocial contact, young adult viewers were assigned to watch either a high or low contact quality version of Grace and Frankie, a sitcom about older adults. The episodes were identical in length. A serial mediation model shows that participants in the high contact quality condition developed a stronger parasocial relationship with one of the characters, Grace, experienced heightened intergroup dissonance, and expressed greater willingness to engage with older adults. However, this parasocial contact process did not occur for the other character, Frankie. These findings contribute to research and theorizing about mediated intergroup contact and the role of media exemplar typicality in the contact process.