Vicarious contact has often been used for studying prejudice-reduction in school contexts due to its relatively accessible application through written or audiovisual portrayals of positive intergroup contact. However, these interventions may sometimes prove ineffective, thus restricting their ecological validity and independent use in education. To contribute to the understanding of factors that might facilitate or mitigate the efficacy of vicarious contact in reducing ethnic prejudice among adolescents, the present study tested for the moderating effect of anti-prejudice motivation and friends’ outgroup attitudes. Participants were Finnish secondary school students (N = 334; M = 13.38 years, SD = 0.53; 48% female; 19% ethnic minority) allocated into cluster-randomized intervention (N = 149) and control (N = 185) groups. Participants in the intervention group took part in 4 × 45-min teacher-led intervention sessions. A pretest-posttest design was employed to assess the outgroup attitudes three weeks before the intervention and the follow-up two weeks after. The results showed that adolescents’ intrinsic, but not extrinsic, anti-prejudice motivation and the pre-intervention attitudes of their reciprocal classroom friends positively predicted post-intervention attitudes towards people from different ethnic and cultural groups. However, only extrinsic motivation moderated the intervention effect as the results indicated the intervention to have a detrimental effect on outgroup attitudes among adolescents with less motivation to be non-prejudiced in order to gain social acceptance. This attitudinal backlash among adolescents less susceptible to the social influence of others implies that motivational aspects should not be overlooked when developing school-based intervention programs, especially when social norms are used as a mechanism of attitude change.

替代接触经常被用来研究学校环境中减少偏见的情况，因为它可以通过积极的群体间接触的书面或视听描述来相对容易地应用。然而，这些干预措施有时可能无效，从而限制了它们的生态有效性和在教育中的独立使用。为了有助于理解可能促进或减轻替代接触在减少青少年种族偏见方面的功效的因素，本研究测试了反偏见动机和朋友的外群体态度的调节作用。参与者是芬兰中学生（N  = 334；M  = 13.38 岁，SD = 0.53；48% 为女性；19% 为少数族裔），分为整群随机干预组（N  = 149）和对照组（N  = 185）。干预组的参与者参加了 4 × 45 分钟的教师主导的干预课程。采用前测后测设计来评估干预前三周和干预后两周的随访外群体的态度。结果表明，青少年内在而非外在的反偏见动机以及干预前课堂上互惠互利的朋友的态度可以积极预测干预后对不同种族和文化群体的态度。然而，只有外在动机会调节干预效果，因为结果表明，干预会对青少年的外群体态度产生不利影响，而青少年为了获得社会认可而不带偏见的动机较少。青少年不易受到他人社会影响的这种态度反弹意味着，在制定基于学校的干预计划时，不应忽视动机方面，特别是当社会规范被用作态度改变的机制时。