Basic and applied research in social psychology is one of the scientific areas that provide sound foundations for understanding how the social environment of the classroom –or any other educational setting– works, and, therefore, these studies should be incorporated into the professional knowledge of educators. In particular, research on stereotyping and prejudice is pervasive in social psychology, and has important applications in the explanation of interpersonal and intergroup behaviour in the classroom context, and thus in the design of educator training programmes in multicultural societies. Some of the intercultural education training goals are related to educators’ perceptions and evaluative reactions toward minority group children (Álvarez & González, 2007). One of these goals would be to develop the ability to gain some control over the use of stereotypes and prejudice. Much research concerning automaticity and control has been conducted from a social cognition approach –a perspective that has come to dominate the study of stereotypes (Bargh, 2007). For example, it has been shown that, by default, stereotypes and prejudices are activated in automatic ways, but, at the same time –and because stereotyped beliefs and evaluations are generally perceived as pernicious-, there is a trend aimed towards discovering the conditions under which automatic influences can be controlled or even changed. Several strategies have been evaluated, and some of them have proved their potential to control automatic beliefs and evaluations. Perspective taking is one of the most researched interventions aimed at reducing stereotyping and prejudice through making narrower the distance between the ingroup and the outgroup, and between the self and the other (Galinsky, Ku, & Wang, 2005). As a matter of fact, there is a neurological basis which supports the ideas that understanding of oneself is closely linked to understanding of others (Cacioppo, Visser, & Pickett, 2006). Perhaps discovering similarities between one’s own group and the outgroup can foster the idea of the basic equality between human communities.

Our experimental study evaluated the effects that perspective taking exerted on implicit stereotyping and prejudice, and on explicit prejudice (modern racism) in a Spanish educator students sample. At the same time, conditions in which the effectiveness could be reached were also revealed – with this aim, fourteen different constructs were measured. The intervention consisted of asking experimental participants to imagine, from the target person’s perspective, a day in the life of a male Moroccan immigrant depicted on an image shown on a computer’s screen. A posttest-only control group design was used.

Results obtained from data collected with the Implicit Association Test and fourteen other instruments showed that stereotyped associations and prejudiced evaluations were reduced through the use of such a strategy, but only in some conditions linked to personal attributes. Some conclusions may be drawn from the evidence. First, there is a need, in the field of educator training, to design goals that include competences related to cognitive and emotional self-regulation when perceiving and interacting with people from cultural minorities –implicit prejudice was very high in our sample. Second, perspective taking should be incorporated into the methodology, but preferably used with some of the participants (e.g., younger educator students, and those who scored low on agreeableness and some conservation values –tradition, security). Third, it would also be effective to include specific activities to help students perceive their selves closer to the outgroup members, and their ingroup close to the outgroups. In sum, the present study contributed to rendering visible the urgency for training educator student in the perception and attitudes they hold towards people from different cultures, and to show that perspective taking is a useful strategy in doing so under some conditions.