contact hypothesis is based on the idea that

Allport’s Intergroup Contact Hypothesis: Its History and Influence

Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Contact hypothesis was proposed by Gordon Allport (1897-1967) and states that social contact between social groups is sufficient to reduce intergroup prejudice.

However, empirical evidence suggests that this is only in certain circumstances.

Key Takeaways:

• The contact hypothesis fundamentally rests on the idea that ingroups who have more interactions with a certain outgroup tend to develop more positive perceptions and fewer negative perceptions of that outgroup.
• Theorists have long been interested in intergroup conflict . However, Robin Williams and Gordon Allport proposed a number of conditions for ameliorating intergroup conflict that has formed the basis of empirical research for several decades.
• Allport suggests four “positive factors” leading to better intergroup relations; however, recent research suggests that these factors can facilitate but are not necessary for reducing intergroup prejudice.
• Although originally studied in the context of race and ethnic relations, the contact hypothesis has applicability between ingroup-outgroup relations across religion, age, sexuality, disease status, economic circumstances, and so on.

Contact Hypothesis

The Contact Hypothesis is a psychological theory that suggests that direct contact between members of different social or cultural groups can reduce prejudice, improve intergroup relations, and promote mutual understanding.

According to this hypothesis, interpersonal contact can lead to positive attitudes, decreased stereotypes, and increased acceptance between individuals from different groups under certain conditions.

The Contact Hypothesis was first proposed by Gordon W. Allport in 1954 and has since been supported by numerous studies in the field of social psychology. T

The contact theory suggests that contact between groups is more likely to be effective in reducing prejudice and improving relations if it meets specific criteria:

1. Equal Status Between Groups

Members of the contact situation should not have an unequal, hierarchical relationship (e.g., teacher/student, employer/employee).

Both groups perceive the other to be of equal status in the situation (Cohen, 1982; Riordan and Ruggiero, 1980; Pettigrew and Tropp, 2005).

Although some scholars emphasize that groups should be of equal status both prior to (Brewer and Kramer, 1985) and during (Foster and Finchilescu, 1986) a contact situation, research demonstrated that equal status could promote positive intergroup attitudes even when the groups initially differ in status (Patchen, 1982; Schofield and Rich-Fulcher, 2001).

2. Common Goals

Members must rely on each other to achieve their shared desired goal. To have effective contact, typically, groups need to be making an active effort toward a goal that the groups share.

For example, a national football team (Chu and Griffey, 1985; Patchen, 1982) could draw from many people of different races and ethnic origins — people from different groups — in working together and replying to each other to achieve their shared goals of winning. This tends to lead to Allport’s third characteristic of intergroup contact; intergroup cooperation (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2005).

3. Intergroup Cooperation

Members should work together in a non-competitive environment.

According to Allport (1954), the attainment of these common goals must be based on cooperation over competition. For example, in Sheriff et al. ‘s (1961) Robbers’ Cave field study , researchers devised barriers to common goals, such as a planned picnic that could only be resolved with cooperation between both groups.

This intergroup cooperation encourages positive relations between the groups. Another instance of intergroup cooperation has been studied in schools (e.g., Brewer and Miller, 1984; Johnson, Johnson, and Maruyama, 1984; Schofield, 1986).

For example, Elliot Aronson developed a “jigsaw” approach such that students from diverse backgrounds work toward common goals, fostering positive relationships among children worldwide (Aronson, 2002).

4. The Support of Authorities, Law, or Custom

The support of authorities, law, and customs also tend to lead to more positive intergroup contact effects because authorities can establish norms of acceptance and guidelines for how group members should interact with each other.

There should not be official laws enforcing segregation. This importance has been demonstrated in such wide-ranging circumstances as the military (Landis, Hope, and Day, 1983), business (Morrison and Herlihy, 1992), and religion (Parker, 1968).

Legislation, such as the civil-rights acts in American society, can also be instrumental in establishing anti-prejudicial norms (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2005).

5. Positive Contact Norms

The belief in positive contact norms refers to the understanding that positive interactions between individuals from different groups are the norm and valued by society.

When individuals perceive that positive contact is socially accepted and encouraged, it can increase the effectiveness of intergroup contact.

6. Personal Accountability

A belief in personal accountability for one’s actions and attitudes is important for effective intergroup contact.

Taking responsibility for one’s biases, stereotypes, and prejudices and actively working towards changing them, can contribute to positive intergroup relationships.

7. Empathy and Perspective-Taking

The belief in the importance of empathy and perspective-taking can enhance intergroup contact.

When individuals try to understand and empathize with the experiences and perspectives of members from other groups, it can lead to greater mutual understanding and positive relationships.

Why Does Contact Reduce Prejudice?

Brewer and Miller (1996) and Brewer and Brown (1998) suggest that these conditions can be viewed as an application of dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957).

Specifically, when individuals with negative attitudes toward specific groups find themselves in situations in which they engage in positive social interactions with members of those groups, their behavior is inconsistent with their attitudes.

This dissonance, it is theorized, may result in a change of attitude to justify the new behavior if the situation is structured so as to satisfy the above four conditions.

In contrast, Forbes (1997) asserts that most social scientists implicitly assume that increased interracial/ethnic contact reduces tension between groups by giving each information about the other.

Those who write, adopt, participate in or evaluate prejudice reduction programs are likely to have explicit or implicit informal theories about how prejudice reduction programs work.

Examples of Contact Hypothesis

Homelessness.

Historically, in contact hypothesis research, racial and ethnic minorities have been the out-group of choice; however, the hypothesis can extend to out-groups created by a number of factors. One such alienating situation is homelessness.

Like many out-groups, homeless people are more visible than they once were because of their growth in number as well as extensive media and policy coverage.

This has elicited a large amount of stigmatization and associations between homelessness and poor physical and mental health, substance abuse, and criminality, and ethnographic studies have revealed that homeless people are regularly degraded, avoided, or treated as non-persons by passersby (Anderson, Snow, and Cress, 1994).

Lee, Farrell, and Link (2004) used data from a national survey of public attitudes toward homeless people to evaluate the applicability of the contact hypothesis to relationships between homeless and housed people, even in the absence of Allport’s four positive factors.

The researchers found that even taking selection and social desirability biases into account, general exposure to homeless people tended to affect public attitudes toward homeless people favorably (Lee, Farrell, and Link, 2004).

Contact Between Age Groups

In the 1980s, there was a trend of pervasive age segregation in American society, with children and adults tending to pursue their own separate and independent lives (Caspi, 1984).

This had consequences such as a lack of transmission of work skills and culture, poor preparation for parenthood, and generally inaccurate stereotypes and unfavorable attitudes toward other age groups.

Caspi (1984) assessed the effects of cross-age contact on the attitudes of children toward older adults by comparing children attending an age-integrated preschool to children attending a traditional preschool.

Those in the age-integrated preschool (having daily contact with older adults) tended to hold positive attitudes toward older adults, while those without such contact tended to hold vague or indifferent attitudes.

In addition, children placed in the age-integrated preschool show better differentiation between adult age groups than those not in that preschool.

These findings were among the first to suggest that Allport’s contact hypothesis held relevance in intergroup contact beyond race relations (Caspi, 1984).

Contact Between Religious Groups in Indonesia and the Philippines

Following a resurgence of religion-related conflict and religiously motivated intolerance and violence and the 1999-2002 outbreak of sectarian violence in Ambon, Indonesia, between Christians and Muslims, researchers have become motivated to find ways to reduce acts of religiously motivated intolerance.

Kanas, Scheepers, and Sterkens (2015) examined the relationship between interreligious contact and negative attitudes toward religious out-groups by conducting surveys of Christian and Muslim students in Indonesia and the Philippines.

They attempted to answer the following questions (Kanas, Sccheeepers, and Sterkens, 2015):

• Does positive interreligious contact reduce, while negative interreligious contact induces negative attitudes towards the religious out-group?
• Does the perception of group threat provide a valid mechanism for both the positive and negative effects of interreligious contact?
• Does positive interreligious contact reduce negative out-group attitudes when intergroup relations are tense and both groups experience extreme conflict and violence?

The researchers focused on four ethnically and religiously diverse regions of Indonesia and the Philippines: Maluku and Yogyakarta, the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, and Metro Manila, with Maluku and the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao having more substantial religious conflicts than the other two regions.

Kanas, Scheepers, and Sterkens found that even accounting for the effects of self-selection, interreligious friendships reduced negative attitudes toward the religious out-group, while casual interreligious contact tended to increase negative out-group attitudes.

In regions experiencing more interreligious violence, there was no effect on interreligious friendships but a further deterioration in effect between casual interreligious contact and negative out-group attitudes.

Kanas, Scheepers, and Sterrkens believed that this effect could be explained by perceived group threat.

Evaluating the Contact Hypothesis

Allport’s testable formulation of the Contact Hypothesis has spawned research using a wide range of approaches, such as field studies, laboratory experiments, surveys, and archival research.

Pettigrew and Tropp (2005) conducted a 5-year meta-analysis on 515 studies (a method where researchers gather data from every possible study and statistically pool results to examine overall patterns) to uncover the overall effects of intergroup contact on prejudice and assess the specific factors that Allport identified as important for successful intergroup contact.

These studies ranged from the 1940s to the year 2000 and represented responses from 250,493 individuals across 38 countries.

The researchers found that, in general, greater levels of intergroup contact were associated with lower levels of prejudice and that more rigorous research studies actually revealed stronger relationships between contact and lowered prejudice (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2005).

The meta-analysis showed that the positive effects of contact on group relations vary dramatically between the nature of the groups, such as age, sexual orientation, disability, and mental illness, with the largest contact effects emerging for contact between heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals.

The smallest contact effects happened between those with and without mental and physical disabilities (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2005).

Although meta-analyses, such as Pettigrew and Tropp’s (2005) show that there is a strong association between intergroup contact and decreased prejudice, whether or not Allport’s four conditions hold is more widely contested.

Some researchers have suggested that the inverse relationship between contact and prejudice still persists in situations that do not match Allport’s key conditions, albeit not as strong as when they are present (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2005).

Gordon Allport taught sociology as a young man in Turkey (Nicholson, 2003) but emphasized proximal and immediate causes and disregarded larger-level, societal causes of intergroup effects.

As a result, both Allport and Williams (1947) doubted whether contact in itself reduced intergroup prejudice and thus attempted to specify a set of “positive conditions” where intergroup contact did.

Researchers have criticized Allport’s “positive factors” approach because it invites the addition of different situational conditions thought to be crucial that actually are not.

As a result, a number of researchers have proposed a host of additional conditions needed to achieve positive contact outcomes (e.g., Foster and Finchilescu, 1986) to the extent that it is unlikely that any contact situation would actually meet all of the conditions specified by the body of contact hypothesis researchers (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2005).

Researchers have also criticized Allport for not specifying the processes involved in intergroup contact’s effects or how these apply to other situations, the entire outgroup, or outgroups not involved in the contact (Pettigrew, 1998).

For example, Allport’s contact conditions leave open the question of whether contact with one group could lead to less prejudicial opinions of other outgroups.

All in all, Allport’s hypothesis neither reveals the processes behind the factors leading to the intergroup contact effect nor its effects on outgroups not involved in contact (Pettigrew, 1998).

Theorists have since pivoted their stance on the intergroup contact hypothesis to believing that intergroup contact generally diminishes prejudice but that a large number of facilitating factors can increase or decrease the magnitude of the effect.

In fact, according to newer theoretical approaches, there are negative factors that can even subvert the way that contact normally reduces prejudice (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2005).

For example, groups that tend to feel anxiety and threat toward others tend to have less decreased prejudice when put in contact with other groups (Blair, Park, and Bachelor, 2003; Stephan et al., 2002).

Indeed, more recent research into the contact hypothesis has suggested that the underlying mechanism of the phenomenon is not increased knowledge about the out-group in itself but empathy with the out-group and a reduction in intergroup threat and anxiety (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2008; Kanas, Scheepers, and Sterkens, 2015).

Social Darwinists such as William Graham Sumner (1906) believed that intergroup contact almost inevitably leads to conflict. Sumner believed that because most groups believed themselves to be superior, intergroup hostility and conflict were natural and inevitable outcomes of contact.

Perspectives such as those in Jackson (1983) and Levine and Campbell (1972) make similar predictions. In the twentieth century, perspectives began to diversify.

While some theorists believed that contact between in groups, such as between races, bred “suspicion, fear, resentment, disturbance, and at times open conflict” (Baker, 1934), others, such as Lett (1945), believed that interracial contact led to “mutual understanding and regard.”

Nonetheless, these early investigations were speculative rather than empirical (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2005). The emerging field of social psychology emphasized theories of intergroup contact.

The University of Alabama researchers Sims and Patrick (1936) were among the first to conduct a study on intergroup contact but found, discouragingly, that the anti-black attitudes of northern white students increased when immersed in the then all-white University of Alabama.

Aligning more with the later work of Allport, Brophy (1946) studied race relations between blacks and whites in the nearly-desegregated Merchant Marine. The researchers found that the more voyages that white seamen took with black seamen, the more positive their racial attitudes became.

In a similar direction, white police in Philadelphia with black colleagues showed fewer objections to working with black partners, having black people join previously all-white police districts, and taking orders from qualified black police officers (Kephart, 1957; Pettigrew and Tropp, 2005).

Following these studies, Cornell University sociologist Robin Williams Jr. offered 102 propositions on intergroup relations that constituted an initial formulation of intergroup contact theory.

These propositions generally stressed that intergroup contact reduces prejudice when (Williams, 1947):

• The two groups share similar statuses, interests, and tasks;
• the situation fosters personal, intimate intergroup contact;
• participants do not fit stereotypical conceptions of their group members;
• the activities cut across group lines.

Stouffer et al. offered the first extensive field study of the effects of intergroup contact (1949).

Stouffer et al. demonstrated that white soldiers who fought alongside black soldiers in the 1944-1945 Battle of the Bulge tended to have far more positive attitudes toward their black colleagues (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2005), regardless of status or place of origin.

Researchers such as Deutsch and Collins (1951); Wilner, Walkley, and Cook (1955); and Works (1961) supported mounting evidence that contact diminished racial prejudice among both blacks and whites through their studies of racially desegregated housing projects.

Allport, G. W. (1955). The nature of prejudice. In: JSTOR.

Anderson, L., Snow, D. A., & Cress, D. (1994). Negotiating the public realm: Stigma management and collective action among the homeless. Research in Community Sociology, 1(1), 121-143.

Aronson, E. (2002). Building empathy, compassion, and achievement in the jigsaw classroom. In Improving academic achievement (pp. 209-225): Elsevier.

Baker, P. E. (1934). Negro-white adjustment in America. Journal of Negro Education, 194-204.

Blair, I. V., Park, B., & Bachelor, J. (2003). Understanding Intergroup Anxiety: Are Some People More Anxious than Others? Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 6(2), 151-169. doi:10.1177/1368430203006002002

Brewer, M. B., & Kramer, R. M. (1985). The psychology of intergroup attitudes and behavior. Annual review of psychology, 36(1), 219-243.

Brophy, I. N. (1945). The luxury of anti-Negro prejudice. Public opinion quarterly, 9(4), 456-466.

Caspi, A. (1984). Contact Hypothesis and Inter-Age Attitudes: A Field Study of Cross-Age Contact. Social Psychology Quarterly, 47(1), 74-80. doi:10.2307/3033890

Chu, D., & Griffey, D. (1985). The contact theory of racial integration: The case of sport. Sociology of Sport Journal, 2(4), 323-333.

Cohen, E. G. (1982). Expectation states and interracial interaction in school settings. Annual review of sociology, 8(1), 209-235.

Deutsch, M., & Collins, M. E. (1951). Interracial housing: A psychological evaluation of a social experiment: U of Minnesota Press.

Foster, D., & Finchilescu, G. (1986). Contact in a”non-contact”society: The case of South Africa.

Jackson, J. W. (1993). Contact theory of intergroup hostility: A review and evaluation of the theoretical and empirical literature. International Journal of Group Tensions, 23(1), 43-65.

Jackson, P. (1985). Social geography: race and racism. Progress in Human Geography, 9(1), 99-108.

Johnson, D., Johnson, R., & Maruyama, G. (1984). Goal Interdependence and Interpersonal-personal Attraction in Heterogeneous Classrooms: a meta analysis, chapter in Miller N & Brewer MB Groups in Contact: The Psychology of Desegregation. In: New York: Academic Press.

Kanas, A., Scheepers, P., & Sterkens, C. (2015). Interreligious Contact, Perceived Group Threat, and Perceived Discrimination:Predicting Negative Attitudes among Religious Minorities and Majorities in Indonesia. Social Psychology Quarterly, 78(2), 102-126. doi:10.1177/0190272514564790

Kephart, W. M. (2018). Racial factors and urban law enforcement: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Kramer, B. M. (1950). Residential contact as a determinant of attitudes toward Negroes. Harvard University.

Lee, B. A., Farrell, C. R., & Link, B. G. (2004). Revisiting the Contact Hypothesis: The Case of Public Exposure to Homelessness. American Sociological Review, 69(1), 40-63. doi:10.1177/000312240406900104

Lee, F. F. (1956). Human Relations in Interracial Housing: A Study of the Contact Hypothesis. In: JSTOR.

Lett, H. A. (1945). Techniques for achieving interracial cooperation. Harvard Educational Review, 15(1), 62-71.

LeVine, R. A., & Campbell, D. T. (1972). Ethnocentrism: Theories of conflict, ethnic attitudes, and group behavior.

MacKenzie, B. K. (1948). The importance of contact in determining attitudes toward Negroes. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 43(4), 417.

Morrison, E. W., & Herlihy, J. M. (1992). Becoming the best place to work: Managing diversity at American Express Travel related services. Diversity in the Workplace, 203-226.

Nicholson, I. A. M. (2003). Inventing personality: Gordon Allport and the science of selfhood. Washington, DC, US: American Psychological Association.

Parker, J. H. (1968). The Interaction of Negroes and Whites in an Integrated Church Setting. Social Forces, 46(3), 359-366. doi:10.2307/2574883

Pettigrew, T. F. (1998). INTERGROUP CONTACT THEORY. Annual review of psychology, 49(1), 65-85. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.49.1.65

Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2005). Allport’s intergroup contact hypothesis: Its history and influence. On the nature of prejudice: Fifty years after Allport, 262-277.

Riordan, C., & Ruggiero, J. (1980). Producing equal-status interracial interaction: A replication. Social Psychology Quarterly, 131-136. Schofield, J. W. (1986). Black-White contact in desegregated schools.

Schofield, J. W., & Eurich-Fulcer, R. (2004). When and How School Desegregation Improves Intergroup Relations.

Sims, V. M., & Patrick, J. R. (1936). Attitude toward the Negro of northern and southern college students. The Journal of Social Psychology, 7(2), 192-204.

Stephan, W. G., Boniecki, K. A., Ybarra, O., Bettencourt, A., Ervin, K. S., Jackson, L. A., . . . Renfro, C. L. (2002). The Role of Threats in the Racial Attitudes of Blacks and Whites. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(9), 1242-1254. doi:10.1177/01461672022812009

Stouffer, S. A., Suchman, E. A., DeVinney, L. C., Star, S. A., & Williams Jr, R. M. (1949). The american soldier: Adjustment during army life.(studies in social psychology in world war ii), vol. 1.

Sumner, W. G. (1906). Folkways: The Sociological Importance of Usages. Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals, Ginn & Co., New York, NY.

Williams Jr, R. M. (1947). The reduction of intergroup tensions: a survey of research on problems of ethnic, racial, and religious group relations. Social Science Research Council Bulletin.

Works, E. (1961). The prejudice-interaction hypothesis from the point of view of the Negro minority group. American Journal of Sociology, 67(1), 47-52.

Further Information

Dovidio, J. F., Love, A., Schellhaas, F. M., & Hewstone, M. (2017). Reducing intergroup bias through intergroup contact: Twenty years of progress and future directions. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 20(5), 606-620.

Pettigrew, T. F., Tropp, L. R., Wagner, U., & Christ, O. (2011). Recent advances in intergroup contact theory. International journal of intercultural relations, 35(3), 271-280.

Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. Journal of personality and social psychology, 90(5), 751.

What Is the Contact Hypothesis in Psychology?

Can getting to know members of other groups reduce prejudice?

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• Archaeology
• Ph.D., Psychology, University of California - Santa Barbara
• B.A., Psychology and Peace & Conflict Studies, University of California - Berkeley

The contact hypothesis is a theory in psychology which suggests that prejudice and conflict between groups can be reduced if members of the groups interact with each other.

Key Takeaways: Contact Hypothesis

• The contact hypothesis suggests that interpersonal contact between groups can reduce prejudice.
• According to Gordon Allport, who first proposed the theory, four conditions are necessary to reduce prejudice: equal status, common goals, cooperation, and institutional support.
• While the contact hypothesis has been studied most often in the context of racial prejudice, researchers have found that contact was able to reduce prejudice against members of a variety of marginalized groups.

Historical Background

The contact hypothesis was developed in the middle of the 20th century by researchers who were interested in understanding how conflict and prejudice could be reduced. Studies in the 1940s and 1950s , for example, found that contact with members of other groups was related to lower levels of prejudice. In one study from 1951 , researchers looked at how living in segregated or desegregated housing units was related to prejudice and found that, in New York (where housing was desegregated), white study participants reported lower prejudice than white participants in Newark (where housing was still segregated).

One of the key early theorists studying the contact hypothesis was Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport , who published the influential book The Nature of Prejudice in 1954. In his book, Allport reviewed previous research on intergroup contact and prejudice. He found that contact reduced prejudice in some instances, but it wasn’t a panacea—there were also cases where intergroup contact made prejudice and conflict worse. In order to account for this, Allport sought to figure out when contact worked to reduce prejudice successfully, and he developed four conditions that have been studied by later researchers.

Allport’s Four Conditions

According to Allport, contact between groups is most likely to reduce prejudice if the following four conditions are met:

• The members of the two groups have equal status. Allport believed that contact in which members of one group are treated as subordinate wouldn’t reduce prejudice—and could actually make things worse.
• The members of the two groups have common goals.
• The members of the two groups work cooperatively. Allport wrote , “Only the type of contact that leads people to do things together is likely to result in changed attitudes.”
• There is institutional support for the contact (for example, if group leaders or other authority figures support the contact between groups).

Evaluating the Contact Hypothesis

In the years since Allport published his original study, researchers have sought to test out empirically whether contact with other groups can reduce prejudice. In a 2006 paper, Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp conducted a meta-analysis: they reviewed the results of over 500 previous studies—with approximately 250,000 research participants—and found support for the contact hypothesis. Moreover, they found that these results were not due to self-selection (i.e. people who were less prejudiced choosing to have contact with other groups, and people who were more prejudiced choosing to avoid contact), because contact had a beneficial effect even when participants hadn’t chosen whether or not to have contact with members of other groups.

While the contact hypothesis has been studied most often in the context of racial prejudice, the researchers found that contact was able to reduce prejudice against members of a variety of marginalized groups. For example, contact was able to reduce prejudice based on sexual orientation and prejudice against people with disabilities. The researchers also found that contact with members of one group not only reduced prejudice towards that particular group, but reduced prejudice towards members of other groups as well.

What about Allport’s four conditions? The researchers found a larger effect on prejudice reduction when at least one of Allport’s conditions was met. However, even in studies that didn’t meet Allport’s conditions, prejudice was still reduced—suggesting that Allport’s conditions may improve relationships between groups, but they aren’t strictly necessary.

Why Does Contact Reduce Prejudice?

Researchers have suggested that contact between groups can reduce prejudice because it reduces feelings of anxiety (people may be anxious about interacting with members of a group they have had little contact with). Contact may also reduce prejudice because it increases empathy and helps people to see things from the other group’s perspective. According to psychologist Thomas Pettigrew and his colleagues , contact with another group allows people “to sense how outgroup members feel and view the world.”

Psychologist John Dovidio and his colleagues suggested that contact may reduce prejudice because it changes how we categorize others. One effect of contact can be decategorization , which involves seeing someone as an individual, rather than as only a member of their group. Another outcome of contact can be recategorization , in which people no longer see someone as part of a group that they’re in conflict with, but rather as a member of a larger, shared group.

Another reason why contact is beneficial is because it fosters the formation of friendships across group lines.

Limitations and New Research Directions

Researchers have acknowledged that intergroup contact can backfire , especially if the situation is stressful, negative, or threatening, and the group members did not choose to have contact with the other group. In his 2019 book The Power of Human , psychology researcher Adam Waytz suggested that power dynamics may complicate intergroup contact situations, and that attempts to reconcile groups that are in conflict need to consider whether there is a power imbalance between the groups. For example, he suggested that, in situations where there is a power imbalance, interactions between group members may be more likely to be productive if the less powerful group is given the opportunity to express what their experiences have been, and if the more powerful group is encouraged to practice empathy and seeing things from the less powerful group’s perspective.

Can Contact Promote Allyship?

One especially promising possibility is that contact between groups might encourage more powerful majority group members to work as allies —that is, to work to end oppression and systematic injustices. For example, Dovidio and his colleagues suggested that “contact also provides a potentially powerful opportunity for majority-group members to foster political solidarity with the minority group.” Similarly, Tropp—one of the co-authors of the meta-analysis on contact and prejudice— tells New York Magazine’s The Cut that “there’s also the potential for contact to change the future behavior of historically advantaged groups to benefit the disadvantaged.”

While contact between groups isn’t a panacea, it’s a powerful tool to reduce conflict and prejudice—and it may even encourage members of more powerful groups to become allies who advocate for the rights of members of marginalized groups.

Sources and Additional Reading:

• Allport, G. W. The Nature of Prejudice . Oxford, England: Addison-Wesley, 1954. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1954-07324-000
• Dovidio, John F., et al. “Reducing Intergroup Bias Through Intergroup Contact: Twenty Years of Progress and Future Directions.”  Group Processes & Intergroup Relations , vol. 20, no. 5, 2017, pp. 606-620. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430217712052
• Pettigrew, Thomas F., et al. “Recent Advances in Intergroup Contact Theory.”  International Journal of Intercultural Relations , vol. 35 no. 3, 2011, pp. 271-280. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2011.03.001
• Pettigrew, Thomas F., and Linda R. Tropp. “A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory.”  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , vol. 90, no. 5, 2006, pp. 751-783. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.90.5.751
• Singal, Jesse. “The Contact Hypothesis Offers Hope for the World.” New York Magazine: The Cut , 10 Feb. 2017. https://www.thecut.com/2017/02/the-contact-hypothesis-offers-hope-for-the-world.html
• Waytz, Adam. The Power of Human: How Our Shared Humanity Can Help Us Create a Better World . W.W. Norton, 2019.
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Contact Hypothesis theory explained

Contact Hypothesis Theory: this article explains the Contact Hypothesis Theory in a practical way. Next to what it is, this article also highlights the intergroup contact and prejudice, stereotypes and discrimination, the conditions and contact hypothesis examples. After reading you will understand the basics of this psychology theory. Enjoy reading!

What is the Contact Hypothesis?

The contact hypothesis is a psychology theory suggesting that prejudice and conflict between groups can be reduced by allowing members of those groups to interact with one another. This notion is also called intra-group contact. Prejudice and conflict usually arise between majority and minority group members.

The background to the contact hypothesis

Social psychologist Gordon Allport is credited with conducting the first studies on intergroup contact.

Allport is also known for this research in the field of personalities . After the Second World War, social scientists and policymakers concentrated mainly on interracial contact. Allport brought these studies together in his study of intergroup contact.

In 1954, Allport published his first hypothesis concerning intergroup contact in the journal of personality and social psychology. The main premise of his article stated that intergroup contact was one of the most effective ways to reduce prejudice between groups.

Allport claimed that contact management and interpersonal contact could produce positive effects against with stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination, leading to better and more worthwhile interaction between two or more groups.

Over the years since Allport’s original article, the hypothesis has been expanded by social scientists and used for research into reducing prejudice relating to racism, disability, women and LGBTQ + people.

Empirical and meta analytical research into intergroup contact is still ongoing today.

Intergroup contact and prejudice, stereotypes and discrimination

The term “prejudice” is used to refer to a preconceived, negative view of another person, based on perceived qualities such as political affiliation, skin colour, faith, gender, disability, religion, sexuality, language, height, education, and more.

Prejudice can also refer to an unfounded belief, or to pigeonhole people or groups. Gordon Allport, the originator of the contact hypothesis, defined prejudice as a feeling, positive or negative, prior to actual experience, that is not based on fact.

Stereotypes, as defined in the contact hypothesis, are generalisations about groups of people. Stereotypes are often based on sexual orientation, religion, race, or age. Stereotypes can be positive, but are usually negative. Either way, a stereotype is a generalisation that does not take into account differences at the individual level.

Prejudice and stereotypes concern biased views regarding others, but discrimination consists of targeted action against individuals or groups based on race, religion, gender or other identifying features. Discrimination takes many forms, from pay gaps and glass ceilings to unfair housing policies.

In recent years, more and more new legislation and regulations have been introduced, designed to tackle discrimination and prejudice reduction in, for example, the workplace. It is not however possible to eliminate discrimination through legislation. Discrimination is a complex issue relating to the justice, education and political systems in a society.

Conditions for intergroup contact to reduce prejudice

Gordon Allport claimed that prejudice and conflict between groups can be reduced by having equal status contact between groups in pursuit of common goals. This effect is even greater when contact is officially sanctioned.

This can be achieved through legislation, but also through local customs and practice. In other words, there are four conditions under which prejudice can be reduced. These are:

Equal status

Both groups taking part in the contact situations must play equal roles in the relationship. The members of each group should have similar backgrounds, qualities and other features. Differences in academic background, prosperity or experience should be kept to a minimum.

Common goals

Both groups should seek to serve a higher purpose through the relationship and working together. This is a goal which can only be achieved when the two groups join forces and work together on common initiatives.

Working together

Both groups should work together to achieve their common goals, rather than in competition.

Support from the authorities through legislation

Both groups should recognise a single authority, to support contact and collaborative interaction between groups. This contact should be helpful, considerate, and foster the right attitude towards one another.

Examples of the contact hypothesis

The effect of greater contact between members of disparate groups has been the basis of many policy decisions advocating racial integration in settings such as schools, housing, workplaces and the military.

The contact hypothesis in the desegregation of education

An example of this is a 1954 landmark court decision by the US Supreme Court. The decision brought about the desegregation of schools. In this ruling, the contact hypothesis was used to demonstrate that this would increase self-esteem among racial minorities and respect between groups in general.

Studies into the implications of this decision in subsequent years did not always yield positive results. There have been studies showing that prejudice was actually reinforced and that self-esteem did not improve among minorities. The reason for this has already been set out above.

Contact between groups in schools, for example, was not always equal, nor did it take place with social supervision. These are two essential requirements or conditions for improving relationships between disparate groups.

The contact hypothesis in developing education strategies

The contact hypothesis has also proved invaluable in developing cooperative education strategies. The best known of these is the jigsaw classroom technique. This technique involves creating a particular classroom setting where students from various racial backgrounds are brought together in pursuit of a common goal.

In practice this means that students are placed in study groups of 6. The lesson is split into six elements, and each student is assigned one part of those six. That means that each student actually represents one piece in that jigsaw.

For the lesson to succeed, students need to trust one another based on their knowledge. This increases interdependence within the group, which is necessary for improving relationships between people.

Reducing prejudice

Besides it being very important to know how prejudice arises, studies on prejudice also focus on the potential to reduce prejudice. One technique widely believed to be highly effective is training people to become more empathetic towards members of other groups.

Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes makes it easier to think about what you would do in a similar situation.

Other techniques and methods used to reduce prejudice are:

• Contact with members of other groups
• Making others aware of the inconsistencies in their beliefs and values
• Legislation and regulations which promote fair and equal treatment of people in minority groups
• Creating public support and awareness

Implication of prejudice and discrimination in the workplace

Discrimination and prejudice can lead to wellbeing issues and substantial financial loss to the organisation, along with a sharp fall in employee and company morale. According to the American Psychological Association, 61% of adults face prejudice or discrimination at some time.

For some this happens at work; others face it as part of everyday life in society. Most people are aware of the negative effects this can have on employees, but discrimination and prejudice going unchecked can also have serious consequences.

Firstly, treating people unfairly can contribute to increased stress levels. This in turn leads to more wellbeing issues for those who are personally harmed or attacked. When someone is constantly worrying about discrimination or religion, he or she is forced to think about that thing all day long. Too much stress reduces sleep quality and suppresses appetite. When this becomes the norm for someone, they are going to feel chronically ill or down.

Prejudice also has a negative effect on the company in general. Companies may even suffer financial loss as a consequence. Employees who feel ill or down because of social issues are more likely to resign. The company then incurs substantial costs training new people.

Another obvious negative outcome for organisations is employees who hate management if they feel they are not being treated fairly. This negative attitude from employees has an effect on individual employee performance and ultimately also on the performance of the organisation as a whole.

The contact hypothesis in summary

The contact hypothesis, of which the intergroup contact theory is a part, is a theory from sociology and psychology which suggests that problems such as discrimination and prejudice can be drastically reduced by having more contact with people from different social groups. This notion is also called intergroup contact. Prejudice and conflict usually arise between majority and minority group members.

The social psychologist credited for his contributions in this field is Gordon Allport. Allport brought together several studies of interracial contact after the Second World War and developed the intergroup contact theory from those. His hypothesis was published in 1954. In the decades which followed, the theory was widely used in initiatives to tackle these social problems.

Prejudice is often a negative evaluation of others based on qualities such as political affiliation, age, skin colour, height, gender or other identifying features. Stereotyping resembles prejudice, but is in fact making generalisations about groups of people.

This social failing is also based on religion, gender or other identifying features which say nothing about the group as a whole. Discrimination goes a step further than prejudice and stereotypes. Discrimination is about actually treating people in a negative way based on particular identifying features such as race or education.

Gordon Allport developed four requirements or conditions necessary for reducing prejudice through increased intergroup contact. The first is that both groups should have an equal status. The members of each group should have similar backgrounds, qualities or social status.

Differences in academic background, prosperity or experience should be kept to a minimum. The second is to have common goals. The groups should not be brought together without some purpose. As mentioned too in the example above in the jigsaw classroom section, dependence on one another is stimulating, which is a prerequisite for social equality and improved relationships. This is linked to the third condition: working together.

Now it is your turn

What do you think? Are you familiar with the explanation of the contact hypothesis? Have you ever faced prejudice or discrimination? Have you ever experienced the positive effects of contact? Had you ever heard of this theory before? Do you think eliminating discrimination and prejudice is possible? What is your view on opportunity of outcome vs opportunity of equality? Do you have any other advice or additional comments?

Share your experience and knowledge in the comments box below.

More information

• Amir, Y. (1969). Contact hypothesis in ethnic relations . Psychological bulletin, 71(5), 319.
• Brewer, M. B., & Miller, N. (1984). Beyond the contact hypothesis: Theoretical . Groups in contact: The psychology of desegregation, 281.
• Paluck, E. L., Green, S. A., & Green, D. P. (2019). The contact hypothesis re-evaluated . Behavioural Public Policy, 3(2), 129-158.
• Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2005). Allport’s intergroup contact hypothesis: Its history and influence . On the nature of prejudice: Fifty years after Allport, 262-277.

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Intergroup Contact Theory: Recent Developments and Future Directions

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• Volume 31 , pages 374–385, ( 2018 )

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November 2001, Vol 32, No. 10

A longstanding line of research that aims to combat bias among conflicting groups springs from a theory called the "contact hypothesis." Developed in the 1950s by Gordon Allport, PhD, the theory holds that contact between two groups can promote tolerance and acceptance, but only under certain conditions, such as equal status among groups and common goals. Since the theory's inception, psychologists have added more and more criteria to what is required of groups in order for "contact" to work.

Recently, however, University of California, Santa Cruz research psychologist Thomas Pettigrew, PhD, has turned this research finding on its head. In a new meta-analysis of 500 studies, he finds that all that's needed for greater understanding between groups is contact, period, in all but the most hostile and threatening conditions. There is, however, a larger positive effect if some of the extra conditions are met.

His analysis turned up another unexpected finding that also runs counter to the direction of the field. The reason contact works, his analysis finds, is not purely or even mostly cognitive, but emotional.

"Your stereotypes about the other group don't necessarily change," Pettigrew explains, "but you grow to like them anyway."

Pettigrew is currently submitting his study for review; the basic findings can also be found in a chapter by him and Linda Tropp, PhD, in the book "Reducing Prejudice and Discrimination" (Erlbaum, 2000).

--T. DeANGELIS

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Justice seems not to be for all: exploring the scope of justice.

written by Aline Lima-Nunes, Cicero Roberto Pereira & Isabel Correia

That human touch that means so much: Exploring the tactile dimension of social life

written by Mandy Tjew A Sin & Sander Koole

Intergroup Contact Theory: Past, Present, and Future

• written by Jim A. C. Everett
• edited by Diana Onu

In the midst of racial segregation in the U.S.A and the ‘Jim Crow Laws’, Gordon Allport (1954) proposed one of the most important social psychological events of the 20th century, suggesting that contact between members of different groups (under certain conditions) can work to reduce prejudice and intergroup conflict . Indeed, the idea that contact between members of different groups can help to reduce prejudice and improve social relations is one that is enshrined in policy-making all over the globe. UNESCO, for example, asserts that contact between members of different groups is key to improving social relations. Furthermore, explicit policy-driven moves for greater contact have played an important role in improving social relations between races in the U.S.A, in improving relationships between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, and encouraging a more inclusive society in post-Apartheid South Africa. In the present world, it is this recognition of the benefits of contact that drives modern school exchanges and cross-group buddy schemes. In the years since Allport’s initial intergroup contact hypothesis , much research has been devoted to expanding and exploring his contact hypothesis . In this article I will review some of the vast literature on the role of contact in reducing prejudice , looking at its success, mediating factors, recent theoretical extensions of the hypothesis and directions for future research. Contact is of utmost importance in reducing prejudice and promoting a more tolerant and integrated society and as such is a prime example of the real life applications that psychology can offer the world.

The Contact Hypothesis

The intergroup contact hypothesis was first proposed by Allport (1954), who suggested that positive effects of intergroup contact occur in contact situations characterized by four key conditions: equal status, intergroup cooperation , common goals, and support by social and institutional authorities (See Table 1). According to Allport, it is essential that the contact situation exhibits these factors to some degree. Indeed, these factors do appear to be important in reducing prejudice , as exemplified by the unique importance of cross-group friendships in reducing prejudice (Pettigrew, 1998). Most friends have equal status, work together to achieve shared goals, and friendship is usually absent from strict societal and institutional limitation that can particularly limit romantic relationships (e.g. laws against intermarriage) and working relationships (e.g. segregation laws, or differential statuses).

Since Allport first formulated his contact hypothesis , much work has confirmed the importance of contact in reducing prejudice . Crucially, positive contact experiences have been shown to reduce self-reported prejudice (the most common way of assessing intergroup attitudes) towards Black neighbors, the elderly, gay men, and the disabled - to name just a few (Works, 1961; Caspi, 1984; Vonofako, Hewstone, & Voci, 2007; Yuker & Hurley, 1987). Most interestingly, though, in a wide-scale meta-analysis (i.e., a statistical analysis of a number of published studies), it has been found that while contact under Allport’s conditions is especially effective at reducing prejudice , even unstructured contact reduces prejudice (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). What this means is that Allport’s proposed conditions should be best be seen as of a facilitating, rather than an essential, nature. This is important as it serves to show the importance of the contact hypothesis : even in situations which are not marked by Allport’s optimal conditions, levels of contact and prejudice have a negative correlation with an effect size comparable to those of the inverse relationship between condom use and sexually transmitted HIV and the relationship between passive smoking and the incidence of lung cancer at work (Al-Ramiah & Hewstone, 2011). Contact between groups, even in sub-optimal conditions, is strongly associated with reduced prejudice .

Importantly, contact does not just influence explicit self-report measures of prejudice , but also reduces prejudice as measured in a number of different ways. Explicit measures (e.g. ‘How much do you like gay men?’) are limited in that there can be a self-report bias: people often answer in a way that shows them in a good light. As such, research has examined the effects of contact on implicit measures: measures that involve investigating core psychological constructs in ways that bypass people’s willingness and ability to report their feelings and beliefs. Implicit measures have been shown to be a good complement to traditional explicit measures - particularly when there may be a strong chance of a self-report bias. In computer reaction time tasks, contact has been shown to reduce implicit associations between the participant’s own in-group and the concept ‘good’, and between an outgroup (a group the participant is not a member of) and the concept ‘bad’ (Aberson and Haag, 2007). Furthermore, positive contact is associated with reduced physiological threat responses to outgroup members (Blascovich et al., 2001), and reduced differences in the way that faces are processed in the brain, implying that contact helps to increase perceptions of similarity (Walker et al., 2008). Contact, then, has a real and tangible effect on reducing prejudice – both at the explicit and implicit level. Indeed, the role of contact in reducing prejudice is now so well documented that it justifies being referred to as intergroup contact theory (Hewstone & Swart, 2011).

How does it work?

Multiple mechanisms have been proposed to explain just how contact reduces prejudice . In particular, “four processes of change” have been proposed: learning about the out-group , changing behavior, generating affective ties, and in-group reappraisal (Pettigrew, 1998). Contact can, and does, work through both cognitive (i.e. learning about the out-group , or reappraising how one thinks about one’s own in-group ), behavioural (changing one’s behavior to open oneself to potential positive contact experiences), and affective (generating affective ties and friendships, and reducing negative emotions) means. A particularly important mediating mechanism (i.e. the mechanisms or processes by which contact achieves its effect) is that of emotions, or affect, with evidence suggesting that contact works to reduce prejudice by diminishing negative affect (anxiety / threat) and inducing positive affect such as empathy (Tausch and Hewstone, 2010). In another meta-analysis , Pettigrew and Tropp (2008) supported this by looking specifically at mediating mechanisms in contact and found that contact situations which promote positive affect and reduce negative affect are most likely to succeed in conflict reduction. Contact situations are likely to be effective at improving intergroup relations insofar as they induce positive affect, and ineffective insofar as they induce negative affect such as anxiety or threat. If we feel comfortable and not anxious, the contact situation will be much more successful.

Generalizing the effect

An important issue that I have not yet addressed, however, is how these positive experiences after contact can be extended and generalized to other members of the outgroup . While contact may reduce an individual’s prejudice towards (for example) their Muslim colleague, its practical use is strongly limited if it doesn’t also diminish prejudice towards other Muslims. Contact with each and every member of an outgroup – let alone of all out-groups to which prejudice is directed – is clearly unfeasible and so a crucial question in intergroup contact research is how the positive effect can be generalized.

A number of approaches have been developed to explain how the positive effect of contact, including making group saliency low so that people focus on individual characteristics and not group-level attributes (Brewer & Miller, 1984), making group saliency high so that the effect is best generalized to others (Johnston & Hewstone, 1992), and making an overarching common ingroup identity salient (Gaertner, Dovidio, Anastasio, Bachman, & Rust, 1993). Each of these approaches have both advantages and disadvantages, and in particular each individual approach may be most effective at different stages of an extended contact situation. To deal with this issue Pettigrew (1998) proposed a three stage model to take place over time to optimize successful contact and generalization. First is the decategorization stage (as in Brewer & Miller, 1984), where participants’ personal (and not group) identities should be emphasized to reduce anxiety and promote interpersonal liking. Secondly, the individuals’ social categories should be made salient to achieve generalization of positive affect to the outgroup as a whole (as in Johnston & Hewstone, 1992). Finally, there is the recategorization stage, where participants’ group identities are replaced with a more superordinate group: changing group identities from ‘Us vs. Them’ to a more inclusive ‘We’ (as in Gaertner et al., 1993). This stage model could provide an effective method of generalizing the positive effects of intergroup contact.

Theoretical Extensions

Even with such work on generalization, however, it may still be unrealistic to expect that group members will have sufficient opportunities to engage in positive contact with outgroup members: sometimes positive contact between group members is incredibly difficult, if not impossible. For example, at the height of the Northern Ireland conflict, positive contact between Protestants and Catholics was nigh on impossible. As such, recent work on the role of intergroup contact in reducing prejudice has moved away from the idea that contact must necessarily include direct (face-to-face) contact between group members and instead includes the notion that indirect contact (e.g. imagined contact, or knowledge of contact among others) may also have a beneficial effect.

A first example of this approach comes from Wright, Aron, McLaughlin-Volpe, and Ropp’s (1997) extended contact hypothesis . Wright et al. propose that mere knowledge that an ingroup member has a close relationship with an outgroup member can improve outgroup attitudes, and indeed this has been supported by a series of experimental and correlational studies. For example, Shiappa, Gregg, & Hewes, (2005) have offered evidence suggesting that just watching TV shows that portrayed intergroup contact was associated with lower levels of prejudice . A second example of an indirect approach to contact comes from Crisp and Turner’s (2009) imagined contact hypothesis , which suggests that actual experiences may not be necessary to improve intergroup attitudes, and that simply imagining contact with outgroup members could improve outgroup attitudes. Indeed, this has been supported in a number of studies at both an explicit and implicit level: British Muslims (Husnu & Crisp, 2010), the elderly (Abrams, Crisp, & Marques 2008), and gay men (Turner, Crisp, & Lambert, 2007).

These more recent extensions of the contact hypothesis have offered important suggestions on how to most effectively generalize the benefits of the contact situation and make use of findings from work on mediating mechanisms. It seems that direct face-to-face contact is always not necessary, and that positive outcomes can be achieved by positive presentation of intergroup-friendships in the media and even simply by imagining interacting with an outgroup member.

Issues and Directions for Future Research

Contact, then, has important positive effects on improved intergroup relations. It does have its critics, however. Notably, Dixon, Durrheim, & Tredoux (2005) argue that while contact has been important in showing how we can promote a more tolerant society, the existing literature has an unfortunate absence of work on how intergroup contact can affect societal change: changes in outgroup attitudes from contact do not necessarily accompany changes in the ideological beliefs that sustain group inequality. For example, Jackson and Crane (1986) demonstrated that positive contact with Black individuals improved Whites’ affective reactions towards Blacks but did not change their attitudes towards policy in combating inequality in housing, jobs and education. Furthermore, contact may also have the unintended effect of weakening minority members’ motivations to engage in collective action aimed at reducing the intergroup inequalities. For example, Dixon, Durrheim, & Tredoux (2007) found that the more contact Black South Africans had with White South Africans, the less they supported policies aimed at reducing racial inequalities. Positive contact may have the unintended effect of misleading members of disadvantaged groups into believing inequality will be addressed, thus leaving the status differentials intact. As such, a fruitful direction for future research would be to investigate under what conditions contact could lead to more positive intergroup relations without diminishing legitimate protest aimed at reducing inequality. One promising suggestion is to emphasize commonalities between groups while also addressing unjust group inequalities during the contact situation. Such a contact situation could result in prejudice reduction without losing sight of group inequality (Saguy, Tausch, Dovidio, & Pratto, 2009).

A second concern with contact research is that while contact has shown to be effective for more prejudiced individuals, there can be problems with getting a more prejudiced individual into the contact situation in the first place. Crisp and Turner’s imagined contact hypothesis seems to be a good first step in tackling this problem (Crisp & Turner, 2013), though it remains to be seen if, and how, such imagined contact among prejudiced individuals can translate to direct contact. Greater work on individual differences in the efficacy of contact would provide an interesting contribution to existing work.

Conclusions

Contact, then, has been shown to be of utmost importance in reduction of prejudice and promotion of more positive intergroup attitudes. Such research has important implications for policy work. Work on contact highlights the importance of institutional support and advocation of more positive intergroup relations, the importance of equal status between groups, the importance of cooperation between groups and the importance of positive media presentations of intergroup friendships - to name just a few. As Hewstone and Swart (2011) argue,

“Theory-driven social psychology does matter, not just in the laboratory, but also in the school, the neighborhood, and the society at large” (Hewstone & Swart, 2011. p.380).

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• Miller, N., & Brewer M. B., eds. (1984). Groups in Contact: The Psychology of Desegregation. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.
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• Tausch, N., & Hewstone, M. (2010). Intergroup contact and prejudice . In J. F. Dovidio, M. Hewstone, P. Glick, & V. M. Esses (Eds.), The Sage handbook of prejudice , stereotyping, and discrimination (pp. 544–560). Newburg Park, CA: Sage.
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From the editors

Everett (2013) presents an excellent overview of the research on Intergroup Contact Theory and how psychologists have used it to understand prejudice and conflict. As the article notes, friendship between members of different groups is one form of contact that helps dissolve inter-group conflict. Friendships are beneficial because of “self-expansion,” which is a fundamental motivational process that drives people to grow and integrate new things into their lives (Aron, Norman, & Aron, 1998). When an individual learns something or experiences something for the first time, his/her mind literally grows. When friendships are very intimate, people include aspects of their friends in their own self-concept (Aron, Aron, Tudor, & Nelson, 1991).

For example, if Scott (an American) becomes friends with Dan (a Russian), Scott might grow to appreciate Russian culture, because of their intimacy. Even the word “Russian” is now part of Scott’s own self-concept through this friendship, and Scott will have more positive feelings and attitudes toward Russians as a group. The same process happens for all kinds of other groups based race/ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, etc.

Importantly, self-expansion and intimacy through friendship do not work like magic; psychologists can’t wave a wand and make them appear. Nor does it happen through superficial small talk (e.g., “how about this crazy weather?”). Intimacy develops through deep communication: sustained, reciprocal, escalating conversations in which two friends come to know each other in a meaningful way. A Christian person might say, “I have a Jewish co-worker” (while talking about a casual acquaintance) or a Caucasian person might say, “I give money to an organization that helps starving people in Africa” or a straight person might say, “I support same-sex marriage equality because I know someone who is gay.” All of that is good, but it’s not as effective at reducing inter-group conflict as a true friendship with someone in those other groups; superficial contact has a small effect on racism, anti-Semitism, or homophobia. A recent meta-analysis (Davies, Tropp, Aron, Pettigrew, & Wright, 2011) revealed that spending lots of time with cross-group friends and having lots of in-depth communication with those friends were the two strongest predictors of change in positive attitudes and prejudice reduction.

At In-Mind, we work in a transnational team and we think this is enriching. What about you? Have you found friendships, or even working relations, across social groups? Did this lead you to have more open or positive attitudes? Or, do you have other experiences?

article author(s)

Jim A. C. Everett

Jim Everett studied for his undergraduate at the University of Oxford, gaining a First Class degree in Psychology, Philosophy, and Physiology. He completed... more

article keywords

• discrimination
• intergroup contact hypothesis

article glossary

• intergroup conflict
• recognition
• Intergroup Contact Hypothesis
• contact hypothesis
• cooperation
• meta-analysis
• stereotypes
• stereotype threat
• field study

Reducing Intergroup Conflict Through Contact

• Conflict Resolution
• Experimental Psychology
• Intergroup Relations
• Interventions
• Methodology
• Race Relations

The world is a diverse place containing people of different races, ethnicities, and nationalities. This diversity, although beneficial in many ways, can also lead to tensions resulting in conflict between groups. Such strife occurs at every level of society, and the negative social and political outcomes it produces have led researchers to investigate ways to reduce conflict and prejudice. In a 2015 study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology , researchers Gunnar Lemmer and Ulrich Wagner (Philipps-University Marburg, Germany) examined the effectiveness of intergroup contact at reducing ethnic prejudice.

The intergroup contact theory is based on the idea that interactions between members of different groups help improve intergroup attitudes and reduce intergroup tensions and prejudice. Lab-based and real-world studies have examined the impact of different types of interactions — including face-to-face contact, indirect forms of contact, and virtual contact — at reducing prejudice between different ethnic groups. Researchers also have studied the efficacy of this type of intervention in minority- and majority-group members, as well as in regions where serious pre-existing or historical conflict exists.

The studies conducted in this field use a wide range of research designs and methodologies to examine a variety of different variables. To understand the overarching message conveyed by this body of work, the researchers conducted a meta-analysis of studies examining real-world intergroup contact interventions.

To be included in the meta-analysis, studies had to examine the impact of a contact intervention and be written in English or German. They also had to be implemented in a field setting and examine the impact of the intervention on cognitive (i.e., beliefs or stereotypes about ethnic groups), affective (i.e., like or dislike of ethnic groups), or conative (i.e., intended behavior toward ethnic groups) dimensions of ethnic attitudes.

The researchers identified relevant papers by completing searches of several large databases, journals, and topic-related conference proceedings, examining the reference sections of articles, and consulting with organizations and experts.

The search resulted in 73 documents containing 129 independent comparisons that assessed the effectiveness of either direct or indirect intergroup contact interventions immediately or up to 1 year after intervention completion.

The researchers found that overall, intergroup contact interventions resulted in improved attitudes toward other ethnicities, when tested both immediately and up to 1 year later. Interventions using direct face-to-face contact, indirect contact, or a combination of the two were equally effective. When looking at specific types of contact intervention, the researchers found those using contact meetings (i.e., where people are brought together, usually through structured group discussions about intergroup relations), cooperative learning methods (i.e., where people are brought together to work toward a common learning goal that is not related to interethnic relations), and extended contact (i.e., where people are exposed to stories, videos, or plays that display positive relationships between ethnic groups) to be effective; however, the effectiveness of virtual contact programs (i.e., indirect interaction using computer-based systems) was not verifiable.

The researchers found contact intervention to be effective in places with high-intensity conflicts between ethnic groups and in places where such conflict had occurred in the recent past. Interventions were more effective for ethnic majority group members but were still of benefit to ethnic minority group members, and the impact of contact interventions was found to generalize not only to individual outgroup members but to the entire outgroup, improving attitudes towards entire target ethnic groups.

In a time of increasing globalization — and global conflict — these findings suggest that intergroup contact interventions may be a valuable tool for reducing prejudice and increasing understanding between ethnic groups at the local, national, and global level.

Lemmer, G., & Wagner, U. (2015). Can we really reduce ethnic prejudice outside the lab? A meta‐analysis of direct and indirect contact interventions. European Journal of Social Psychology, 45 , 152–168.

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Careers Up Close: Joel Anderson on Gender and Sexual Prejudices, the Freedoms of Academic Research, and the Importance of Collaboration

Joel Anderson, a senior research fellow at both Australian Catholic University and La Trobe University, researches group processes, with a specific interest on prejudice, stigma, and stereotypes.

Experimental Methods Are Not Neutral Tools

Ana Sofia Morais and Ralph Hertwig explain how experimental psychologists have painted too negative a picture of human rationality, and how their pessimism is rooted in a seemingly mundane detail: methodological choices. 

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In addition, an APS Rising Star receives the society’s Early Investigator Award.

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Article Contents

The contact hypothesis reconsidered: interacting via internet, conditions and challenges of the contact hypothesis, practicality and contact, anxiety in contact, generalization from contact, the net advantage, ameliorating anxiety through online interaction, supersize it: generalizing from the contact to the group, getting more than just skin deep, beyond the cookie-cutter contact: tailoring the net contact to fit specific needs, conclusions, about the authors.

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The Contact Hypothesis Reconsidered: Interacting via the Internet

• Article contents
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Yair Amichai-Hamburger, Katelyn Y. A. McKenna, The Contact Hypothesis Reconsidered: Interacting via the Internet, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication , Volume 11, Issue 3, 1 April 2006, Pages 825–843, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00037.x

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One of the leading theories advocated for reducing intergroup conflict is the contact hypothesis. According to this theory, contact under certain conditions, such as equal status, cooperation towards a superordinate goal, and institutional support, will create a positive intergroup encounter, which, in turn, will bring about an improvement in intergroup relations. Despite its promise, the contact hypothesis appears to suffer from three major defects: (1) practicality—creating a contact situation involves overcoming some serious practical obstacles; (2) anxiety—the anxiety felt by the participants may cause a contact to be unsuccessful or at least not reach its potential; (3) generalization—the results of a contact, however sucessful, tend to to be limited to the context of the meeting and to the participants. The Internet has, in recent years, become an accessible and important medium of communication. The Internet creates a protected environment for users where they have more control over the communication process. This article suggests that the Internet’s unique qualities may help in the creation of positive contact between rival groups. The major benefits of using the Internet for contact are examined in this article.

The contact hypothesis has been described as one of the most successful ideas in the history of social psychology ( Brown, 2000 ). Allport (1954) presented the first widely-accepted outline of the contact hypothesis, claiming that true acquaintance lessens prejudice. In other words, knowledge, on its own, will not cause people to negate their prejudices and stereotypes about others, since they are very likely to accept only those pieces of information that fit into their preconceived schema of the world. It is through getting to know the other that people may be able to break down their stereotypes of him or her.

The Internet has, to date, been perhaps the most successful means of facilitating and enabling contact among individuals—particularly those who otherwise would not have had the opportunity, nor perhaps the inclination, to meet ( McKenna & Bargh, 2000 ). As we will argue here, the Internet is uniquely suited to the implementation of the various requirements of the contact hypothesis that are necessary for consistently producing successful outcomes. Indeed, the Internet may be the best tool yet for effectively putting the contact hypothesis into practice.

The article begins with a brief overview of the requirements necessary to create an ideal and successful contact situation and the challenges to putting these requirements into practice in traditional settings. We then discuss the ways in which the Internet can be used to meet these challenges and, in some areas, do so more successfully than can be achieved through traditional interaction contexts (e.g., in person, over the phone). We conclude with a short section providing ideas for how various aspects of the online contact environment and interaction process can be tweaked to fit specific situational needs and to improve the chances for a successful contact to occur.

Under ideal circumstances, when a member of a majority group meets with a minority group member and the experience is a positive one, an attitude change on two levels will result ( Allport, 1954 ). First, there will be an attitude change that is target-specific. That is, initial assumptions about the other that arise from the (negative) stereotypes associated with his or her group are replaced by more positive perceptions of the individual. Second, these new positive associations with the individual will become extended to that individual’s group as a whole, thus ameliorating negative attitudes toward the group. Allport delineated four key conditions for such a meeting: equal-group status within the situation; common goals; intergroup cooperation; and institutional support. Several other conditions were later added, the most important of these being voluntary participation and intimate contact ( Amir, 1969 , 1976 ).

There is strong empirical support demonstrating that, when effectively implemented, the conditions described above do indeed lead to a positive attitude change that is target-specific (e.g., Brown & Wade, 1987 ; Hewstone & Brown, 1986 ; Riordan & Ruggiero, 1980 ). The evidence is less clear regarding a global attitude change toward the group, however. A majority of studies do not find that the positive attitude toward the individual translates into a more positive attitude toward the group nor into more positive behavior toward other individual group members (see Hewstone & Brown, 1986 for a review). Scarberry, Ratcliff, Lord, Lanicek and Desforges (1997) demonstrate that a global attitude change can be consistently achieved, however, under carefully controlled conditions.

The contact hypothesis contains a long list of conditions for a sucessful contact. However, Pettigrew and Tropp (2000) , in their meta-analysis of contact studies, have found that it is not necessary that all of Allport’s (1954) conditions be present simultaneously for bias to be reduced. Mere contact can be a sufficient condition for bias reduction that is lasting and generalizes beyond the individuals to their larger group. Importantly, however, each of Allport’s conditions further enhances the bias-reducing effects of mere contact and thus the more conditions that are co-present, the more likely a successful and lasting outcome will be achieved.

Unfortunately, there are significant barriers to meeting many of the conditions and, indeed, even to arranging for a “mere contact” to take place. This, in turn, limits the number of contacts that actually take place. The major challenges are: (1) The practicality issue: Contact between rival groups according to the conditions required by the contact hypothesis might be very complicated to arrange and expensive to run. (2) Anxiety: Despite the fact that participation in a contact is voluntary, the high anxiety involved in the contact situation may hinder its success. (3) Generalization: How can a generalization be created from a specific contact with certain outgroup members to the outgroup as a whole? We turn to a more detailed discussions of these difficulties below.

Organizing a meeting among members of opposing groups raises both logistical and financial issues. Groups that are segregated and/or geographically distant from each other will be harder to bring together and any meeting will be more costly. Even when the different groups are geographically close, linking them may still prove an expensive undertaking. Joint holiday plans for Catholic and Protestant children in Northern Ireland are one such example ( Trew, 1986 ). As the undertaking becomes more expensive, the chances of it taking place decline. In addition, there may be barriers of language or of status. Language barriers may cause feelings of distance, misunderstanding, and miscommunication among the different groups. The issue of equal status is also problematic; in some cases rival groups are characterized by extreme status differences ( Pettigrew, 1971 ).

Intergroup interactions are often more anxiety-provoking than interpersonal ones and such anxiety may not be conducive to harmonious social relations ( Islam & Hewstone, 1993 ; Stephan & Stephan, 1985 ; Wilder, 1993 ). Intergroup anxiety is the result of anticipation of negative reactions during the intergroup encounter ( Stephan & Cookie, 2001 ; Stephan & Stephan, 1996 ). When an individual is anxious, he or she is more likely to use heuristics. Thus, if an intergroup contact produces significant levels of anxiety in the individual or individuals involved, he or she is more likely to apply stereotypes to the outgroup ( Bodenhausen, 1990 ; Bodenhausen & Wyer, 1985 ).

Wilder (1993) pointed out that when in a state of anxiety, group members are likely to ignore any disconfirming information supplied in the contact context. Under such conditions, as Wilder and Shapiro (1989) demonstrated, when a member of the outgroup behaves in a positive manner that contradicts the expectations of the other side, members of the ingroup do not alter their opinions and recall the outgroup as behaving in a manner consistent with the stereotype. In such a case, the contact between these members is unlikely to bring about any change in the group stereotype.

One of the greatest challenges to the contact hypothesis is the issue of whether or not the results of a positive contact with a member of the outgroup will be generalized further. Group saliency during the interaction appears to be of critical importance to successful generalization. However, there is much debate among researchers as to what level that salience should be. Hewstone and Brown (1986) argued that a general contact is likely to be perceived on the interpersonal level and therefore not have any impact on the intergroup level. In other words, if the individual is perceived only as an individual rather than also as a representative member of his or her group, then any attitude change will remain target-specific. They suggested that, for a positive contact to have a wider group-level impact, individual participants need to be seen as representatives of their group so that the (out)group identity is highly salient. Conversely, Brewer and Miller (1984) among others have suggested that in order for a contact to succeed, group saliency should be low.

Hamburger (1994) suggested that when the central tendency of the stereotype is the only component to be measured, a large part of the picture is ignored. He added that this component may be the most resistant to change. Thus, negative results of group generalization based solely on central tendency measures may lead to erroneous conclusions regarding the contact theory in general. The inclusion of more sensitive measurements, such as variability, will give a more accurate picture, as well as allow an investigation into the background processes. Several recent studies have demonstrated Hamburger’s suggestion that the central tendency is likely to be the more rigid component in the stereotype ( Garcia-Marques & Mackie, 1999 ; Hewstone & Hamberger, 2000 ).

Clearly, when all the necessary ingredients are present, positive and beneficial results may be obtained, but just as clearly, “getting the recipe right” to produce such an outcome may be difficult at best under traditional circumstances. Yet the major literature dealing with the contact hypothesis (for a review see Brown & Hewstone, 2005 ) fails to take into account the potential role of the Internet in helping towards the success of an intergroup contact. Below we examine the ways in which contact over the Internet may overcome the practical difficulties inherent in the creation of a face-to-face contact situation according to the conditions set out in the contact hypothesis.

Internet contact and practicality

Leveling the field.

The contact hypothesis requires that there should be equal status between the members of both groups taking part in the contact. According to McClendon (1974) , equal status increases the likelihood for perceived similarities between the groups and so enhances the likelihood for improvement in their relationship and in the reduction of stereotypes ( Pettigrew, 1971 ). Optimally, there should be both external equal status (in real life) and internal equal status (within the contact) between the people taking part in the encounter. In face-to-face encounters, even very subtle differences in manner of dress, body language, use of personal space, and the seating positions taken in the room can belie real (or perceived) status differences. As Hogg (1993) has shown, within group interactions people tend to be highly sensitive in discerning subtle cues that may be indicative of status. Online interactions have the advantage here because many, although not all, of the cues individuals typically rely on to gauge the internal and external status of others are not typically in evidence.

For instance, when contact takes place in text-based environments on the Internet, regular status symbols are not part of the interaction; “on the Internet no one knows that I am wearing a diamond necklace or have teeth missing.” This point is particularly pertinent with regard to face-to-face contact, where organizers may have gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that all participants are of equal status only to have one arrive with a Rolex watch or a similarly inappropriate status symbol.

Even when status differences are known, electronic interaction tends to ameliorate some of the effects of status differentials. For instance, when bringing together members of two established groups, the members are likely to be well aware of the internal pecking order within their own group even if they do not have knowledge of the established hierarchy among the other group’s members. In face-to-face interactions such distinctions within the groups often quickly become apparent to all, as those who stand lower tend to speak up less often and, in ways both obvious and subtle, give deference to those with higher status within their group.

Such is not the case in electronic interactions. One aspect of electronic communications that has long been decried (e.g., Sproull & Kiesler, 1991 ) is the tendency, within organizational settings, for there to be a reduction in the usual inhibitions that typically operate when interacting with one’s superiors. In other words, existing internal status does not carry as much weight and does not affect the behavior of the group members to such an extent. Underlings are more likely to speak up, to speak “out of turn,” and to speak their mind. Thus electronic interaction makes power less of an issue during discussion which leads group members, regardless of status, to contribute more to the discussion ( Spears, Postmes, Lea, & Wolbert, 2002 ). While this can prove to be problematic within a corporate setting, it is advantageous in the present context, as the medium serves to reduce the constraining effects of status both within and between the two groups.

Connecting from afar and with the comforts of home

As noted above, organizers may face significant difficulties in arranging a meeting among individuals and groups when it comes to finding a suitable meeting place, transporting the participants involved, and compensating participants for lost time due to travel incurred. This is particularly true when the groups in question or their various members live at some distance from one another. Participation may be limited to only those members of the groups who have the financial resources and job flexibility to enable their attendance or those who live in close proximity to the meeting site, rather than to all members who have the inclination (but not the resources) to attend. Thus the size and number of contacts possible are severely restricted when such meetings are face-to-face affairs.

The advent of computer-mediated interaction has opened the doors to connection possibilities that were previously not feasible. Time differences and physical distance are no longer obstacles to bringing people “together,” at least in the developed countries of the world. Electronic meetings are neither costly to set up nor are they time consuming for the participants. All that is required is for the participants to log onto the Internet and into the virtual meeting space at the specified day and time from an office, public library, or a home computer.

Indeed, having participants engage in the contact from the privacy of their respective homes has distinct advantages. Participants are likely to feel more comfortable and less anxious in their familiar surroundings. Further, research has shown that public, as opposed to private, settings can exacerbate the activation and use of stereotypes, especially when it comes to those tied to racial prejudice (e.g., Lambert, Payne, et al., 2003 ). As Zajonc (1965) has shown, an individual’s habitual or dominant response is more likely to emerge in public settings, whereas the individual is likely to be more open and receptive to altering the habitual response when in a private sphere. Even when participants interact in quite “public” electronic venues but do so from the privacy of their homes, they tend to feel that it is a private affair (e.g., McKenna & Bargh, 2000 ; McKenna, Green, & Gleason, 2002 ). Thus, interacting electronically from home should serve to inhibit the activation of stereotypes as compared to a more public and face-to-face setting in a new environment.

Cooperation toward superordinate goals

One of the keys to a successful contact is for both sides to participate jointly in a task, the completion of which is important to both groups ( Allport, 1954 ; Miller & Harrington, 1992 ). This is especially true when cooperation between the groups will lead to successful outcomes ( Blanchard, Adelman, & Cook, 1975 ). The question then arises as to whether such an exercise may be successfully undertaken on the Internet and, if so, will the results equal or surpass those conducted in traditonal, face-to-face environments?

Today many organizations do in fact have working teams whose members are dispersed all around the world and who frequently communicate, cooperate, and complete tasks through the Internet. Successful outcomes routinely occur despite the fact that, in many cases, the team members have never met one another and are unlikely to do so. This phenomenon is known as a virtual team. This form of working is becoming increasingly common within organizations, as the benefits of including virtual teams have become more evident ( Cascio, 2000 ). For instance, employers find that telecommuting increases worker productivity and improves attendance ( Abreu, 2000 ).

To date, the evidence seems to indicate that tasks performed by virtual teams are done equally well (or equally badly) as those conducted by face-to-face work teams. Research by Dennis (1996 ; Dennis & Kinney, 1998 ) has shown that members of verbally-interacting workgroups tend to share less vital information than do members of electronic workgroups, and hence make poor decisions. Yet, members of the electronic groups also tend to make poor group decisions, despite exchanging 50% more of the vital information needed to make an optimal decision. Galegher and Kraut (1994) also found that for virtual work groups the final product was similar in overall quality to that produced by face-to-face group members.

Institutional support and willingness to participate

One of the preconditions for a contact is that participants from both sides receive institutional support ( Allport, 1954 ; Slavin, 1985 ). This is to try to ensure that the contact will have a positive influence on the wider groups represented there. This is particularly important when the differences between the groups are deep-seated or potentially explosive. In such a case, a leader might resent sending group representatives to a meeting with the outgroup and may be concerned that such a meeting would diminish his or her standing as a leader.

A related condition is that the members from both sides take part in the meeting on their own volition. If the organization has compelled its members to take part in the meeting, they are unlikely to change their stereotypes as a negative reaction to the feelings of loss of control over their freedom of association ( Stephan & Stephan, 1996 ).

Internet contact may provide a balm to some of these issues. Participating in an Internet contact may be seen as taking on less of a risk than a face-to-face contact ( Bargh & McKenna, 2004 ; McKenna & Bargh, 1998) and this may make it easier for group members to volunteer to participate and for leaders to support such a meeting.

Bridging the language barrier

One issue that arises when coordinating meetings among groups with different native tongues is that of communication. Generally, participants need to be selected who either can communicate through a common language—often one that is native to neither group (i.e., English)—or translators must be provided, which can be costly. Bringing in individuals to provide translation assistance can be problematic for other reasons, as well. For instance, there is the danger that attention will focus on the person doing the translation and not on the individual members whose opinions he or she is expressing. This can reduce the perception of the target both as an individual and as a representative member of his or her group.

Emerging software, however, will soon allow individuals interacting through a text-based environment to receive messages in their own language even though those messages were created in another. There are already a number of text translation tools currently available for use on the Internet. None have yet reached the point of refinement and accuracy needed for a successful exchange of ideas with all the nuances, but the translation programs are improving by leaps and bounds (e.g., Climent, Moré, Oliver, Salvatierra, Taulé, Sanchez, & Vallmanya, 2003 ; Coughlin, 2001 ). It will not be long before we can all speak “your” language and you can speak “ours.” This will allow for the removal of a (human) third party translator to obvious advantage and, because communication will take place in each party’s “own” language, feelings of similarity and kinship should be enhanced.

Thus, in terms of sheer practicality, there are some distinct advantages to conducting contact interactions over the Internet. Participants can readily take part from disparate locales and do so from a position of greater comfort and security than can be obtained in face-to-face meetings. Many of the most obvious status “give-aways” are not in evidence in text-based online interactions. When the status of a member is known, the nature of the communication medium tends to ameliorate the negative influence and effects that status can have on an interaction. Cooperative tasks can be conducted just as well online as they could were the participants to undertake them in person and, indeed, there may be greater willingness to take part in the online task. Finally, as our technology continues to evolve, better software tools are being developed that will enhance the meeting and interaction between participants in ways not possible in traditional settings. Beyond issues of practicality, there are additional ways that an online setting can prove advantageous; these are discussed below.

There is a growing body of evidence supporting the notion that the anxiety an interaction situation may provoke is significantly reduced when that interaction takes place through a text-based exchange on the Internet as compared to face-to-face. As noted earlier, inter-group interactions are often more anxiety-provoking than interpersonal ones, although those too can often elicit feelings of anxiousness. Anxiety increases the tendency to rely on stereotyping during an interaction, with lasting effects. Further, should an individual’s anxiety or nervousness be apparent to others, they tend to be liked and accepted less by those others (e.g., Leary, 1983 ).

However, many of the situational factors that can foster feelings of anxiety in social situations (e.g., having to respond on the spot, feeling under visual scrutiny) are absent in online interactions. Because participants have more control over how they present themselves and their views online (e.g., being able to edit one’s comments before presenting them), they should tend to feel more comfortable and in control of the situation. They should be better able to and to more often express themselves, to be liked more by their online interactions partners than if they interacted in person, and to develop closer, more intimate relationships through online interaction.

Research on those with chronically high levels of social anxiety demonstrates just that. For instance, a recent laboratory study examined small group interaction among socially anxious and nonanxious participants (see McKenna & Seidman, 2005 ). Seventy-five undergraduate students at New York University were pre-selected for this study based on their responses on the Interaction Anxiousness Scale ( Leary, 1983 ). Only those who scored at the high and low extremes of the scale were recruited for the study, and they were randomly assigned to interact in groups of three either face-to-face or in a specially-created Internet chat room. Immediately following the interaction, participants assessed how they felt during the interaction, as well as how accepted and included they felt by the other group members.

Consistent with their responses on the Interaction Anxiousness Scale, socially anxious individuals in the face-to-face condition reported feeling anxiety, shyness, and discomfort during the group interaction, while the opposite was true for non-anxious participants. In marked contrast, interacting online produced significantly different results. Participants reported feeling significantly less anxious, shy, and uncomfortable, and more accepted by their fellow group members than did those who interacted face-to-face—but these effects were wholly qualified by differences in levels of social anxiety. That is, the extremely extroverted participants felt equally comfortable, outgoing, and accepted interacting online and in person. For those experiencing high levels of social anxiety, however, the mode of communication proved pivotal to their feelings of comfort, shyness, and acceptance. Moreover, the self-reports of the socially anxious participants in the online condition on these measures were virtually identical to those of nonanxious participants in the face-to-face condition.

Those experiencing anxiety in social situations have also been found to take more active leadership roles in online groups than in their face-to-face counterparts. In a study by McKenna, Seidman, Buffardi, and Green (2005 ), participants were again preselected based on their interaction anxiety scores and randomly assigned to interact in groups of four (composed of two anxious and two nonanxious members) either in an Internet chat room or face-to-face. They then engaged in a decision-making task, following which they rated each of their interaction peers on measures of leadership, degree of participation in the discussion as compared to the other members, extroversion, and how much they liked the person based on their interaction. Peer ratings showed that socially anxious participants were as likely as their nonanxious counterparts to be perceived as leaders within the respective groups and to participate as actively when the interaction took place online. In the face-to-face condition, nonanxious participants received the leadership vote and were the more active participants. Socially anxious participants were viewed as more likeable and extroverted when they interacted online than in person, while their nonanxious counterparts were viewed as equally likeable and extroverted in both situations.

The largest hurdle to overcome is the tendency for the various members of the contact situation to come to feel quite close to one another and yet to view their new comrades from the outgroup as exceptions to their group rather than as normative representatives. Unless the members of the outgroup are perceived as representative members, the contact will have failed, for no changes in the perceived stereotype of the group as a whole will have taken place.

One of the advantages of online communication is that one can quite easily manipulate the degree of individual versus group saliency in a given contact situation in order to achieve a desired outcome. Spears et al. (2002) have argued that anonymous communication within groups leads to a sense of depersonalization by the group members. That is, members feel an absence of personal accountability and personal identity and thus the group-level identity becomes more important. When the group-level identity is thus heightened, Spears et al. (2002) have shown that group norms can have an even stronger effect than occurs in face-to-face interactions. The degree to which the group identity is salient, however, plays an important role in determining what the effects of anonymity will be on the development of group norms.

For instance, Spears, Lea, and Lee (1990) found that when members of online groups interacted under anonymous conditions and group salience was high, normative behavior increased in those groups as compared to electronic groups in which members were anonymous but the salience of the group was low. Whether group salience was high or low, participants who interacted under individuating conditions displayed an intermediate level of conformity to group norms.

One of the most interesting sets of studies examining the interaction between anonymity and identity-salience tested the effects of primed behavior in electronic groups. Postmes, Spears, Sakhel, and De Groot (2001) primed participants with either task-oriented or socioemotional behavior and then had them interact in electronic groups under either anonymous or identifying conditions. Members in the anonymous groups displayed behavior consistent with the respective prime they received considerably more so than did their counterparts who interacted under identifiable conditions within their groups. Normative behavior strengthened over time in the anonymous groups, with the members conforming even more strongly to the primed behavior. In contrast, when members were identifiable to other group members they actually bucked the norms and behaved more prime-inconsistently over time.

Further studies provided even stronger evidence of the effect that anonymity can have on normative behavior. In a study by Postmes et al. (2001) , only half of the participants in each group received the behavioral prime. In the anonymous groups, those participants who did not receive the prime nonetheless conformed to the task or socioemotional behavior being exhibited by their primed cohorts and did so significantly more than did the nonprimed participants in the identifiable groups. Further, those who interacted anonymously reported feeling a significantly stronger attachment to their group and to the other group members.

Importantly, in an online environment one can hit two birds with one stone; one can heighten the perception of the individual members as representative of their disparate groups while simultaneously fostering feelings of kinship and attachment to the “new group” composed of all members taking part in the exercise. There are a number of means by which the first can be achieved. For instance, one can provide all members with anonymous screen names that are evocative of the group they are representing (e.g., Pakistan 1, India 1, Pakistan 2) or, following Leah Thompson’s procedure (see Thompson & Nadler, 2002 ) one can have each member briefly introduce him- or herself at the beginning of the interaction and ask each to include a statement stressing his or her typicality as a member, and so forth. As the interaction in the online environment progresses, group norms will begin to quickly emerge ( Spears et al., 2002 ). These norms will be distinct from those that operate when members of group A are alone together and distinct from those unique to group B. Rather, these norms will emerge from the combined membership of groups A and B in the online setting, leading to heightened feelings of attachment and camaraderie among the participants. Thus, one can effectively invoke the necessary balance of a sense of both “us and them” among the participants that will allow for acceptance and generalization.

Cook (1962) suggested that the more intimate the relationship, the more favorable the attitude of the groups was likely to be. He stressed the importance of the “acquaintance potential,” or the opportunity provided by the situation for the contact participants to get to know each other. Recent research into the importance of personalized interaction (e.g., Miller, 2002 ) and intergroup friendships (e.g., Pettigrew, 1997 , 1998 ) has reawakened interest in this aspect of the contact. It is also has a particular relevance to this discussion on contact through the Internet.

Mutual self-disclosure is a critical component for the formation of close interpersonal bonds and the establishment of a sense of belonging and acceptance. Thus problematically, interactions between in-group and out-group members are usually conducted on a casual and superficial level. For example, Taylor, Dube, and Bellerose (1986) reported a study carried out at McGill University, an English University in a French-speaking area of Canada. Most of the students (76%) are English speakers. One might think that, given the relatively high percentage of English-speaking students, the French-speaking students would engage in more interaction with English-speaking students than with French-speaking students. However, the sample of French students reported that fully 50% of their social interactions were with other French-speaking students, a proportion notably higher (in fact, double) than their representation in the university. English-speaking students reported interacting with in-group members 87% of the time. Tellingly, participants reported that their interaction with in-group members was significantly more intimate than their interaction with out-group members.

One of the major advantages of Internet interactions over face-to-face interactions is the general tendency for individuals to engage in greater self-disclosure and more intimate exchanges there. Interactions online tend to become “more than skin deep” and to do so quite quickly (e.g., McKenna et al., 2002 ; Walther, 1996 ).

Spears and Lea (1994) suggest that it is the protection of anonymity often provided by the Internet that helps people openly to express the way they really think and feel. In line with this, McKenna and Bargh (1998, 1999 ) suggest that this sense of anonymity allows people to take risks in making disclosures to their Internet friends that would be unthinkable to them in a face-to-face interaction. More recently, McKenna, Buffardi, and Seidman (2005) found that, while people tend to engage in the greatest acts of self-disclosure when interacting under relative anonymity online, they also disclose more to their face-to-face friends and to family members when interacting with these individuals online. In other words, even without the cloak of anonymity, people more readily make intimate disclosures through their Internet interactions than through their face-to-face interactions, even when it comes to their nearest and dearest.

There are a number of unique qualities of the Internet that facilitate self-disclosure and intimacy online. As they have been discussed extensively elsewhere (see Ben Ze’ev, 2004 ; McKenna & Bargh, 2000 ; McKenna & Green, 2002 ; McKenna et al., 2002 ), we list them only briefly. They are: (1) a greater sense of anonymity or non-identifiability that leads to a reduced feeling of vulnerability and risk; (2) the absence of traditional gating features to the establishment of any close relationship—that is, easily discernable features such as physical appearance (beauty is in the eye of the beholder), mannerisms, apparent social stigmas such as stuttering, or visible shyness or anxiety; (3) a greater ease of finding others who share our specialized interests and values—and particularly so when there are a lack of “real world” counterparts (e.g., because of the marginalized or highly specialized nature of the interest, such similar others may not be present in one’s physical community or, if they are, they are not readily identifiable); and (4) more control over one’s side of the interaction and how one presents oneself.

The online environment seems to be particularly suited for “getting more than skin deep.” The results of a laboratory experiment in which undergraduates were randomly assigned (in cross-sex pairs) to meet one another for the first time in an Internet chatroom or to meet face-to-face demonstrates this quite well. McKenna et al. (2002 , Study 3) found that those who met online both liked each other more and felt that they had gotten to know one another better than did those who interacted face-to-face. This effect held when participants met one another twice, once in person and once over the Internet, unaware that it was the same interaction partner in both situations. There was a significant correlation between the degree of liking for the partner and how well the participant felt he or she had gotten to know the other person for those who met over the Internet. However, there was no such correlation in the face-to-face condition. Along similar lines, Walther (1996 , 1997) found that new acquaintances can achieve greater intimacy through online communication than they do in parallel face-to-face interactions.

One of the greatest advantages of the Internet is the ability to tailor and tweak the various requirements to achieve optimal results for specific contact situations. Rather than being limited to a single intensive meeting that takes place over a few hours or days, multiple contacts can be arranged spanning days, weeks, and even months.

The anonymity and identifiability of participants can be manipulated depending on the particular needs of the situation and can be altered over time. The salience of the originating group and that of the “new group” can be heightened or lowered as needed. As research has shown, in some situations it is beneficial for the salience of the outgroup to be quite high and in others such heightened salience is detrimental to a successful contact. The Internet contact has the ability to serve both approaches and to examine which, if either, is more beneficial to the intergroup relationship. Group identity may be emphasized on the Internet by exercising control over the contact environment or, if it is thought appropriate, may be reduced if requested. This may be especially important with groups, which have salient physical characteristics that are impossible to reduce in face-to-face contact.

It is possible for the contact organizer to create an interactive information system on the outgroup that can be accessible to the ingroup participants both before and during the contact. In preparing this, its creators should gather information on the perceptions and stereotypes held by their group of the outgroup. They can then start to tackle the main components of the stereotype. This learning system will accompany participants through the different stages of the contact. The need to learn more about the outgroup may continue to be important for the participants at different stages of the contact process, i.e., before the contact, during the meeting sessions, between meetings, and after the contact program has been completed. Importantly, the ease of receiving needed information about the outgroup on the screen at any given moment can prove a useful aid in the creation of a positive intergroup contact. The ability of the Internet to supply a learning mechanism, where the information is accessible in a wholly interactive form and so can answer the specific requests and concerns of participants, creates a learning environment of a particularly high quality ( Rosenberg, 2002 ).

Finally, when it is deemed necessary for participants to meet face-to-face for a successful contact to occur, it is possible to implement a “gradual model” approach leading up to that face-to-face contact to insure a greater chance of success. Using this model, organizers can make use of an very gradual process to help the individual become comfortable with the contact situation and the other members, and to develop strong bonds with those other members before they ever meet in person. The main steps in this graded contact are as follows:

Communicating by text only: This text-only interaction is the most common form of communication over the Internet. This stage will continue until the participant feels secure in this form of contact and his/her anxiety levels are negligible.

Text + image: Participants will continue to use the text method with which they feel secure, but will simultaneously view a live video image of the person with whom they are interacting. When low-level social anxiety has been established, participants will transfer to the next stage.

Communicating by video + audio: At this stage, people will still interact from their secure environment and still without physical proximity to their conversation partner. However, use of text messages by the subject will be reduced; instead he/she will communicate orally. In addition, a live image of the subject will be transferred to the other participant. Again, when a satisfactory level of comfort has been achieved, participants may progress to the next stage.

Face-to-face interaction: This is the stage of regular face-to-face interaction. It is predicted that this process will successfully bridge the gap between text-only Internet contact and total exposure through a face-to-face encounter, and do so in a way that continually preserves low levels of anxiety among participants. As research by McKenna and colleagues has shown ( Bargh et al., 2002 ; Mckenna et al., 2002 ), when interactions first begin over the Internet and then move to a face-to-face environment, participants not only like one another more than they would were they to have initially begun their interaction in person, but when the face-to-face meeting does take place it serves to heighten already strong feelings of liking and kinship.

The Internet has an enormous potential for providing tools to create effective intergroup contact. Its unique characteristics provide an excellent basis for such a contact, for example, by creating a secure environment, reducing anxiety, cutting geographical distances, significantly lowering costs, and by creating equal status, intimate contact,and cooperation. In addition, it offers the chance to receive approval from the authorities. The Internet is also a major information resource, and its ability to answer questions and provide knowledge in real time makes it a uniquely useful tool for the promotion of intergroup communication. The Internet may be said to provide opportunities for a successful contact that are superior to those provided in a traditional face-to-face meeting.

There are clearly potential obstacles in putting together a contact through cyberspace; and while taking this fully into account, it is our belief that contact schemes over the Internet may prove exceptionally effective tools in the pursuit of improved interpersonal and intergroup relations. One of the mechanisms that may be developed to support such schemes is found in the field of interactive learning systems which interact with each user individually. In addition, future research should reveal more information about different factors which affect such a contact; for example, the impact of personality on the Internet contact ( Amichai-Hamburger, 2002 ).

Despite the questions that remain as yet unanswered, we believe that the advantages of using the Internet for an outgroup contact are exceptionally promising, and we advocate the introduction of the Internet as a vital part of contact between groups.

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Yair Amichai-Hamburger is a social-industrial psychologist, and an assistant professor in the Psychology Department, Bar-Ilan University, Israel. He has written widely on the impact of the Internet on well-being and has recently edited The Social Net: Understanding Human Behavior in Cyberspace . Oxford University Press.

Address: Department of Psychology, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel

Katelyn Y. A. McKenna (Yael Kaynan) is a Senior Lecturer at Ben-Gurion University and a lecturer at The Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in the departments of Communication. Her research interests are in the areas of relationship cognition, the self, and social identity, particularly in terms of their applicability to Internet interactions.

Address: Bldg 72, Room 550, Department of Communication Studies, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, 84105, Israel

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It is Who You Know That Counts: Intergroup Contact and Judgments about Race-Based Exclusion

David s. crystal.

Department of Psychology, Georgetown University

Melanie Killen

Department of Human Development, University of Maryland

Martin Ruck

Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Intergroup contact and evaluations about race-based exclusion were assessed for majority and minority students in fourth, seventh, and tenth grades ( N = 685). Students were presented with scenarios depicting cross-race relations in contexts of dyadic friendship, parental discomfort, and peer group disapproval. Participants reporting higher levels of intergroup contact gave higher ratings of wrongfulness of exclusion and lower frequency estimations of race-based exclusion than did participants reporting lower levels of such contact. Intergroup contact also predicted students’ attributions of motives in two out of three scenarios. Findings are discussed in terms of the extant literature on peer relations, moral reasoning, and intergroup contact.

One of the key developments in the field of social psychological research on intergroup relations is a renewed appreciation of Allport's (1954) intergroup contact hypothesis (Dovidio, Glick, & Rudman, 2004). Allport (1954) specified, among other things, the conditions under which contact between individuals from different racial groups can be effective in reducing prejudice, in particular, when contact is: among groups of equal status, based on common goals, based on cooperation rather than competition, and supported by external authorities. Abundant research in social psychology exists on the benefits of intergroup contact among adults (e.g., Brown & Hewstone, 2005 ; Dixon, Durrheim, & Tredoux, 2005 ; Dovidio, Gaertner, & Kawakami, 2003 ; Hewstone, Cairns, Voci, Hamberger & Niens, 2006 ; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006 ; Tausch, Kenworthy & Hewstone, 2006 ).

What such social psychological research does not address, however, are the essential developmental questions of acquisition and emergence, that is how individuals’ intergroup contact is related to intergroup attitudes in childhood and adolescence. Further, social psychological research has shown that racial biases and stereotypes are difficult to change in adulthood ( Stangor & Schaller, 2000 ), providing a strong rationale for understanding these attitudes in childhood, when change is more feasible. In addition, most adult studies of intergroup contact are set in the laboratory (e.g., Gaertner, Mann, Dovidio, Murrell, & Pomare, 2000 ), or in the work place (e.g., Voci & Hewstone, 2005). These settings are substantively different from the schools and neighborhoods in which interracial contact among children commonly occurs indicating that childhood intergroup contact may be quite effective for promoting change. To do this it is necessary to better understand the links between integroup contact and intergroup attitudes (see Tropp & Prenovost, in press ). Since racial bias among youth, as exemplified in peer harassment and conflicts in school contexts ( Graham & Juvonen, 1998 ), still constitutes a major social problem in the U.S., the fact that few studies have examined the effects of intergroup contact on race-related measures among children and adolescents represents an obvious void in the literature (for exceptions, see Rutland, Cameron, Bennett, & Ferrell, 2005 ; McGlothlin & Killen, 2006 ).

Our present conceptualization of intergroup contact is informed by the theoretical work of Piaget (1932) , by research in developmental social cognition ( Smetana, 1995 ), and by the peer relations literature ( Rubin, Bukowski, & Parker, 1998 ). Piaget contended that children learn morality through everyday interactions with peers. Through such everyday interactions, he believed, children become aware of and learn to operationalize key issues regarding the treatment of others, including, equality, fairness, and empathy. Recent meta-analyses and reviews of the literature on intergroup contact have reported findings that are consistent with Piaget's (1932) theorizing. Work by researchers such as Dovidio et al. (2003) , Pettigrew and Tropp (2000 , 2005 , 2006) , and Tropp & Prenovost (in press) , have documented that intergroup friendship—fostered by daily interactions—is one of the strongest predictors of prejudice reduction . Empirical studies, as well, attest to the efficacy of intergroup friendships for reducing racial segregation and prejudice ( Aboud, Mendelson, & Purdy, 2003 ; Khmelkov & Hallinan, 1999 ; Stephan, 1999 ).

Developmental peer relations literature that addresses daily interactions with peers and awareness of issues regarding fair and equal treatment of others stems from research on peer exclusion, where the race of the excluder differs from that of the excluded. For example, in a series of studies, Killen and her colleagues ( Killen, Henning, Kelly, Crystal & Ruck, in press ; Killen, Lee-Kim, McGlothlin, & Stangor, 2002 ) have reported that moral reasoning is more likely to be used in intergroup-related than non-intergroup-related exclusion interactions, and that children using moral reasoning are likely to reject intergroup-based exclusion. Killen and associates have also found that context plays an important role in children's and adolescents’ decisions regarding the rightness and wrongness of race-based exclusion ( Killen, et al., 2002 ). Therefore, in our current study, we chose different contexts of interracial peer exclusion as the main stimuli with which to examine correlates of intergroup contact. This approach to studying intergroup contact also responds to the call by Dixon and colleagues (Dixon et al. , 2003) for research that utilizes naturalistic, everyday contexts to study how interracial interactions influence intergroup bias as well as views on fair or just treatment.

Previous developmental literature indicates that peers and parents are among the most potent sources of influence on children's intergroup attitudes ( Aboud & Levy, 2000 ; Abrams, Rutland, Cameron, and Marques, 2003 ; Devine, 1989 ; Fishbein, 2002 ; Hallinan & Teixeira, 1987a , b ; Sinclair & Dunn, 2005). For this reason, we examined cross-race social exclusion in three situations of increasing intimacy: cross-race companionship in the context of a dyadic friendship ( Lunch) , cross-race companionship in the context of parental disapproval ( Sleepover ), and cross-race dating in the context of peer group disapproval ( Dance ). Based on the historical dimensions of racial exclusion in the United States, in each situation, a European-American child was portrayed as excluding an African-American child.

The first scenario described a situation in which a majority protagonist decides not to invite a minority protagonist to have lunch with him/her and another friend. This scenario represented a prototypical cross-race dyadic situation of potential friendship at school ( Hallinan & Teixeira, 1987a ), a setting in which race-based exclusionary attitudes often emerges ( McGlothlin, Edmonds, & Killen, in press ). The second scenario addressed the possible influence of parental uneasiness concerning outgroup members on children's race-based exclusion. Investigators have suggested that, through processes such as illusory correlation, young children may come to feel that outgroup members are to be avoided because their family associates with such individuals so rarely ( Johnston & Jacobs, 2003 ). Based on such research, as well as on evidence suggesting the long-term effects of parental disapproval of cross-race peer relations on later racial attitudes ( Devine, 1989 ), the second scenario (Sleepover) depicts a majority protagonist deciding not to invite a minority student over to his/her house for a sleepover party out of concern for parental discomfort regarding the minority guest. The third scenario, which involves the greatest degree of intimacy, presents a majority boy who refrains from inviting his minority girlfriend to a school dance for fear of his friends’ disapproval. While the frequency of cross-race companionship, although relatively rare, may hold steady through the elementary school years, some studies have found that it drops off measurably by early adolescence ( Aboud et al., 2003 ; Graham & Cohen, 1997 ; Howes & Wu, 1990 ; Hallinan & Teixeira, 1987a ). One reason for the decrease at this developmental period may be found in the onset of cross-race dating and the potential for cross-race romantic partners ( Fang, Sidanius & Pratto, 1998 ; Kennedy, 2003 ). Therefore, the third scenario was designed to capture the possible influence of peer group displeasure, intensified by considerations of romantic relations between cross-race partners, on students’ attitudes toward race-based exclusion.

Prior investigations of racial exclusion among youth have utilized measures that directly ask participants about race-based reasons for exclusion (e.g., “Is it all right to exclude on the basis of race?”) ( Killen et al., 2002 ). Studies such as that by Hodson, Dovidio, and Gaertner (2002) , however, demonstrate that having participants weigh competing factors so as to create a situation of ambiguity, in tandem with racial characteristics, can be an even more effective method for detecting race-related bias. Consequently, each scenario used in the current investigation presented, in addition to the issue of race, at least one explicit non-race reason for the exclusion decision.

For example, researchers have found that common interests and shared activities play a unique role in the development and maintenance of friendship at all stages of life ( Cole & Teboul, 2004 ; Zarbatany, Ghesquiere & Mohr, 1992 ; Goldman, Cooper, Ahern, & Corsini, 1981 ; Rubin, Bukowski, & Parker, 1998 ). Thus, in the Lunch scenario, the alternative reason for exclusion was a lack of common interests (e.g., the two students do not share the same interest in sports). In designing the Sleepover scenario, we were guided by the knowledge that parental attitudes towards and monitoring of children's friends, both new and old, is one of the best predictors of parent-child conflict and adolescent health risk behavior (Barber & Delfabbro, 2000a; Borawski, Levers-Landis, Lovegreen, & Trapl, 2003 ). Therefore, the alternative reason for parents’ discomfort in the Sleepover scenario was parents’ unfamiliarity with the new friend (who happens to be a minority).

Finally, several investigations indicate that school identification is significantly associated with a number of important outcomes for youth, including academic performance, coping style, and parental attachment (Edwards & Kelly, 1981; Finn & Frone, 2004 ; Meeus, Oosterwegel, & Vollebergh, 2002 ). Moreover, investigators such as Abrams et al. (2003) have shown the importance of school loyalty to the maintenance of ingroup norms. In the Dance scenario, therefore, the alternative reason for exclusion was that the minority student attended a rival high school. In sum, we specifically designed scenarios in which the majority protagonist's motives for exclusion could be interpreted ambiguously so as to provide a more indirect measure of potential race-related attribution bias.

On the basis of such ambiguity, one set of hypotheses focused on the relationship between intergroup contact and attributions of motives in race-based and non race-based exclusion scenarios. Attribution research by Dodge and colleagues ( Crick & Dodge, 1994 ) shows that aggressive children, as compared to non-aggressive children, tend to attribute hostile intent to peers in ambiguous situations. One interpretation of this finding is that children are likely to attribute characteristics that they themselves possess to protagonists acting in situations where the motives for action are ambiguous or multifaceted. In line with such research, McGlothlin and Killen (2006) , using picture cards depicting protagonists of different races engaging in morally ambiguous interactions, reported that European-American children in homogeneous schools were more likely to use race as a reason to attribute negative motives to the protagonists than were European-American children in heterogeneous schools.

Taken together, these findings imply that, in the present study, children who have little interaction with outgroups, perhaps due to purposeful avoidance of outgroup individuals, may be more likely to attribute racial motives to protagonists in ambiguous exclusion situations than their counterparts who have more interaction with outgroups. Additionally, Killen et al. (2002) found that, with age, students in schools where intergroup contact was high were less critical of peer-motivated than of parent-motivated race-related exclusion. Based on such findings, and the expectation that students with low intergroup contact lack familiarity with the dynamics of cross-race relationships, we predicted that students with high intergroup contact would be less likely to attribute racial motives to peer-instigated exclusion, and more likely to attribute such motives to parent-instigated exclusion than would their low contact peers.

The vast majority of adult studies on intergroup contact, as well as Allport's (1954) original thesis, focus on reducing racial bias. However, racial bias takes many forms, and researchers and theorists have found that the benefits of intergroup contact may generalize to other areas of cognition and emotion ( Dovidio et al., 2003 ; Miller, 2002 ). For example, intergroup contact is seen as increasing what people know about others (i.e., the outgroup) and, thus, increasing the likelihood of seeing members of the outgroup in individuated and personalized ways ( Pettigrew, 1998 ). A second cognitive benefit of intergroup contact is thought to be the development of new social representations, leading to a recategorization of a common ingroup identity in which those formerly perceived as outgroup members are now viewed as part of the ingroup ( Gaertner & Dovidio, 2000 ; Nier et al., 2001 ).

As for emotional benefits, regular interactions with outgroup members have been shown to enhance empathy toward outgroup individuals ( Dovidio et al., 2003 ). Empathy, in turn, can lead one to feel more positively about members of another group ( Batson, Polycarpou, Harmon-Jones, & Imhoff, 1997 ), and can elicit an emotional experience, termed empathic concern, that produces a prosocial motivation to improve the welfare of another person ( Batson, 1991 ). Perceptions of outgroup members as separate individuals, recategorization of them as part of one's ingroup, and concerns about their welfare would seem to heighten one's sense of equality, fairness, and justice vis a vis outgroup individuals. These attributes—equality, fairness, and justice—are the hallmarks of moral reasoning ( Turiel, 1983 , 1998 ). Such findings suggest that intergroup contact may enhance individual sensitivity to moral transgressions implicit in race-related interactions and cross-race relations in general.

We discussed above studies by Killen and associates ( Killen et al, in press ; Killen et al., 2002 ) who reported that children's use of moral reasoning was positively correlated with rejection of race-based exclusion. In conjunction with findings on the emotional and cognitive benefits of intergroup contact ( Batson, 1991 , 1997 ; Dovidio et al., 2003 ; Miller, 2002 ), Killen et al.'s results indicate that in contexts where, for example, a white child excludes a black child, children with higher levels of intergroup contact would be more likely than their counterparts with lower levels of such contact, to view the excluded child as a separate individual, consider him/her as part of their ingroup, feel more empathy for him/her, and therefore, perceive such white-to-black exclusion as a moral transgression. For this reason, the current study also investigated the effects of intergroup contact on judgments regarding the wrongfulness of race-based exclusion. More specifically, we predicted that higher levels of intergroup contact would be associated with a greater negative evaluation of the wrongfulness of exclusion in situations of interracial peer exchanges.

Although cross-race friendship has been found to be a significant predictor of prejudice reduction ( Pettigrew & Tropp, 2000 , 2006 ), such friendship, especially among children, usually takes place in a group context (see Tropp & Prenovost, in press ). As children develop, the influence of friends on behavior, achievement, and attitudes becomes increasingly strong ( Rubin, et al., 1998 ). For these reasons, in the current study, we also investigated whether students with high intergroup contact perceived more or less race-based exclusion among their peers than those with low intergroup contact. This question is important because it indirectly addresses the issue of peer groups, and the extent to which such groups potentially encourage race-related biases and exclusion.

For example, if students with low intergroup contact perceive more race-based exclusion among their peers than those with high intergroup contact, it might suggest that excluding students associate with other excluding students, thus possibly reinforcing biased attitudes. This, in turn, would indicate that interventions to reduce such biases be focused on peer groups rather than individuals. If, on the other hand, low contact students perceived the same or less race-related exclusion than high contact students, it would imply that peer groups are unlikely to play a role in promoting race-related bias, and would point to the need for more individualized targeting in regard to prejudice reduction.

To explore this issue, we asked students to estimate the frequency of occurrence of race-based exclusion among their peers. Numerous studies have documented that similarity of attitudes, social perceptions, and behavioral preferences—all of which would contribute to inclusion or exclusion of other-race peers—play a role in friendship selection ( Aboud & Mendelson, 1998 ; Barrett, Wilson, & Lyons, 2003 ; Kupersmidt, DeRosier, & Patterson, 1996; Poulin, Cillessen, Hubbard, & Coie, 1997 ). Thus, children with higher intergroup contact are likely to know and associate with high contact children, and children with lower intergroup contact are likely to know and associate with low contact children. In line with this reasoning, and studies such as that by Harris, Durso, Mergler, and Jones (1990) who found that frequency estimations are based on domain-specific knowledge of stimuli, that is, on people one knows rather than on people one does not know, we predicted that students with higher levels of intergroup contact would give relatively lower estimations of race-based exclusion, while those with lower levels of intergroup contact would give relatively higher estimations of such exclusion among their friends and acquaintances.

Age-related factors

Research demonstrates that from middle childhood to mid-adolescence age-related changes occur in categorization, social reasoning, and relations with parents that have implications for the emergence of various stereotypes and race-related biases ( Aboud, 1988 ; Levy & Dweck, 1999 ; Killen et al., 2002 ). Furthermore, research on school desegregation has shown that with age children have the potential to interact with a wider range of students from diverse ethnic backgrounds (due to the neighborhood demographics for elementary school in contrast to the demographics for upper level schools which feed from a wide range of neighborhoods, see Frankenberg & Orfield, in press ; Orfield, 2001 ). In the present study, therefore, we sampled youth in 4 th , 7 th , and 10 th grades. We predicted that 4 th graders, experiencing less intergroup contact than 7 th and 10 th graders, would be more willing to condone, and would perceive less racial exclusion than would older children. As for attributions of motive, we hypothesized that, given age-related increases in youth's challenges to parental support of race-based exclusion ( Killen et al., 2002 ), with age, students would be more likely to attribute non-racial motives to peer-related exclusion, and less likely to attribute such motives to parent-related exclusion.

Majority-minority status

The inclusion of majority and minority youth (from similar socioeconomic levels) in our sample was an important aspect of this study in light of the overwhelming focus on European-American participants in U.S research on prejudice and stereotypes ( Fisher, Jackson, & Villarruel, 1998 ). Given their greater experiences with discrimination in U.S. society ( Fisher, et al., 1998 ), we hypothesized that minority students would perceive higher levels of wrongfulness and estimate higher frequencies of race-based exclusion than their majority peers. It was an open question whether minority or majority children would attribute racial motives on behalf of the protagonist, that is, the one making an exclusionary decision. On the one hand, minority children's experience with racial exclusion might make them more aware of this type of motive and therefore they would expect it to occur. On the other hand, majority children who experience less intergroup contact than do minority children may interpret racial motives to interracial exchanges given the unfamiliarity of this type of encounter. Therefore, we made no explicit predictions regarding relations between majority/minority status and attributions of motive.

Participants

Participants were 685 children in 4 th , 7 th , and 10 th grades, attending 13 public schools in mixed-ethnicity (range was 20% to 45% minority) suburbs of a mid-size city in the mid-Atlantic region. There were 94 girls and 70 boys in 4 th grade ( M = 9.85 years, SD = .42), 167 girls and 113 boys in 7 th grade ( M = 12.86 years, SD = .49), and 133 girls and 108 boys in 10 th grade ( M = 15.89 years, SD = .52). The ethnic breakdown for the sample was: European-American, 60%; African-American, 14%; Asian-American, 12%; Hispanic-American, 6%; and Other, 8%. The sample was evenly divided by gender for each ethnic group. Based on school demographics, all participants were from working- to middle-class backgrounds.

Written parental consent was obtained for all participants in the study. Participants were individually interviewed in a quiet room at their school by a trained research assistant, matched on ethnicity. Interviewers first administered the Social Reasoning about Exclusion interview, which was audio-taped and later transcribed for coding purposes. After the interview, all participants completed the Intergroup Contact Survey ; the interviewers read the survey to the fourth graders; seventh and tenth graders completed the survey by themselves.

The Social Reasoning about Exclusion interview consisted of three stories, each representing a different interracial social context in which exclusion occurred. After each of the stories, participants were posed a number of questions, among them, those regarding attributions of motive, wrongfulness judgments, and frequency estimations. For several of these questions, participants were also asked to justify their answers (i.e., social reasoning). For reasons of economy of focus, the analyses of participants’ social reasoning responses were not included in this paper.

Based on pilot testing and previous research designs published in the literature ( Killen et al., 2002 ), we used a pre-established order of the stories for all participants. Stories were given in the order of least to most intimate. This was purposely done so as to avoid priming the least intimate with the most intimate context. We have used similar techniques in previous research, for example, consistently presenting gender- before race-related exclusion scenarios ( Killen et al., 2002 ). Therefore, the contexts of the three stories, presented in the following order, were: Lunch (personal choice about cross-race friendship with no external pressure), Sleepover (inviting a cross-race friend to the home with external pressure from parental authority), and Dance (cross-race dating in high school with external pressure from the peer group). As noted above, in light of the history of racial exclusion in the United States, all stories portrayed a European-American child excluding an African-American child.

After each story, participants were first asked to attribute a motive to the protagonist's behavior. For participants who attributed the actor's decision to racial motives, interviewers asked for several judgments and ratings; for participants who attributed the actor's decision to non-racial motives, the interviewer asked the same set of follow-up questions for non-raced based motives. Then, the interviewers went back to ask participants for their evaluations as a function of the other consideration (race-based or non-race based). The measures were: (1) wrongfulness of the exclusion decision depicted in the scenario, and (2) the frequency of the type of exclusion observed among their peers. The following descriptions of the assessments are based on the Lunch scenario. In the scenario, two White girls, both interested in sports, decide not to invite to lunch a new girl in school who is Black and is rumored not to like sports, because they think they won't have much in common with her.

Attribution of motives: “Why do you think that Karen believes that she and her friend Jane don't have much in common with Diane?” Responses were coded as (1) Race only (e.g., “Because she is Black”); (2) Non-race only (e.g., “Because she doesn't like sports, but they do”), or (3) Both Race and Non-Race (e.g., “She’s Black and they’re White, and anyway she doesn't like sports”). We focused on the “non-race only” responses as expressing the clearest attribution of motive. Consequently, we created a dichotomous variable with “1” representing “non-racial motive” and “0” representing “other” for each of the three scenarios. Wrongfulness of race-based exclusion: “What if Karen thinks that they won't have much in common because Diane is Black? How good or bad is that?” Responses ranged from 1 (“very very good”) to 8 (“very very bad”). Frequency estimations of race-based exclusion: “How often do you think kids your age might not invite someone to lunch because they are a different race?” Responses ranged from 1 (“never”) to 5 (“always”).

Measuring intergroup contact

After the interview, participants completed the Developmental Intergroup Contact Survey (Crystal, Killen, & Ruck, 2005), containing, among other demographic items, ten questions adapted from the Diversity Attitudes Questionnaire (DAQ, Kurlaender & Yun, 2001 ). This questionnaire is used by the Harvard University Civil Rights Project, and has been administered to over 10,000 students in U.S. public schools. The DAQ was designed to assess the effects of school desegregation on perceptions of intergroup contact, broadly construed (school, neighborhood, and community interactions). Thus, our measure included items about interracial interactions in the neighborhood and community as well as the existence of cross-race friendship. It reflected, therefore, a balance between depth (cross-race friendships in classrooms, neighborhood, and community) and breadth (interracial interactions on school projects, in the neighborhood, messages from teachers) of intergroup contact.

The ten DAQ questions were subjected to a principal axis factor analysis with a varimax rotation (Kaiser normalization), which yielded a primary factor, explaining 31% of the variance, and consisting of the following six items: a) How many students in your school are from racial or ethnic groups different from your own?, b) How often do you work on school projects and/or study with students from other racial or ethnic groups?, c) At school how many friends do you have who are from a different racial or ethnic group than you?, d) Outside of school how many friends do you have who are from a different racial or ethnic group than you?, e) In the neighborhood where you live, do you have neighbors from other racial or ethnic backgrounds?, f) How many of your friends from your neighborhood are from a different racial or ethnic group than you? Responses to these items, which ranged from 1 (“none) to 4 (“many”), were combined to form the Intergroup Contact Scale , with a Cronbach's alpha of .79. 1

Data Analysis

For attribution of motives, we conducted three separate logistic regression equations (one for each scenario) with the non-racial attributions serving as the dependent variables, and the Intergroup Contact Scale, grade, and majority/minority status serving as the independent variables. Univariate analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to provide descriptive analyses on the Intergroup Contact Scale. We used Repeated Measures ANOVA to assess main, interaction, and contextual effects on participants’ judgments of wrongfulness, and, in a separate analysis, frequency estimations of race-based exclusion. The between-subjects factors were levels of intergroup contact (low/high); grade (4 th , 7 th , and 10 th ); and majority/minoritystatus (majority, minority). Because gender was neither a theoretical nor empirical variable of interest, it was omitted from the analysis. The within-subjects factor was context of exclusion (Lunch, Sleepover, Dance).

Intergroup contact: Grade, gender, and majority/minority status

A univariate ANOVA was performed on the Intergroup Contact Scale with grade, gender, majority/minority status and their interactions serving as the independent factors. Significant main effects were found for grade, F (2,683) = 18.31, p < .001, and majority/minority status, F (1,683) = 164.19, p < .001. Follow-up analyses revealed that, as expected, 7 th graders ( M = 3.00, SD = .62) and 10 th graders ( M = 3.11, SD = .58) reported higher levels of intergroup contact than did 4 th graders ( M = 2.62, SD = .72). Also, minority students ( M = 3.33, SD = .52) reported more intergroup contact that did majority students ( M = 2.70, SD = .63). Mean levels of intergroup contact, broken down by grade and majority/minority status, appear in Table 1 .

Level of Intergroup Contact by Grade and Ethnicity

Intergroup contact as a predictor of attributions of motive

We used separate logistic regression analyses to test hypotheses about attributions of motive in each of the three exclusion scenarios. Our hypotheses focused only on main effects. In the analyses on the Lunch scenario, only grade emerged as a significant predictor (see Table 2 ). Univariate tests revealed that, consistent with expectations, students were increasingly likely with age to attribute non-racial motives to peers (4 th graders, M = .39, SD = .49; 7 th graders, M = .44, SD = .50; 10 th graders, M = .52, SD = .50) (see Figure 1 ). In the Sleepover scenario, both intergroup contact and grade were found to be significant predictors (see Table 2 ). In accord with hypotheses, students with high contact ( M = .44, SD = .50) were less likely than students with low contact ( M = .52, SD = .50) to perceive parent-related exclusion as motivated by non-racial reasons. Also in line with hypotheses, 4 th graders ( M = .57, SD = .50) were more likely than 7 th graders ( M = .51, SD = .50) who were more likely than 10 th graders ( M = .37, SD = .49) to attribute non-racial motives to parent-related exclusion (see Figure 1 ). In the Dance scenario, intergroup contact and majority/minority status were significantly associated with attributions of motive (see Table 2 ). Again consistent with predictions, more students with high contact ( M = .59, SD = .49) than students with low contact ( M = .53, SD = .50) attributed non-racial motives to the interracial exclusion among peers. Lastly, more majority ( M = .60. SD = .49) than minority ( M = .50, SD = .50) students perceived the exclusion in the Dance scenario as motivated by non-racial reasons.

Mean score of attributions of non-racial motives in situations of interracial exclusion as a function of grade.

Logistic Regression Analyses on Attributions of Motive

Intergroup contact as a predictor of evaluations of race-based exclusion

Results of the repeated measures ANOVA on students’ ratings of wrongfulness in the three scenarios yielded significant between-subject effects of intergroup contact, F (1,666) = 15.55, p < .001, partial eta 2 = .02, and majority/minority status, F (1,666) = 6.76, p < .01, partial eta 2 = .01. Follow-up tests showed that, as hypothesized, students with high contact ( M = 7.42, SD = .97) were more likely than students with low contact ( M = 7.14, SD = .77) to perceive race-based exclusion as wrong (see Figure 2 ). Contrary to predictions, however, majority students ( M = 7.36, SD = 1.00) gave higher ratings of wrongfulness than minority students ( M = 7.14, SD = 1.13) (see Figure 3 ), and grade was not significantly associated with overall ratings of wrongfulness. No significant within-subjects effects were found.

Mean score of wrongfulness of race-based exclusion as a function of intergroup contact.

Mean score of wrongfulness of race-based exclusion as a function of majority/minority status.

Intergroup contact as a predictor of frequency estimations of race-based exclusion

The repeated measures ANOVA testing hypotheses on frequency estimations of race-based exclusion revealed significant between-subjects effects for intergroup contact, F (1,668) = 9.06, p < .01, partial eta 2 = .01, grade, F (1,668) = 5.82, p < .01, partial eta 2 = .02, and majority/minority status, F (1,668) = 10.21, p < .001, partial eta 2 = .02. Post hoc analyses showed that, as predicted, students with high contact ( M = 2.22, SD = .77) estimated lower frequencies of race-based exclusion than did students with low contact ( M = 2.41, SD = .90). Also consonant with hypotheses, frequency estimations of race-based exclusion increased with age (4 th grade, M = 2.20, SD = .82; 7 th grade, M = 2.28, SD = ,85; 10 th grade, M = 2.46, SD = .79). Finally, as expected, minority students ( M = 2.42, SD = .87) gave higher estimations than did their majority counterparts ( M = 2.21, SD =.75). 2

As for within-subjects effects, a significant interaction between context, intergroup contact, and majority/minority status emerged, F (2,1336) = 9.36, p < .001, partial eta 2 = .01. Follow-up analyses revealed two findings: students with high contact evinced the most consistent responses across the three scenarios (Majority: Lunch, M = 2.08, SD = 1.03, Sleepover, M = 2.11, SD = .87, Dance, M = 2.14, SD = .98; Minority: Lunch, M = 2.38, SD = 1.03, Sleepover, M = 2.30, SD = .85, Dance, M = 2.32, SD = .97), relative to those with low contact (Majority: Lunch, M = 2.32, SD = .93, Sleepover, M = 2.15, SD = .79, Dance, M = 2.50, SD = .89; Minority: Lunch, M = 2.36 SD = .93, Sleepover, M = 2.75 SD = .78, Dance, M = 2.41, SD = .88). Moreover, the Sleepover scenario elicited the greatest difference in response, in particular, among students with low contact of both majority and minority status.

Three new findings from this study contribute to the literature on intergroup contact and the developmental trajectory of prejudice. Specifically, intergroup contact, based on race and ethnicity, was significantly related to children's ratings of wrongfulness of race-based exclusion across the three scenarios, frequency estimations of race-based exclusion across the three scenarios, and attributions of motive to excluding protagonists in two of the three scenarios. The vast majority of prior studies conducted on intergroup contact have used adult samples with artificially contrived groups in the laboratory, or non-ethnic (racial) categories, and outcome measures unrelated to evaluations of racial exclusion ( Pettigrew & Tropp, 2005 ). By contrast, our research design and stimuli followed directly from the theoretical framework informing the study: that of Piaget's (1932) conceptualization of morality as learned by children through everyday interactions with peers (see Turiel, 1983 ). Consistent with the suggestions of Dixon et al. (2005) , the current investigation used real groups (based on a widely used measure of intergroup contact, and samples comprised of both majority and minority students) and everyday, familiar contexts to assess a range of measures associated with race-related exclusion. We know of no other empirical study that has systematically examined the effects of intergroup contact on assessments reflecting social and moral judgments about everyday interracial peer interactions among a large sample of majority and minority youth. Due to the real-world nature of our groups and stimuli, we assume that our results as well more accurately reflect actual positive effects of intergroup contact on children and adolescents as reported above.

What is more, most studies of intergroup relations only look at the effect of intergroup contact on assessments of race-related attitudes or racial bias ( Pettigrew & Tropp, 2005 ). The current investigation is unique in exploring the influence of intergroup contact on a diverse range of outcome measures including ratings of wrongfulness, frequency estimations, and attributions of race-based motives regarding racial exclusion. Consonant with work of Dovidio et al. (2003) and Miller (2002) , our findings provide support to the notion that the effects of intergroup contact may generalize to a number of related areas of social cognition and emotion in children and adolescents as well as in adults.

Additionally, it is important to note that, although our scenarios depicted exclusion of African-American children only, our measure of intergroup contact inquired about contact with outgroups in general, rather than focusing specifically on contact with African-Americans. We know of no studies in the intergroup contact literature that specifically target one contact outgroup, unless the study uses a minimal group paradigm (artificially generated laboratory groups) (see Tropp & Prenovost, in press ). Moreover, most studies of intergroup relations with children or adolescents use the heterogeneity or homogeneity of the school as the measure of intergroup contact ( Pettigrew & Tropp, 2005 ), and heterogeneous school populations typically include many different ethnic groups in the U.S. (Latino, Asian-American, African-American, Biracial, European-American). In comparison with school composition, in the present study, we used a more focused and, we believe, a more accurate measure of intergroup contact by obtaining individual reports of contact with others based on race and ethnicity, which certainly does not exclude contact with African-Americans. The intergroup contact hypothesis ( Allport, 1954 ) states that positive experiences with members of the outgroup reduce prejudice. Research by Tropp and Prenovost (in press) has shown that interactions with individuals from diverse ethnic backgrounds reduce prejudice, and prejudice is typically assessed by students' attitudes towards members of outgroups. Thus, we expected that students would generalize their positive interactions with members of outgroups (including non-African-Americans) and apply them to the more specific situation of exclusion of African-American peers, which is what we found.

More specifically, the data showed that students with high contact were, overall, more likely than students with low contact to perceive wrongfulness in race-based exclusion. These results are consistent with Allport's (1954) intergroup contact hypothesis and with a large body of empirical research on adults demonstrating that face-to-face intergroup relations are effective in reducing prejudice ( Dovidio, Kawakami, & Beach, 2001 ; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2000 , 2005 , 2006 ). They are also in line with studies associating intergroup contact with increases in empathy ( Dovidio et al., 2003 ), interpersonal differentiation ( Pettigrew, 1998 ), and recategorization towards a common ingroup identity ( Gaertner & Dovidio, 2000 ; Nier et al., 2001 ) in regard perceptions of outgroup individuals.

We hypothesized that these attributes would enhance a person's moral sensitivity regarding the potentially biased treatment of outgroup members, leading to a heightened sense of moral transgression in the face of exclusion based on race. Our results were consonant with this hypothesis. The higher ratings of wrongfulness given by students with high levels of intergroup contact, relative to their low contact peers, may be seen as reflecting a more salient use of moral reasoning regarding race-related exclusion. These findings accord as well with the association reported by Killen et al. (2002) between children's use of moral reasoning and their rejection of race-based exclusion. The increased intergroup sensitivity that we documented adds to a list of social-cognitive benefits of intergroup contact, among them, greater feelings of personal safety and social satisfaction as recently reported by Juvonen, Nishina, and Graham (2006) . Nevertheless, future research will need to explore in greater depth which specific mechanism and/or social cognition (e.g., empathy, recategorization, personalization) are responsible for the apparently enhanced moral sensibility that we found among students with high levels of intergroup contact.

In view of their stronger ratings of the wrongfulness of racial exclusion, students with high contact might be expected to be more aware of race-based exclusion and thus report more of it. Instead, as predicted, students with high contact perceived less racial exclusion among their peers than did students with low contact. Such results are in line with the notion that both high contact and low contact students tend to associate with peers who share their racial attitudes and behaviors, as suggested by literature documenting the importance of similarity in values, cognitive style, and social skills as a basis for friendship ( Aboud & Mendelson, 1998 ; Altermatt & Pomerantz, 2003 ; Morry & Gaines, 2005 ).

Thus, following the premise that one bases frequency estimates on domain specific knowledge (i.e., the people one knows) ( Harris et al., 1990 ), if one associates with friends who tend to be inclusive of other-race members (i.e., other high contact students) then one is likely to observe such inclusiveness and generalize it to one's peers as a whole when making frequency estimates. Similarly, if one is part of a group that tends to exclude other-race members, then observations of such exclusion are likely to form the basis for frequency estimates of the behavior of one's peers. If this reasoning is accurate, then interventions aimed at reducing racial bias would benefit from identifying not only those individual students who hold biased views regarding other-race members, but also those biased individuals’ cliques or social networks which, our research implies, may at the very least encourage such attitudes by practicing race-based exclusion. Such reasoning also indicates that prejudice-reducing interventions might need to focus on interpersonal group dynamics as well as intraindividual race-related attitudes.

Our stimuli scenarios varied between peer- and parent-instigated exclusion, and purposely depicted excluding protagonists with ambiguous (both race- and non-race-related ) motives for their actions. To capture more subtle forms of race-based bias, we asked participants to make specific attributions regarding those ambiguous motives. Consonant with hypotheses, students with high contact were less likely to attribute racial motives to peer-related exclusion (Dance scenario) than were their low contact counterparts. At the same time, more students with high contact attributed racial motives to parent-related exclusion than did students with low contact.

These results highlight the importance of context in understanding the complexities of youths’ responses to situations of race-based exclusion (see Killen, et al., 2006). Further, the findings also likely reflect the contrasting social experiences of students with high and low contact in terms of their assumed association with similar-minded peers, as noted above. Students with high contact may have more cross-race friendships, which makes them less focused on race as a factor in social decision-making about social relationships and, thus, less likely to attribute race-related motives to peer-instigated exclusion. Such an explanation accords with prior research on cross-race friendships, showing that these relationships are viewed as similar in quality to same-race friendships by students in heterogeneous school environments ( Aboud et al., 2003 ). In regard to the parent-related scenario, relative to students with low contact, students with high contact may be more critical of parents than of peers ( Killen et al., 2002 ) because they are more likely to have experienced negative parental feedback about race given their greater potential opportunities for cross-race interaction. Given recent interest in the use of indirect assessments to measure racial prejudice and bias ( Baron & Banaji, 2006 ; Shelton, Richeson, Salvatore, Trawalter, 2005 ; Frantz, Cuddy, Burnett, Ray, & Hart, 2004 ), our results suggest that, as demonstrated by other studies using a similar methodology ( Margie et al., 2005 ; McGlothlin et al., 2005 ), employing attributions of motive in ambiguous or complex situations represents a subtle yet valid method for capturing potential race-related biases and judgments.

Our age-related findings revealed that, as predicted, with increasing age, students estimated higher frequencies of race-based exclusion across the three scenarios. At the same time, age was not, overall, significantly associated with students’ perceptions of wrongfulness of race-based exclusion. This finding is consistent with prior research on evaluations of exclusion, which has found few age differences regarding judgments of straightforward moral transgressions, such as racial exclusion ( Killen, et al., 2002 ).

As predicted, based on their long history and present experience of discrimination ( Fisher et al., 1998 ), minority students overall estimated higher frequencies of race-based exclusion than did their majority counterparts. Interestingly, however, minority students, in general, perceived a lower degree of wrongfulness in race-based exclusion than did majority students (although this difference was small). Researchers have described a sense of resignation in discriminated groups—a feeling that discrimination is going to happen no matter what one does, and is a fact of life in modern America ( Davis & Stevenson, 2006 ; Fisher et al, 1998 ). It may be that minimizing the badness or wrongfulness of such “inevitable” discrimination serves as a kind of protective mechanism for minority students. More research on this issue is warranted.

The question of social desirability effects needs to be addressed. Many traditional measures of racial bias and prejudice are vulnerable to such effects because of the high profile these topics are given in the national discourse and media of the U.S. There are several reasons why we believe that social desirability played a smaller role in the current investigation than it does in the majority of studies on racism and prejudice. First, questions regarding the rightness or wrongness of exclusion, even race-based exclusion, are quite different from and less direct than those asking frank opinions about outgroups and their members. Prior research shows that exclusion is multi-faceted, and that children and adolescents view some exclusion, such as that based on group functioning, as justified ( Killen et al., 2002 ). As described above, we purposefully imbedded several possible reasons for exclusion into our interview scenarios so as to minimize such pure social desirability effects and present participants with more complex and, thus, ecologically valid dilemmas. Second, we sought to relate intergroup contact not only to indices of prejudice but to a diverse range of outcome variables, including frequency estimations and attributions of racial bias. These assessments are considerably more indirect than traditional measures of racism, yet as we hypothesized, intergroup contact was significantly associated with these more subtle outcome variables as well. Therefore, we believe that the measures in our study, based on everyday interactions, captured the real-world influence of intercrop contact on race-based exclusion and its corollaries, beyond any possible social desirability effects.

In conclusion, our results provide initial evidence for the applicability of Allport's (1954) intergroup contact hypothesis to situations of interracial exclusion among children and adolescents. The relationship between such contact and a heightened moral sensitivity to race-based exclusion is consistent with, but not specifically documented in, previous literature. These findings indicate that promoting contact in schools and neighborhoods among children and adolescents of different races and ethnicities is likely to enhance young people's sense of moral transgression in the face of race-based exclusion during interracial peer interactions. The fact that students with high contact also estimated race-based exclusion as occurring less frequently than did their low contact peers suggests that students with similar levels of intergroup contact may associate with one another, and thus, that small social networks may be a prime target for school-based interventions aimed at reducing prejudice.

What is more, the greater reluctance of high contact students to attribute racial motives to peers, relative to students with low contact, may be seen as reflecting a more optimistic, “moral” view of others, as well as of themselves, and further contributes to the small but growing literature reporting positive and prosocial outcomes associated with the promotion of interracial interaction among youth ( Juvonen et al., 2006 ; Frankenberg & Orfield, in press ; Kurlaender & Yun, 2001 ). On the whole the findings of this study are especially important given recent assaults on and legal challenges to public policies aimed at fostering integration of schools in the U.S. ( Greenhouse, 2006 ). At the very least, the results of studies such as this demonstrate the benefits of intergroup contact in terms of moral sensitivity to race-based exclusion among children and adolescents. If such sensitivity is an attribute that racially heterogeneous societies like the U.S. would seek to promote in their youth, then it is not only true that it's who you know that counts, but that the more diverse and variegated the “who” the better.

Acknowledgments

The research described in this paper was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (1R01HD04121-01). We thank the research team at the University of Maryland, Marguerite Adams, Holly Bozeman, Alaina Brenick, Michael J. Collins, Christina Edmonds, Julia Hadricky, Alexandra Henning, Megan Clark Kelly, Nancy Geyelin Margie, Heidi McGlothlin, Alexander O'Connor, Christine Pitocchelli, and Stefanie Sinno, and the research team at Georgetown University, Nancy Gibbs, Lindsey Gansen, Dayna McGill, Elizabeth Kravec, Anne Blossom, Mia Shorteno-Fraser, and Meredith Mellody for assistance with instrument development, data collection, data coding, analyses, and reliability coding. In addition, we thank Megan Clark Kelly, Nancy Geyelin Margie, and Cameron Richardson for technical assistance with the manuscript.

Crystal, D., Killen, M., & Ruck, M. (2008). It’s who you know that counts: Intergroup contact and judgments about race-based exclusion. British Journal of Developmental Psychology , 26 , 51-70.

1 To explore the potentially differential effects of various aspects of intergroup contact on race-based exclusion, we broke down our intergroup contact measure into the following components: “opportunity for contact” (items “a” and “e”), “cross-group friendship” (items “c” and “d”), and “school-based contact” (3 items that reflected relations between intergroup contact and schoolwork). We combined these items into separate variables and then ran bivariate correlations between these newly created variables and our chief outcome measures such as the wrongfulness ratings and frequency estimations for each of the three scenarios. Results showed no consistent significant differences between the magnitude of correlations of one compound variable compared with the others in relation to the outcome measures. We therefore concluded that the best index of intergroup contact was the initial overall assessment contained in our Intergroup Contact Scale .

2 To ascertain whether skew in the wrongfulness ratings might have affected the results of the ANOVAs, we performed a LOG transformation on the variables and reran the repeated measures ANOVAs on the transformed wrongfulness ratings as well as the transformed frequency estimations. In both cases, the results of the ANOVAs were exactly the same as they were before we performed the LOG transformations. The apparent skew in the data, therefore, did not affect the results of the multivariate analyses.

Contributor Information

David S. Crystal, Department of Psychology, Georgetown University.

Melanie Killen, Department of Human Development, University of Maryland.

Martin Ruck, Graduate Center, City University of New York.

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Imagined Contact Hypothesis

The COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t just a tough time in world history - it was also specifically a dividing and polarizing time in American history. The country was gearing up for one of the most contentious elections that anyone could remember. Divisions were drawn between Democrats and Republicans; “pro-maskers” and “anti-maskers,” people who waited for the COVID-19 vaccination and those who only believed it would cause more harm. And what’s worse, there was little contact between these two groups. The isolation and separation of people to their individual homes may have saved lives and reduced the spread of COVID-19, but it definitely pushed us further apart.

America is not new to groups being separated. From the 18th century until the 1960s, the country was segregated. Entire cities were divided, and not just in the soda fountains or the bathrooms. White people might live or go to school on one side of the highway (like they did in Austin, Texas ) while people of color lived and went to school on the other side.

We know how dangerous this type of segregation and separation is. Warring political parties get nothing done to help their constituents. People who are considered “lesser” than the privileged or more powerful groups face a higher risk of discrimination, bullying, or downright violence. Separating different groups based on race, sex, political party, sexual orientation, religion, or ethnicity is simply harmful.

Psychologists know that, despite the harm caused by ingroups and outgroups, this has been a part of human existence since our species first appeared on Earth. They also know, through decades of research, that there is a way to reduce ingroup and outgroup biases and create a society where people from all groups can live and work together without threats of violence or fighting.

And this solution isn’t as complicated as you might think. In fact, it starts with just thinking.

Intergroup Contact Theory

Before we talk about thinking your way into a more inclusive world, let’s talk about Intergroup Contact Theory. In 1954, Gordon Allport introduced this idea in his book, The Nature of Prejudice. The idea is simple: contact between two groups could reduce prejudice between the people within those groups.

This idea doesn’t discriminate. It can work to reduce racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, or ableism. And although it sounds simple, you can probably think of some examples from your real life in which a family member or a friend changed their opinions about minority groups after interacting with someone in that group. Maybe a friend’s parents came around to support gay marriage after your friend came out to them, or a colleague changed their opinion on the existence of whether privilege exists after talking to someone who doesn’t have said privilege.

But even if you can’t think of an example yourself, psychology has your back. Plenty of studies on intergroup contact theory show that positive contact between people in different groups can help to reduce prejudice. In 2003, for example, studies showed that white athletes who played team sports with Black athletes held less prejudice than white athletes who played individual sports. Large analyses of studies on this topic show that even when contact is “unstructured,” that contact is likely to reduce prejudice among all “outgroups,” including the LGBTQ community, people of color, and people with disabilities.

It seems that the best way to reduce any prejudice you have is to go out and have contact with the people you have prejudices about!

What About Negative Contact?

Of course, you might find yourself thinking about all the times your family got in Facebook fights with someone on the other side of the political aisle. It’s important to note that while psychologists believe that negative contact can be more powerful than positive contact, positive contact is more likely to happen in person. Intentionally going out into the world, meeting new people, and talking to them about their experiences is the best way to reduce prejudice and become a more inclusive person.

This Isn’t Always Possible

This wasn’t always a possibility in the COVID-19 pandemic. The whole point of lockdowns was to stay home and keep everybody safe! Plus, decades of segregation, redlining and other factors don’t always encourage intermingling between ingroups and outgroups. You may not know or hang out with people who have a different religion than you, who identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community, or who are of a different race or social class than you. So what do you do then? Well, you might be surprised to know that just imagining these positive interactions can help reduce prejudice, too.

Imagined Contact Theory

That’s right! In 2008, researchers took the Intergroup Contact Theory one step further. What would happen if people simply imagined that they were having positive interactions with someone in an “outgroup?”

They attempted to answer the question like this: researchers separated different groups of participants into two groups. One group was instructed to think about a positive interaction with an elderly person. The other group was instructed to think about an empty field. Once the exercise was over, the researchers measured the potential for prejudice against the elderly among the participants.

As it turned out, the groups who had imagined the positive interaction with the elderly reported lower prejudice against the elderly than the groups who were told just to think about an empty field. There were no elderly people involved in the study - just imagination.

Through further studies of imagined contact theory, researchers have found that simply imagining positive interactions with people can help you improve your attitude, increase your desire for contact with others, and improve how you work within groups. Having trouble with a group project at school? Imagine it going well before you head to class. Worried about how you will interact with your family during your next Thanksgiving dinner? Imagine an evening of laughs and good conversation. Frustrated at people who might be on the other side of the aisle than you? Picture yourselves sitting down and having a conversation in which you both see eye to eye. You might just be more willing to have that conversation.

The Power of Imagination

Sure, this can sound pretty crazy, but the mind does some pretty crazy things. In fact, many psychologists would agree that this exercise is so powerful because the mind has trouble knowing the difference between what is real and what is imagined. We scream and cry when we have nightmares. Reliving trauma in our minds can be just as harmful as experiencing it for the first time. Imagination isn’t just a silly thing that we do when we are children or we are bored - the thoughts we have can make an impact.

One way to look at the Imagined Contact Theory is to think about manifestation. When we want to manifest something, we picture it over and over in our minds. We repeat affirmations that we don’t necessarily believe. And while picturing a new car in our minds won’t make a car appear in front of us, it will put us in the right mindset to work for that car, save money for that car, and look for opportunities to get that car.

Imagined contact theory can do the same thing. Simply imagining a positive interaction with anyone won’t change who they are. But when you are prepared to have a positive interaction with someone, you might let small things go, give people the benefit of the doubt, or try to see things from their point of view. We do these things for the people we love - why can’t we do them for the people that we used to judge?

Guided Meditations Can Help

This can still feel like a strange practice to try. If you don’t know where to begin, try out a loving-kindness meditation. This type of Buddhist meditation asks you to send love and positivity out to yourself, people you love, people you don’t always love, and all people of the world. This isn’t always easy to do, but starting by sending love to people that you already love can help you ease into this practice and spread the love even further.

The same approach can be taken with imagined contact. First, think about walking through a nice park on a warm, sunny day. Imagine that you come into contact with friends or family that you love. Picture a lovely conversation between all of you - everyone is laughing and smiling. Next, picture in your mind that someone in the group introduces someone who you might be skeptical about at first. But everyone in the group is accepting and welcoming of them. As the conversation continues, all of you laugh together. Everyone keeps an open mind, shares, and has positive feelings at the end of the day.

See, how hard was that? This simple exercise can help you before interacting with anyone who might make you uncomfortable or nervous for whatever reason. Manifest positive interactions with imagined contact!

Related posts:

• The Psychology of Long Distance Relationships
• Beck’s Depression Inventory (BDI Test)
• Operant Conditioning (Examples + Research)
• Variable Interval Reinforcement Schedule (Examples)
• Concrete Operational Stage (3rd Cognitive Development)

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• SciComm Series

Episode 44: The Contact Hypothesis

How can we make the world less prejudiced? Research from the social sciences hints at a promising solution. This week, we do a deep dive on “The Contact Hypothesis”: what it is, how we know it works, and what its limits are.

We hear from four experts in this area whose research sheds light on the question:

• Tom Pettigrew , emeritus professor of psychology at University of California, Santa Cruz
• Linda Tropp , professor of social psychology at University of Massachusetts-Amherst
• Shreya Bhattacharya , economist; PhD from the University of Houston
• Salma Mousa , assistant professor of political science at Yale University

Download a PDF version of this episode’s transcript.

Note: Minor changes to this episode’s script arose in editing.

In June 2014, insurgents from the extremist group, ISIS – the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria – stormed into the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, defeating the Iraqi Army and taking control of the city. 

SALMA MOUSA: And that campaign involved ethnic cleansing of religious minorities, primarily Yazidis, but also smaller numbers of Christians and Muslim groups as well, who were forcibly displaced basically overnight and who would remain displaced for two or three years, even though they thought they would be home after the weekend.

That’s Salma Mousa. She’s a political science professor at Yale. In 2014, she watched the news of ISIS in Mosul from her home in California. She may have been geographically far away at the time…

SALMA MOUSA: But it’s not a topic that was ever that far from home for me. I’m from Egypt. I grew up in the Middle East, almost my entire life. I did my undergrad there. My school was bombed by Al-Qaeda when I lived in Saudi Arabia. I was out of school for a few months. So this is not like, unfortunately it’s not like a new topic for me. I’m not going to say my family’s affected as much as other people’s, but, it’s something that’s in the periphery and it’s something you’re kind of familiar with, like this kind of extremism and… But you never really see it take root like ISIS took root. I think like lots of other people, we kind of saw ISIS and thought, okay, this is like an Al-Qaeda branch. And sometimes they take over a few neighborhoods at a time in Iraq, but it doesn’t last for more than a few days or a few weeks. And then they’re going to be just stamped out by the army, by the local police. And this was really different. All of a sudden you’re seeing these scenes where Mosul fell. Like Mosul—one of the biggest cities in Iraq—it just fell, and I could not believe my eyes that ISIS took over a city that big and that important and held onto it for so long. 

When ISIS seized Mosul, thousands of Christians fled, many taking refuge in Iraq’s northern Kurdish region. This was just the latest chapter in Christian life in this country. Since the US overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003, there’s been a marked shift in Christian-Muslim relations there. Twenty years ago, nearly 1.5 million Christians lived in Iraq but now only a few hundred thousand still live within the country’s borders. As the Associated Press puts it: the Christian people “who remain in Iraq feel abandoned, bitter, and helpless, some wary of neighbors with whom they once shared feasts and religious celebrations, Muslims and Christians alike.” [1]

Around the time ISIS took over Mosul, Salma Mousa had just started as a PhD student in Stanford’s political science department. As she watched the events play out, she wondered whether there was anything she could do to help the area move forward.

SALMA MOUSA: And I just thought like, I personally care about this topic because I want the Middle East to be diverse. The Arab world has always been a diverse place. And to see it be emptied of its ethnic and religious diversity for me is, is a really deep, personal tragedy at just a national– At every single level, it’s a tragedy, and I want to do everything I can to preserve that social fabric and that diversity that’s always characterized the Middle East. So when I saw this happening, I thought, okay, we need to get to work on this. I’m not going to fix Iraq in a day, but what are some of the things that are happening on the ground that people are trying to do to fix this? Like how can we possibly think about moving forward after this kind of tragedy and what can research, uh, tell us about it?

You’re listening to Opinion Science, the show about our opinions, where they come from and how they change. I’m Andy Luttrell. And we’ll hear about Salma Mousa’s research in Iraq in a little bit, but we need to lay some ground work first.

This week we’re going to dive deep into a concept in social science called the  contact hypothesis . It’s probably the most thoroughly studied tool for addressing prejudice, and it’s been explored for decades by people all over the world. We’ll hear from experts in psychology, political science, economics, and sociology as we unpack what the contact hypothesis is, whether it actually works, and what its limitations are.

Now, social relations are super complex, and I won’t even try to explore every issue relating to racism, social class, religious conflict, and all the other ways discrimination rears its ugly head. But to me, the seed at the center of a lot of this stuff—and what makes it relevant to this show—is the notion of  prejudice . At its most basic, prejudice is an opinion we form of an entire group of people. Someone who thinks negatively of religious minorities, for example, has a prejudice. And these general prejudices about groups can spill over into how we think about and act toward individual people from those groups, unfairly giving advantages or disadvantages to someone not because of who they are but because of how we label them.

Now, our prejudices come from all sorts of places, but one of the nagging problems is that we usually don’t really  know  the people we have prejudices about. So maybe—just maybe—the key to stopping prejudice in its tracks is just bringing people together. That’s the gist of the contact hypothesis, but let’s unpack it a little more…

Act I: Origins

Gordon Allport and The Nature of Prejudice

There’s no person more tied to the contact hypothesis than Gordon Allport. He was born in 1897 in Montezuma, Indiana. By the time he finished high school, his brother, Floyd, was working on a PhD in psychology at Harvard University and encouraged Gordon to apply to Harvard for college. I’m sure they had no idea that Harvard would become Gordon’s home—he finished his undergraduate degree there, then completed a PhD there  in just two years!  A couple years later, he returned to Harvard as a social science instructor, then as a professor, and he stayed there for the rest of his career.

Anyhow, in 1954, Gordon Allport published a book called  The Nature of Prejudice  containing 31 chapters exploring prejudice and where it comes from. In fact, they even released an abridged paperback version—you could buy it at the airport—and it became a best-selling social psychology book in the public. Allport once said that the book was his proudest achievement [2] , and reflecting on the influence of the book fifty years later, a group of psychologists seemed to agree, writing: “ There is no debate that Gordon W. Allport’s  The Nature of Prejudice  is the foundational work for the social psychology of prejudice… [H]alf a century after its publication, [it] remains the most widely cited work on prejudice. ” [3]  Almost seventy years ago, Allport created the roadmap for how we still think about these issues today.

What’s interesting, though, is that by his nature, Allport was a personality psychologist. It’s thanks to him that the study of personality ever blossomed into what it is today. But it meant that a lot of  The Nature of Prejudice  skirts around the social side of the equation. 

TOM PETTIGREW: He was first a personality psychologist, second, a social psychologist. And, uh, he didn’t think too much of sociology. He thought there must be something to it, he once said to me, but he didn’t understand it. But, for him, causation came from individuals, emanated from people.

That’s Tom Pettigrew. He was a graduate student at Harvard, working with Allport in the years leading up to the book. In those days, it was his job to fetch books at the library for Allport as he was doing the research. We’ll get back to Tom’s story in a second, but despite what he says about Allport’s orientation as a personality psychologist, one place where social influences get the spotlight is Chapter 16:  The Effect of Contact.

Okay, so what do we mean by “contact”? Well, deciding what counts as contact and what doesn’t can get a little fuzzy, but we’re basically talking about bringing people together from different backgrounds. This could be as simple as just increasing your exposure to people from different groups, although some researchers don’t think that’s quite enough to count as true “contact.” More often what we mean is creating opportunities for social  interactions  between individual people who differ in things like their race or religion. One recent report used the term  “meaningful social mixing ,” which I think captures the spirit of what contact is supposed to be. [4]

Just a quick terminology check before we move on. In the social sciences, we often lean on this term, “intergroup.” Our point is that each of us belongs to different groups. We get our identities from them, and we’re often quick to categorize other people based on them. And when I say “group,” I don’t mean like the handful of people you get lunch with—I mean big socially identifying groups. These include the kinds of identifiers that end up on surveys—gender, race, age group—among other things we use to categorize ourselves—religion, sexual orientation, disability status, hair color, etc.

So,  intergroup  contact is about interactions across these group lines—White and Black people working together in an office, Christians and Muslims playing on the same sports team, Cis and Transgender people having an engaged conversation.

Now, back in the early 20th century, the assumption was actually that contact would only make intergroup tensions  worse . It seemed like hostility was a given, so why rock the boat? One sociologist even wrote in 1934 that bringing people together from different racial groups would only breed “suspicion, fear, resentment, disturbance, and at times open conflict.” [5]

But then there was some reason to rethink that assumption. During World War II, the United States Army made it a policy that White and Black soldiers would fight separately. No mixed units allowed. But the realities of war called for a change of plans. Infantry replacements were sorely needed, and the Army decided to replace various White platoons with Black platoons and suddenly Black and White soldiers were fighting side by side. Was it the social disaster that early sociologists feared?

Well, as one platoon sergeant from South Carolina said:

“When I heard about it, I said I’d be damned if I’d wear the same shoulder patch they did. After that first day when we saw how they fought, I changed my mind. They’re just like any of the other boys to us.”

A company commander from Nevada said:

“You might think that wouldn’t work well, but it did. The white squad didn’t want to leave the platoon. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

And a platoon commander from Texas put it even more plainly:

“We all expected trouble. Haven’t had any.”

Surveys from Army’s Research Branch tell a similar story. When they asked white soldiers in units that remained segregated, only 18% thought it would be a good idea to mix Black and White platoons. But when they asked white soldiers who had already been made to mix with Black soldiers, 64% said mixing platoons was a good idea. [6]

Then in 1945, the  Social Science Research Council  established a committee to explore techniques for reducing intergroup hostility. They asked Robin Williams to prepare a report. I know—not  that  Robin Williams. I’m talking about Robin Williams, Jr., a sociologist at Cornell University. He produced a report suggesting more than 100 propositions and testable hypotheses for improving intergroup relations. One of them—#78—highlighted the potential benefits of intergroup contact. He outlines a few considerations for what would boost the effectiveness of contact, but that was that.

TOM PETTIGREW: It was just a couple pages in a book of his that he put this down, but Allport was impressed by it and cites him in his nature of prejudice book.

As Allport’s writing his tome on prejudice, he happens across Williams’ ideas and the research on integrated units in the military, and voila…we have Chapter 16 on  The Effect of Contact , which he introduces by writing:

It has sometimes been held that merely by assembling people without regard for race, color, religion, or national origin, we can thereby destroy stereotypes and develop friendly attitudes. The case is not so simple. [7]

Because the prevailing view at the time was that contact would only make prejudice worse, Allport was careful to outline the pieces that would have to be in place for contact to actually be beneficial. Now almost every textbook covering the contact hypothesis comes with four general conditions that theoretically must be met for contact to reduce prejudice.

#1.  Equal Status . Even if two groups have different status in society, bringing them together should only reduce prejudice if those groups have equal status  within  the contact situation. That is, one person shouldn’t be the leader and the other the follower, one the boss and the other the employee. It’s only when they come together on an even playing field that we should expect to see the benefits.

#2.  Common Goals.  The people who are getting together should share the same goals. Imagine a football team—everyone on the team wants to win.

#3.  Cooperation.  It’s one thing to have the same goals, but the people who are interacting need to cooperate toward reaching those goals. If one person’s doing all the work—or worse, there’s active competition for the same goal, we shouldn’t expect to see much good come of this kind of contact.

#4.  Institutional Support.  It should be clear that the folks in charge support social mixing and the reduction of prejudice. Laws and customs shouldn’t get in the way. For example, trying to promote intergroup contact wouldn’t seem to have much impact when there are official segregation policies in place.

And there we have,  the Contact Hypothesis —an idea with some straightforward origins that would become the most studied method for reducing prejudice.

Tom Pettigrew’s Impact

Even though it’s Allport’s name that’s been stuck to the Contact Hypothesis for decades, I’d argue that it’s actually Tom Pettigrew—his former grad student—who’s been the most ardent champion of intergroup contact.

Tom grew up in Richmond, Virginia in the 30s and 40s. Not a time or a place with super progressive views on race. In his new book, Tom writes that “slavery was never once discussed in [his] … public schooling.” [8]  But thanks to a handful of personal experiences with African Americans growing up, Tom had seen through the thin veil meant to keep racism alive. And he didn’t keep his opinions to himself. He was expelled in 7th grade for calling his history teacher a bigot after she routinely disparaged African Americans. Then years later when he was doing research on apartheid in South Africa, he was told by a government official that he was no longer welcome in the Union of South Africa. In response, he said: “Why sir, that’s the biggest compliment I’ve ever received.” [9]

In the 60s, he was a vocal advocate for racial desegregation in American schools, giving speeches, writing popular articles, and serving as an expert witness in various court cases. He even hosted a 15-part public television series in 1962 called Epitaph for Jim Crow: The Dynamics of Desegregation. [10]

ANNOUNCER [TV clip]: The Dynamics of Desegregation

TOM PETTIGREW [TV clip]: Race relations are the most important domestic problem facing our nation today. We’re going to take a new look at race relations and see if we can clear up some of these misconceptions, using the tools and techniques of the sociologist and the social psychologist.

But let’s back up—it was in 1952 that he arrived at Harvard as a graduate student to work with Gordon Allport, who was in the thick of his research for the big book on prejudice. I asked Tom what Allport was like as a person.

TOM PETTIGREW: He was a tall man. He was actually shy. He was warm, but shy. He certaintly wasn’t shy in his writings. He was intellectually confident, but socially, quite a bit shy. And he had trouble expressing hostility, and I have no such trouble. And, he liked me in part because I used to express a lot of it for him.

It was his third year in grad school when  The Nature of Prejudice  was officially released, and Tom was in awe.

TOM PETTIGREW: I virtually committed it to memory. And so for my special exams, I requested to write on contact, and that’s where the four factors come from. 

Wait a second. I thought these were Allport’s four conditions.

TOM PETTIGREW: They aren’t in Allport’s chapter. They were what I deduced from the chapter in order to make it easier to study for the exam, and Allport accepted it, and I’ve used it, but that’s why the four factors got stuck in psychology textbooks.

Yeah, it’s true. If you look in Allport’s original chapter, you can definitely see where he talks about the importance of equal status, cooperation, etc., but at no point does he say: “Here are the four conditions for optimal intergroup contact!” That was Tom…and so I’m now referring to them as Pettigrew’s Four Conditions.

But over the years, he’s actually developed some mixed feelings about this contribution.

TOM PETTIGREW: People started then publishing papers all over the place saying, Hey, here’s another factor that’s required. Another factor. And before long, contact theory by the sixties was getting to be worthless because there were virtually no contact conditions in the whole world that would meet all of this laundry list of conditions.

Research on the contact hypothesis was spinning. It captured the attention of so many people, and everyone wanted a piece of it. But when you sit back and look at a giant pile of studies, how can you make sense of it? Does contact actually work? Are these special conditions really necessary?

One way to answer questions like this is to use a statistical tool called  meta-analysis . It’s basically a way of combining the results of a bunch of different studies and summarizing them mathematically. It also lets you look at patterns that emerge—like does contact reduce prejudice more in studies that made sure people were equal status? You see where I’m going with this.

TOM PETTIGREW: So, contact made sense to me in terms of my own life, but I’d always wanted to do a meta-analysis on the studies, but there were two things holding me back. One, there weren’t that many studies for quite a while. And two, the way people summarize research was quite inadequate in the old days, by which I mean the sixties and seventies. It wasn’t until meta-analysis came along that I began to think, Ah, now we have a real way to summarize effects. Yeah. And now we’ve got enough studies to do it. So those two things had to come together for me, even though I’d been wanting to do it for 50 years. And then, oh, there’s another essential. You have to have somebody more compulsive than I am and who’s really good at it. And that was Linda. 

LINDA TROPP: Yeah, that that would be me. I was definitely the very detail-oriented, record keeping one of the pair of us.

That’s Linda Tropp. She’s a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, but she got her PhD in 2000 at UC Santa Cruz—where Tom Pettigrew was a professor…sort of. She had been wanting to work him as a grad student…

LINDA TROPP: …but Tom had officially retired in 1994 and I was like, oh, darn I’ll never get the chance to work with him. But I had a class with Tom, and I was a TA for Tom because he was still teaching some classes after his official retirement. And then at one point in my third year, it was the third floor landing in Social Sciences 2, by the elevators, if you remember this, Tom. You told me that you were planning to apply for a grant to support a med analysis of the contact literature. And then Tom asked me if it would be okay if he wrote me into the grant as the designated grad student to work with him on the project. And I was like, of course. I’d be honored. And so that was really, now upon reflection, I had no idea that that little conversation would have such an impact on the next 10 years of my life.

And so they began collecting study after study after study from the sixty years of research testing the contact hypothesis.

LINDA TROPP: We were estimating like, it’ll be like 150 studies, something like that. Right? Like we thought the project would last maybe a couple of years. And, little did I know that, I mean, it took us five and a half or six years just to create the dataset because we kept trying to get to the point where, you know, you look up studies from different people’s reference lists and you start coming across the exact same studies that we’ve kind of exhausted the literature, and we just kept not getting to that point. #

TOM PETTIGREW: Linda is quite right. I didn’t realize what a job it was going to really be. I’d never done– I’d done small analyses of 20 studies or something, but nothing like this. And it did go on and on. I think we, before we were through with gathered almost 900, of which 515 met our conditions, but my poor wife thought it would never end and it didn’t look like it was going to for a while.

LINDA TROPP: And then also I do remember where you had expressed at one point that we should have a meta-analysis that covers the whole century. And we had only gathered papers through December, 1999, which did not represent the whole century, and that we should therefore collect papers from December, 2000. Do you remember that?

TOM PETTIGREW: No, I had forgotten that. That was my compulsivity. I wanted to the end of the century. 

LINDA TROPP: Yes. We both had compulsivity that presented different ways.

TOM PETTIGREW: In different ways, yeah.

And when all was said and done, data from more than 250,000 people from 38 different countries collected over 60 years, showed that overall, having contact with people from different groups is reliably related to having less prejudice. [11]

And what about Allport’s—or Pettigrew’s—four conditions? Equal status, cooperation, common goals, and institutional support?

TOM PETTIGREW: …they turn out not to be essential after all. But they are facilitating. If you have them, you get a bigger effect. But you actually get at least small effects, positive effects, even when these conditions don’t hold. And one of the things that particularly interested me, and Linda has engaged in some of this research: In the most conflicted parts of the world—Cypress, South Africa, Pakistan, wherever—with all the conflict, you still get some effect, even though you could never argue that the four factors are operating. So, they do facilitate, but they’re not essential.

Yep. The more interaction we have with people who are different from us, the less prejudice we feel about them…even when none of the four factors apply. Sure, they help, but they’re not necessary.

The impact of this whole project can’t be overstated. The general view is that this was the thing that reinvigorated the contact hypothesis. In answering the question “Does contact work,” the psychologist Martin Hewstone wrote: “Thanks to the Herculean labours of Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp…we can now answer with an emphatic ‘yes.’”

But where does that leave us?

LINDA TROPP: As I see it, at least one of the crucial things that I think our meta-analysis did was to help people or researchers in the field move beyond the basic question of does contact reduce prejudice or does contact improve intergroup attitudes? I think as I read a lot of the literature preceding our project, it was kind of like a ping pong match where people would be like, yes, contact works. No, it doesn’t. And it was just kind of one or the other. And I think having compiled the database and presented the findings that we do, it has allowed us as a discipline or even across disciplines to consider more interesting and perhaps more nuanced questions related to contact effect. So, you know, we kind of can set aside the basic question of “does contact reduce prejudice?” and say, “Well, for whom is contact most likely to reduce prejudice? What types of effects might contact have beyond just reducing prejudice? What about social change? What about policy support? What about many other types of outcomes?” So I think it’s helped us to really think more broadly and expansively about what contact can do and perhaps what contact cannot do.

Act II: Contemporary Experiments

So from a chapter in a book about prejudice in 1954 to today, the idea that contact with people who are different from you can minimize group hostilities has gained a lot of traction. Lots of studies have supported the idea. But one thing that can make these studies tricky is that a lot of them are correlational. You might have heard the saying: “correlation does not necessarily imply causation,” and that can be a real problem if we’re trying to build programs that will have an impact.

Here’s what I mean by that. Let’s look back at a study Gordon Allport did with his PhD student Bernard Kramer back in the 1940s. [12]  That’s before he wrote The Nature of Prejudice. Back when you could publish an article in psychology that’s just titled “Some Roots of Prejudice.” They had asked a bunch of college students how often they associated with Jewish people, and the more these students—who were not Jewish themselves—said they had contact with Jewish people, the less anti-Semitic they were. Simple evidence for the contact hypothesis from 75 years ago.

So, sure one way to interpret that is that engaging in contact with Jewish people  made  these students less prejudiced. But exactly the same correlation could be revealing that it’s the students who were  already  less prejudiced who go out and have these diverse social experiences. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg conundrum. What came first? The contact or the lack of prejudice?

The way we deal with this in the social sciences is to run a randomized experiment. If we can get a big group of people and randomly give only some of them a contact experience, we can see whether that experience has a true influence on what comes next.

Unfortunately, we just don’t have a ton of studies like this. Just a few years ago, researchers went out and found all the studies they could that used a randomized experiment and looked at changes to prejudice at least a little while after the contact experience happened. They found just 27 experiments. The good news, though, is that if you  meta-analyze  those 27 experiments, you find that there’s reliable evidence that having a face-to-face interaction with someone from a different group does lead to less prejudice. [13]

Because I think these kinds of experiments are really compelling, I want to focus the second part of this podcast on two very recent examples of them. They’re from the last few years and highlight what contact could look like in the real world, around the globe…and what its limits might be.

First, we head to India…

Inter-Caste Contact

You’re probably familiar with the caste system in India. And maybe you’ve heard that it’s this old system of social class that has since been abolished. The reality is more complicated, as it usually is. And don’t let this podcast be your authoritative final word on caste dynamics, but a quick overview of things will set the stage…

Basically, a rigid hierarchical system for Hindu social groups goes back thousands of years, and is by and large based on one’s occupation. The highest status caste would include priests and teachers, and the lowest status caste would include street sweepers and people doing society’s “unclean” jobs. Historically, the caste system led to regional segregation, rules about who could share food, and strict traditions of who could marry who. This all reached its peak during British colonization as an easy way to enforce simple categories in the census. In fact, some historians claim that caste didn’t have nearly this significance before British rule. [14]

But in any case, following India’s independence, the 1950 constitution made caste-based discrimination illegal. Granted, though, there were still officially recognized castes, primarily to enact various affirmative action programs to help correct for historical inequalities. Just some terminology—we can distinguish between  privileged  caste and various disadvantaged castes, which are called “Scheduled Caste,” “Scheduled Tribes,” and “Other Backward Classes”

But anyhow, the point is that caste-based discrimination was made illegal. And just as the U.S. Civil Rights movement abolished all racism, so too must the caste system eradicated from India, right? Yeah, not quite.

In addition to plenty of anecdotal evidence, there are clear data showing caste-based discrimination in the modern era. For example, in 2005 researchers conducted a simple experiment out in the world. [15]  They collected up hundreds of job advertisements from newspapers all over India. And they sent almost 5,000 fake resumes to those jobs. Now, these resumes were carefully designed so that they had identical educational qualifications and job experience. They were objectively strong applications. The only parts that really changed from one application to the next was the applicant’s name. In India, last names are closely tied to caste. You’d know someone’s caste as soon as you knew their name. So the researchers randomized the applications so that sometimes the person’s name denoted a high caste and sometimes a low caste.

Out of all of these resumes, only about 9% resulted in an invitation to interview for the job. Typical job search. But the question is whether the success rate differed depending on caste, and it did. If the name on the resume denoted a higher caste, the odds of getting an interview were 1.5 times the odds of getting an interview if it was a low caste name on basically the exact same resume. So whatever people might be saying about caste being a thing of the past, we can still see its influence.

SHREYA BHATTACHARYA: It’s surprising how high caste segregation is when it comes to urban areas even today.

That’s economist Shreya Bhattacharya, and she’s studied whether  contact  might help address caste-based prejudices in India. Because if there are these persistent stereotypes about caste and these groups remain fairly segregated, maybe bringing them together would be enough to chip away at the problem.

And, I guess I should say that Shreya  eventually  studied the contact hypothesis. It all started just because she was interested in these slum relocation programs happening in India. As of the 2011 census, 65 million people were living in slums throughout India [16] —that’s the whole population of France. [17]

SHREYA BHATTACHARYA: Slums are essentially like these, uh, sort of shanty settlements where people are living. And slums are pretty homogeneous in terms of caste composition. So there are clearly, you know, caste hierarchies at play, even there. That’s why you see the residential segregation by caste that you do see, because it operates even within slums.

For a variety of reasons, government programs have emerged that give free permanent housing to people living in slums. The Indian Government has even said it aims to provide almost 20 million houses for these purposes by 2022. [18]

Now, there’s plenty of debate about whether these programs are ultimately good or bad, but they allow us to study what happens when major changes are implemented in people’s lives. 

SHREYA BHATTACHARYA: Most people study slum relocation in Mumbai. And I heard of this relocation policy in Pune, and I said, oh my God, I know that city really well. Let me go and see what this is about.

By the way, Pune is a big city in India southeast of Mumbai. More than 3 million people live there—it’s one of the cities that Shreya grew up in.

So she went to check out this big slum relocation project and talked to people had been moved there. But even after doing some initial poking around, she couldn’t shake her interest in it.

SHREYA BHATTACHARYA: I started my PhD at the University of Houston, but every summer when I would be back in India, I would always just go back to see, oh, you know, what’s happened with the relocation? Are they still doing it? And you know, what’s the organization of people here? And, um, I think then I stumbled upon this really critical piece of information while communicating with the local government officials in Pune, which was, they showed me the list of people who were expected to actually move in in one of the next rounds of relocation.

And remember—caste is apparent in people’s names. So when Shreya was looking over the list, it sure looked like this slum relocation apartment was integrating different castes together. When she asked how they were deciding who to put in which apartment, they said…

SHREYA BHATTACHARYA: Oh, you know, we’re just seeing how far each slum is from the relocation site and accordingly just randomly, you know, deciding to put people in apartments. Our objective is to just fill up like the seven-story apartment and all the apartments there.

This is huge. This simple approach to filling apartments means that the government was basically running a randomized experiment on the contact hypothesis. It wasn’t that the people who were already more tolerant could opt into a more diverse community. Instead, their residential fate was essentially a coin flip.

By the way, it’s worth mentioning that this whole thing is reminiscent of some of the early research that got Gordon Allport thinking about the power of contact in the first place. A couple studies from the early 1950s looked at newly desegregated public housing apartments in the United States. [19] [20]  They found that feelings between White and Black people were more positive in the desegregated apartments. Would the same happen for caste more than 60 years later?

Shreya used official records to figure out the caste composition of each floor in this new apartment building. What proportion was privileged caste? What proportion was scheduled caste and scheduled tribes? [21]

SHREYA BHATTACHARYA: On a given floor, you’re going to find anywhere between 30% to 80% of people on the floor who are from a different caste than you.

And after people had time to settle in their new homes, she and her team surveyed the residents in more than 200 households.

In the end, she found that people who were randomly assigned to a floor with more neighbors of a different caste as them, the more open they were to other castes. There are a couple places in the survey where we can see that this is the case.

First, she asked people:  How much do you trust members of another caste?  And people who had been randomly assigned to live on a floor with more caste diversity eventually said they were more trusting of members of other castes.

But to get more to the heart of segregation, she asked about inter-caste marriage. As recently as 2005, less than 4 percent of all married women in the state where Pune is had married outside their own caste. [22]  Less than 4 percent! And Shreya asked the relocation residents about this. Specifically, she asked how much they would support a law prohibiting inter-caste marriage and how much they would support an inter-caste marriage in their own family. The more caste diversity there was among their neighbors, the more cool people were with inter-caste marriage. And these effects of caste diversity got bigger the longer someone had lived in this new apartment.

This is all interesting, though, because it’s not clear that people actually made many close friends outside their own caste after moving to a diverse neighborhood.

SHREYA BHATTACHARYA: I think one of the ways this is working is through exposure, essentially. People would typically otherwise stay in very segregated neighborhoods where they’re only with people of their own type. And what’s suddenly happening is you don’t have a choice. Your slum is getting demolished, so you have to go and stay in this apartment.

So you don’t have a choice. Then you have to like mix with these neighbors or at least live in—Even if you don’t talk to anybody, you have a neighbor who you’re going to see up and down the corridor every day. So I think this has something to do with exposure. And I will not rule out that maybe in the beginning, there were more antagonistic attitudes in the beginning, because you’re suddenly staying with a whole bunch of people who you’ve never interacted with.

But I guess over time, seeing more and more of these people, more and more people who are not from your type and you realize that, you know, they’re not actually not that bad and they lead to being good citizens, good neighbors. I think it’s just the seeing them every day, and you realize that, you know, maybe your prejudices that you’ve been fed with are really not true.

Christian-Muslim Contact in Iraq

Okay, let’s look at another recent case of contact in action. Whereas Shreya’s study took advantage of a naturally occurring experiment with the governments’ slum relocation program, what if we wanted to deliberately create a contact experience? And you know, with caste in India, it’s something that people have already been trying to claim doesn’t matter anymore, so maybe people were ready to shed those prejudices. But what about intergroup tensions in the wake of a deep conflict that’s on everyone’s minds?

Maybe you see where I’m going with this. We’re going back to the conflict between Muslim and Christian people in Iraq. As a quick reminder, in 2014, ISIS took over huge swaths of land in Syria and Northern Iraq under a banner of ethnic cleansing of religious minorities, and Christian people—among others—were forcibly displaced, driven out of their homes for years.

Here’s political scientist Salma Mousa again. [23]

SALMA MOUSA: That kind of experience is obviously really traumatizing when you’re a few miles away from your home, but you know that there is an ISIS commander or fighter who’s living in your house, in your bed, who’s stolen all of your valuables. And you just hear word from your neighbors or people around of what’s left of your house. You don’t really know what’s going on. You come back three years later, you see everything, valuables gone. The deeds to your house are gone. It’s hard for you to prove ownership. Your AC is not even in the wall anymore. They’ve taken absolutely everything they could take. And this is obviously– this is a kind of experience that defines a community. This becomes your identity. Like, your identity become centered around this victimhood and this kind of experience of going through this kind of ethnic cleansing. And so we have a bunch of research about potential strategies to reduce prejudice and to improve intergroup relations. But for me, the real question is do these strategies work where it really, really counts? Like when the rubber hits the road and people can barely look each other in the eye, like, can these kinds of interventions to humanize the other, can that actually get us out of this and move towards some kind of social reconstruction?

The answer—maybe—was contact. An NGO in Iraq had reached out to Salma about surveying displaced Christians in IDP camps—IDP is “internally displaced people.” As they were doing these surveys, she started to wonder if there was anything more they could do—like actually do something in the community to see if it would help ease tensions between Christians and Muslims. She’d read about the contact hypothesis and wanted to see if that would work. The question was…what’s the right backdrop for studying contact in these environments?

SALMA MOUSA: We ran some focus groups in the camps and the number one suggestion that came out of that with soccer leagues, that was the thing people wanted to do. And actually, I had played around before with the idea of like drama and literature, literature courses, and art courses, and no one signed up. These are people in IDP camps with nothing to do. No one side signed up. And so that’s when we kind of went back to the drawing board and soccer became the obvious answer. And fortunately, it fulfills basically all of the criteria for contact according to the classic theory.

Those four classic criteria again are:

Equal Status – Everyone on the team has an important part to play.

Cooperation – Everyone on the team is working together.

Common Goals – Win the game!

Authority Support – Community leaders signed off on these activities.

SALMA MOUSA: So once we knew soccer was the way to go, we set up a series of new soccer leagues. So in total, we actually ran four leagues and the idea was that we would recruit pre-existing Christian teams. So the teams in this area generally are pretty ethnically homogenous, so we just sent an invite out to all the teams in the area and just said, we’re going to start up these new set of leagues and they’re going to be great. There’s going to be professional referees and new fields and bleachers, and people are going to watch and new uniforms, like it’s going to be very professionalized. But there’s like one big caveat, which is that to sign up, you agree that your team will have some players added.

And that’s the key. This wasn’t just a fun way to bring some lively soccer games to these communities, it was an experiment in contact.

All of the teams in these new soccer leagues were told that part of the goal was building community, so each team would be assigned three additional players. By random chance, these additional players would be three more Christians or they would be three Muslim players from nearby leagues.

Now, you might be thinking, why is it that we want to get Christians to love a group that ran them out of their homes? Let’s be super clear—it’s the extremist group ISIS that forced Christians to flee—not Muslims in general. In fact, the Muslim players in Salma’s soccer leagues—they had been displaced by ISIS, too. Nevertheless, the whole mess shook Christians’ feelings about Muslims in general. These were the rifts we’re hoping to mend.

SALMA MOUSA: I don’t bring together perpetrators and victims. That’s something I’m ethically not interested in.

But when she was getting permission from local priests to run the soccer leagues, they had the same reservations.

SALMA MOUSA: They were very skeptical, and I completely understood their skepticism. And it was mainly, why should we teach Christians to trust Muslims again, after what happened to us? Which I completely understand, obviously. And so that was, that made it even more clear to me that we had to target the intervention only to displaced people so we don’t get any of this victim-perpetrator thing going on.

And as you might expect, there were some growing pains. It took a change in norms for these mixed leagues to feel okay.

SALMA MOUSA: We had some players who we interviewed three or four months after the league ended, who said, before these leagues happened, you would never see a Christian team with a Muslim player. It just didn’t happen. And we did get some resistance. One of the teams was affiliated with kind of a, I wouldn’t go so far to say separatist, but definitely like a movement that’s for the independence of Syriac Christians in the area. And they were quite staunch in—they have a very strong sense of communal identity, and they were really hesitant. And that team actually happened to get randomized into the treatment group. And we obviously, we’re not going to force anyone. We just said, okay, this is the setup. Like, you agree to participate under these terms and we’re not forcing you. So it’s up to you just let us know what you decide. And a few weeks later, they came back and said, okay, well we’ll do it because they saw everyone else was doing it.

And it wasn’t just this one team that was hesitant at first.

SALMA MOUSA: At the beginning of the program, we saw a lot of reluctance to really welcome the Muslim players. The Christian players were not speaking Arabic, even though they’re fluent in Arabic because they kind of did not want the Muslim players to understand what’s going on. Even on the benches, they weren’t sitting next to each other. They were referring to these fields as ‘our fields.’ Why are you inviting the Muslims to the league, even? They’re going to ruin the league. They’re going to ruin our fields.

So, did the players change their tune? Did spending a couple months getting to know a few Muslim guys do anything to these Christians’ views? It seemed like it…

SALMA MOUSA: By the end of the program, one of the research staff was kind of joking with one of the players, because he was like, oh yeah, you’re going to invite them to the event, that’s great. And she’s like, what? I thought you, I thought Muslims suck and you know, they’re like, they’re the worst. And we shouldn’t, they’re ruining the league. And then the player was like, what are you saying? Don’t talk like that. We don’t talk like that here. So this norm against hate speech against Muslims, which was quite common that at the beginning of the program, it seemed to have really become taboo. Like, what are you talking about? We don’t talk about that here.

So it sure sounds like the tides might have been shifting, but this is just one anecdote. If we look across the league and consider the question scientifically, how do we know if this grand experiment actually made a difference? We can look at three key markers of success.

First, at the end of the season, players voted for a “best newcomer” award based on sportsmanship. They couldn’t vote for a player on their own team, but they had to vote for a player who joined the league as one of the additional players. Only 46% of the people on a Christian-only team voted for a Muslim player for this award. But the players who just by random chance had Muslim players join their team? 72% of them voted for a Muslim player for this award.

Second, when the league concluded, everyone was asked if they would volunteer to join a mixed team next season. Players who were randomly assigned Muslim teammates were significantly more likely to agree to play with Muslims again next season, compared to players on all-Christian teams.

And finally, Salma followed up with the players six months after the league ended to see who they were still training with. Only 15% of the players on all-Christian teams were training with Muslims. But of the Christian players on mixed teams, 64% were still training with Muslim buddies.

And there were other signs that contact was working in ways her surveys couldn’t quite pick up. For example, one of the soccer leagues was in a place that was a little harder for the Muslim players to get to.

SALMA MOUSA: …a neighborhood called Ankawa, which is a Christian neighborhood in the city of Erbil. And so the Muslims who we had brought in were coming from other parts of town. And so in that instance, that’s where you saw the Christian players on these mixed teams start to actually pool their money to cover the taxi fare of the Muslim teammates, which was quite touching, actually. Like, the average income of these places is not very high. And they went out of their way to make sure that those guys could come to practice and come to the games, which was really nice to see.

And even after the league had wrapped up, the friendships they’d formed held on.

SALMA MOUSA: Like we see the guys on mixed teams socializing months after the intervention. The Christians are like haggling with the security guards at a, like a bar to let their Muslim teammates come in, uh, to this Christian only bar so they can watch like the champions league final.

But here’s the thing. Even though playing on a mixed team actually succeeded in making Christians more tolerant of the Muslim players they met in the soccer league…

SALMA MOUSA: …it did not really, detectably anyway, change your behaviors or your attitudes toward Muslims in general. So this critical assumption of the contact hypothesis, that how you feel toward the people you meet is going to extend to the entire outgroup. I didn’t find evidence of that.

She had been looking for signs that her soccer players were starting to open up to Muslims in general—people they had never actually met before. For example, she was able to track whether they made a trip to Mosul, which was still a mostly Muslim city, and she organized a social event that was open to players, their families, and their friends, which meant Christian attendees would socialize not just with the Muslims they knew, but Muslim strangers as well. Across these off-the-field behaviors, the players on mixed teams were not reliably more likely to do these things.

So it’s true that one of the big hopes for contact is that the benefits  generalize —meaning they go beyond the specific people you’re interacting with and reshape your views of the whole group itself. And there’s been some evidence that this actually does happen. [24]  But not always. Like, go back to those super early contact studies during World War II where White soldiers came to like the Black soldiers they were fighting with. Even though this was encouraging news, these White soldiers didn’t actually end up becoming more open to Black people in general. [25]

Is this a critical blow to the contact hypothesis? Not necessarily. At least I don’t think so. The challenge is to get better at understanding  when  these experiences chip away at prejudice toward the whole group and when it doesn’t. From a practical perspective, I like how Salma frames the caution we should exercise…

SALMA MOUSA: At the very least, we can highlight that this generalization is not something you can assume is going to be true. And the higher the baseline prejudice, the more ingrained the conflict, the less likely it is that you’re going to get this generalization, because it’s just riskier to trust strangers for people who have been through some kind of personal trauma that importance of vetting people becomes even more important.

Act III:  Limitations

Salma Mousa’s study on contact in Iraq naturally raises the question: are there limits to the benefits of contact? The fact that contact can—and likely will—result in less animosity seems extremely well established. But as we wrap things up, I want to shine a light on two critical issues.

The first thing to consider is whether the contact experiences we’re talking about are ultimately good ones. Listen, I’ve met a lot of people in my life—lots of contact—and I haven’t come away loving every one of them.

So although contact seems to reduce prejudice even when we don’t meet the canonical conditions for optimal contact, one thing seems to be actually critical—that it’s a generally good experience. 

Like, let’s imagine there’s a program trying to combat prejudices against gay and lesbian people and the program arranges for monthly meet ups between people with different sexual orientations. Now, assuming those meetings are at least somewhat pleasant—everyone’s kind and considerate,—this could very well chip away at any prejudices that might have existed.

But what if those meetups go poorly? What if one person is rude and the other is distant? One person feels ridiculed or even physically harmed? Well, the mere fact that there was contact has no magic properties—it was an unpleasant experience, and it might make prejudices just run deeper.

Here’s Linda Tropp again…

LINDA TROPP:  For any single contact experience we have, a negative contact experience will be more impactful on our attitudes than a positive one, which, you know, makes sense as human beings, we tend to be more vigilant in the face of threats, right? We don’t always remember all the positives in our lives. But overall, you know, all things being equal, what they tend to see is that people from different groups typically experience more positive contact than negative contact. So you still emerge with a net positive. So even though each individual contact experience that’s negative might be more impactful on your attitudes, overall, you tend to have more positive interactions than negative interactions with members of other groups. 

But what this also means is– kind of going back to the conflict context, right? If you have some severely negative examples that really stand out in your mind and contribute to kind of framing the narratives for intergroup relations that might help to explain why communities that used to be neighbors, you know, that co-existed pretty well that they might separate into factions, or there might be breakouts of violent conflict even after years of peaceful coexistence or relative integration, because those negative experiences are really impactful.

But let’s say we’re able to implement high-quality, positive contact experiences between people who are different from each other. Majority groups start to see minority groups more positively, minority groups start to see majority groups more positively. Problem solved. World changed. Right?

I mean, the question is whether this is actually what we want. Is getting everyone to like each other the ultimate goal? Political scientist Salma Mousa explains why focusing on reducing prejudice is one thing we can do, but it happens alongside other issues that pervade the societies we live in.

SALMA MOUSA: What we tend to call ‘intergroup conflict’ as scholars, a lot of times is very one-sided and there’s a structural oppression that’s happening of one group that’s the marginalized group. Part of that dynamic includes some individual-level things like prejudice, prejudice is an individual-level thing, but it interacts with these big structural inequalities. And so as scholars, there’s not that much we can do about the big structural inequalities, unfortunately. We can’t do much about war and residential segregation and inequalities in the legal system except draw attention to how they impact people’s lives. But maybe there’s something we can do about prejudice. These kinds of grassroots-level interventions might be one part of the puzzle. And that’s one part of the puzzle that, just from a pragmatic point of view, is one that we’re more likely to influence as just regular people or working with NGOs. And so that’s the one that I focused on in my study. And it’s one that I hope can can shed some light on the role of prejudice and post-conflict social reconstruction and other contexts outside of Iraq as well.

ANDY LUTTRELL: You know, the time course of a prejudice intervention also just seems more manageable to study. Like the class that I teach the most is psych of prejudice and discrimination. And you know, in the back of my head, there’s always this voice of like, yeah, but like, are the individual people really like the movers and shakers of these problems? But you go, but that’s what our tools let us understand, right? Our tools of social science and psychology specifically are like, I can understand what might make one person think one way or the other. It’s a whole other beast to figure out the mechanics of a system that– 

SALMA MOUSA: That’s the million-dollar question is how much do these individual-level interventions– how much does individual prejudice actually matter for shaping a conflict? That’s the million-dollar question. If we were to suddenly like snap our fingers and everyone in Iraq or everyone in Syria or everyone in the U.S. would be 100%, not just tolerant, but accepting and welcoming of all different faiths and races and ethnicities, would we still see this kind of horrible oppression that we see in those countries of certain marginalized groups? If the answer is yes, or if the answer is, yes, but you know, these attitudes are going to revert very quickly after whatever intervention you did is over, then it’s– For me, we have to ask ourselves a serious question of like, are these interventions are worth it?

This has been a major criticism of intergroup contact as a way to make social progress. Is getting everyone to like each other just a Band-Aid that distracts us from the deeper inequalities that will persist? In an influential article in 2010, psychologist John Dixon and his colleagues argued that positive contact between groups does help reduce prejudice, but it also leads members of marginalized groups to be  less  supportive of taking action to dismantle unjust systems. They’re more reluctant to protest for change and less attentive to remaining inequalities. [26]

Now, one reason not to let this totally undermine our faith in the contact hypothesis is that these effects pretty small—quite a bit smaller than the effects on reducing prejudice. [27]

But also, even if contact ends up reducing minority group’s interest in protesting social injustices, it actually makes the majority group  more  attentive to those inequities.

And we can see one example of this in Shreya Bhattacharya’s study of caste prejudice in India.

SHREYA BHATTACHARYA: And then the other interesting result was that there is an increasing knowledge of caste injustice, particularly among those from privileged castes because they realized that caste injustice has been increasing. And they also kind of anecdotally shared with me that initially they were opposed to affirmative action, but after seeing caste injustice play out the way it has, it really made them realize that there is an injustice that’s been happening historically. And affirmative action is a way that this is solved, and it’s not because the government is trying to play politics.

This isn’t the only place we see contact having this kind of effect. For example, positive interracial contact is associated with White Americans’ support for the Black Lives Matter movement. [28]  Positive contact is related to straight allies’ involvement in LGBT issues. [29]  And new research from Cyprus, Romania, and Israel shows that positive contact is associated with majority groups being more supportive of disadvantaged groups’ push for social change.

Granted, a lot of these studies have the same causality problem we talked about before—maybe it’s just the people who already support social change who are more open to having diverse social interactions. And we still haven’t seen that when push comes to shove, these folks put their money where their mouth is and actually take action against social injustice.

But the point is that when we’re thinking about interventions to create social progress, reducing prejudice might be one part of the equation, but we can’t lose sight of the bigger picture.

TOM PETTIGREW: More and more research has come from places all over the world. I never thought there be so much contact research in my life when I was writing about it initially.

I could have gone on and on researching this episode and cramming every last thing into it, but I think we’re pretty solid on the basics. To wrap up:

Despite the pessimism of the early 20th century, we now have a lot of evidence that  meaningful social mixing —having individual contact with people who are different from us—can be a potent antidote for prejudice. In fact, we know that these experiences, whether on the soccer field or in our homes, can be the catalyst for changes in how we see other people.

Things like maintaining equal status and cooperation can boost the benefits of contact, but they’re not essential. As long as these experiences are reasonably pleasant, getting to know other people is generally a good thing. Granted, the benefits may not always run as deep as we’d like, and we should never lose sight of the systemic, institutional forces that also keep inequalities in place. But for chipping away at an individual’s own prejudices, contact sure seems to help.

Now, I’ve ignored a lot of work in the new wave of intergroup contact theory. For example, there’s now a ton of work on  indirect  contact—prejudices seem to also be lower if you have a friend of a friend who’s from a particular group, or if you are exposed to certain people on TV, or even if you just imagine interacting with someone from another group. [30] [31]

TOM PETTIGREW: If in 1950, you would ask either Allport or me if these things would work, I think we would have said “no.” Regardless, I find these huge literatures have developed now on indirect contact to be really groundbreaking, things that we would not have thought possible just, you know, a half century ago.

Alrighty, that’ll do it for another episode of Opinion Science. This was a big one! Big, giant thank you to the experts who gave their time to talk with me for this episode, including Tom Pettigrew, Linda Tropp, Salma Mousa, and Shreya Bhattacharya.

There was a lot going on in this episode, so if you’re interested in the details, you can go to OpinionSciencePodcast.com to find a transcript of this episode that’s annotated as best I could with all the sources I drew on.

On that note, I’d like to plug a new book by Tom Pettigrew. Yeah, he’s still writing about these things after all these years. It’s amazing. His book is  Contextual Social Psychology: Reanalyzing Prejudice, Voting, and Intergroup Contact . I drew on it a lot when putting this episode together, and it really is a great resource. You can find a link to the book in the show notes.

Also, check out the episode webpage for photos of the slum relocation apartment in India and the soccer leagues in Iraq.

Ok, is that it? I think that’s it. Please share Opinion Science with friends and colleagues, rate and review us online, subscribe on iTunes, follow on Spotify, whatever you do to keep up with podcasts, add this one to the mix.

But that’ll do it for now. I’ll see you back here in a couple weeks for more Opinion Science.

[1]   https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-islamic-state-group-saddam-hussein-baghdad-iraq-296b5588995cf7be62b49619bf1a7bb6 [2]  Pettigrew, T. F. (2002). Gordon Willard Allport: A tribute.  Journal of Social Issues, 55 (3), 415-428.  https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-4537.00125   [3]  Dovidio, J. F., Glick, P., & Rudman, L. A. (2005). Reflecting on The Nature of Prejudice: Fifty years after Allport. In J. F. Dovidio, P. Glick, & L. A. Rudman (Eds.)  On the nature of prejudice: Fifty years after Allport  (pp. 1 – 15).  https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470773963.ch1 [4]  Report:  The Power of Contact:  Designing, Facilitating and Evaluating Social Mixing Activities to Strengthen Migrant Integration and Social Cohesion Between Migrants and Local Communities  (IOM UN Immigration) [5]  Baker, P. E. (1934).  Negro-white adjustment .  (Quoted by  Pettigrew, 2021 ) [6]  Stouffer, S. A. et al. (1949).  The American Soldier. Vol. 1, Adjustment During Army Life.    https://doi.org/10.1037/h0050766 [7]  Allport, G. W. (1954).  The nature of prejudice . Addison-Wesley. [8]  Pettigrew, T. F. (2021).  Contextual social psychology: Reanalyzing prejudice, voting, and intergroup contact. [9]   https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1964/4/9/thomas-f-pettigrew-pa-little-over/ [10]   https://www.thirteen.org/programs/dynamics-of-desegregation/ [11]  Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90 (5), 751–783.  https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.90.5.751 [12]  Allport, G. W., & Kramer, B. M. (1946). Some roots of prejudice.  The Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Applied, 22 , 9–39.  https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1946.9917293 [13]  Paluck, E. L., Green, S. A., & Green, D. P. (2019). The contact hypothesis re-evaluated.  Behavioral Public Policy, 3 (2), 129-158. https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2018.25 [14]   https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-48619734 [15]  Thorat, S., & Attewell, P. (2007). The legacy of social exclusion: A correspondence study of job discrimination in India.  Economic & Political Weekly, 42 (41), 4141-4145.  https://www.jstor.org/stable/40276548 [16]   https://www.census2011.co.in/slums.php [17]   https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-country/ [18]   https://www.trade.gov/market-intelligence/india-housing-all [19]  Deutsch, M., & Collins, M. E. (1951).  Interracial housing; a psychological evaluation of a social experiment . University of Minnesota Press. [20]  Wilner, D. M., Walkley, R. P., & Cook, S. W. (1955).  Human relations in interracial housing . University of Minnesota Press. [21]  Bhattacharya, S. (2021). Intergroup contact and its effects on discriminatory attitudes: Evidence from India.  WIDER Working Paper .  https://doi.org/10.35188/UNU-WIDER/2021/980-8 [22]  Goli, S., Singh, D., & Sekher, T. V. (2013). Exploring the myth of mixed marriages in India: Evidence from a nation-wide survey.  Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 44 (2), 193-206.  https://doi.org/10.3138/jcfs.44.2.193 [23]  Mousa, S. Building social cohesion between Christians and Muslims through soccer in Post-ISIS Iraq.  Science ,  369 (6505), 866-870.  http://doi.org/10.1126/science.abb3153 [24]  Boin, J., Rupar, M., Graf, S., Neji, S., Spiegler, O., & Swart, H. (2021). The generalization of intergroup contact effects: Emerging research, policy relevance, and future directions.  Journal of Social Issues, 77 (1), 105-131.  https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12419 [25]  Stouffer, S. A. et al. (1949).  The American Soldier. Vol. 1, Adjustment During Army Life.    https://doi.org/10.1037/h0050766 [26]  Dixon, J., Tropp, L. R., Durrheim, K., & Tredoux, C. (2010). “Let them eat harmony”: Prejudice-reduction strategies and attitudes of historically disadvantaged groups.  Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19 (2), 76-80.  https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721410363366 [27]  Reimer, N. K., & Sengupta, N. K. (2021). Meta-analysis of the ‘ironic’ effects of intergroup contact.  https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/vrsqe [28]  Meleady, R., & Vermue, M. (2019). The effect of intergroup contact on solidarity-based collective action is mediated by reductions in SDO.  Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 49 (5), 307-318.  https://doi.org/10.1111/jasp.12586 [29]  Fingerhut, A. W. (2011). Straight allies: What predicts heterosexuals’ alliance with the LGBT community?  Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 41 (9), 2230-2248.  https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2011.00807.x [30]  White, F. A., et al. (2021). Beyond direct contact: The theoretical and societal relevance of indirect contact for improving intergroup relations.  Journal of Social Issues, 77 (1), 132-153.  https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12400 [31]  Zhou, S., Page-Gould, E., Aron, A., Moyer, A., & Hewstone, M. (2019). The extended contact hypothesis: A meta-analysis of 20 years of research.  Personality and Social Psychology Review, 23 (2), 132-160.  https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868318762647  

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PSYCH 424 blog

Contact hypothesis example.

While reading the textbook for this weeks lesson, it focused on diversity. Everyone is different. We all differ in how we look, behave, feel, socioeconomic status, etc. Diversity can lead to prejudiced beliefs and discriminatory behavior against those who are different from themselves. Prejudice is an attitude towards others based on group membership which can lead to discriminatory behavior. People categorize themselves into groups that become their in-group. Those who are perceived as unlike those in the in-group are considered part of the out-group. The out-group people are viewed as different from themselves which causes prejudiced beliefs about those who are different (Gruman, 2016).

The idea of the contact hypothesis described in the textbook interested me as a recommended solution for resolving problems between two different groups. The idea of contact hypothesis is described as positive contact with members of an out-group could decrease negative stereotyping of the out-group by the in-group and lead to improved intergroup relations (Gruman, 2016). In this weeks discussion post, I described that I believe that the contact hypothesis would be the best intervention to ease racial tensions. By members of an in-group and out-group working together, it can allow members of both groups to learn that they are not very different from one another and their previous beliefs about one another were false. Working towards a common goal would make the members of both the in and out-group work together and allow relationships between each other to strengthen (Gruman, 2016).

I believe that the aspect of two groups working towards a common goal is the key component for the contact hypothesis to be effective in easing tensions between an in-group and out-group. When reading about the contact hypothesis, I immediately thought about the movie “ Remember the Titans ”. This movie is a great example of the contact hypothesis being effectively applied between two different groups. The movie involved the racial integration of a black school with a white school in 1971 and focuses on the football team overcoming stereotypes and prejudice between the black and white football players (Goodfriend, 2012). 

The key elements that made the football team in the movie succeed are that it followed two important steps of the contact hypothesis to reduce racial tensions. The first step was making group members have equal status. The differences between the two groups were put aside and they were made equal by the coaches explaining that the best players will get the starting positions regardless of skin color. The second step was working towards a common goal. The common goal for each player on the team was to win each football game (Goodfriend, 2012). To do this, they had to work together towards this goal and become one team. Each game became “us” vs “them” meaning our team vs the other team. For the contact hypothesis to work effectively, contact is not the key aspect. Simply being around others who are different from you will not decrease one prejudiced belief and discriminatory behavior. It is important that two groups are made of equal status and are working towards a common goal for the contact hypothesis to be successful. As displayed in the movie, equal status and working towards a common goal were applied to the football team which is why the contact hypothesis was successful in this case for easing racial tensions (Goodfriend, 2012). 

Goodfriend, Wind. “‘Remember the Titans:’ Can Football Reduce Racism?” Psychology Today , Sussex Publishers, 2 Nov. 2012, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psychologist-the-movies/201211/remember-the-titans-can-football-reduce-racism.

Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. M. (2016).  Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems  (3rd Edition). SAGE Publications, Inc. (US).  https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/books/9781506353951

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 17th, 2022 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized . You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment , or trackback from your own site.

This is a great analysis of a potential intervention to ease racial tensions in any community. Your mention of “Remember the Titans” and my subsequent research into it actually sparked a memory of mine of a movie called “The Longest Yard”. If you’ve never seen it, here’s a synopsis. A pro-football player is suspended for throwing a game and ends up landing himself in jail for DUI. He’s transferred to a lunatic warden in Texas who has a prison football team. The warden wants the ex-player to form a practice team of inmates to play against the guards. The quarterback has to bring together all types of inmates, Hispanic, African-American, and White, in order to be competitive and stand a chance against the better equipped and bigger guards.

While a somewhat cheesy plot, it draws upon many of the same topics you mentioned. Working together towards a common goal allowed for the in-group (each race separately) to work with other out-groups (every other race) in order to get revenge on the horrible treatment by the guards and beat them. Thanks for the post!

Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. (2017). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and addressing social and practical problems. SAGE.

I can agree with your blog, contact hypthesis is a great way of connecting groups especially if there is a common goal for all involved. Your example with the movie “Remember the Titans” was in proving your point. However, in the movie as well as through the reading material for this week, when two groups engage in competition instead of cooperation with one another, it will impede the process of conflict resolution (Gruman et al., 2017). OVerall, i enjoyed reading your blog, thank you for the insight.

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Abstract: In text generation, hallucinations refer to the generation of seemingly coherent text that contradicts established knowledge. One compelling hypothesis is that hallucinations occur when a language model is given a generation task outside its parametric knowledge (due to rarity, recency, domain, etc.). A common strategy to address this limitation is to infuse the language models with retrieval mechanisms, providing the model with relevant knowledge for the task. In this paper, we leverage the planning capabilities of instruction-tuned LLMs and analyze how planning can be used to guide retrieval to further reduce the frequency of hallucinations. We empirically evaluate several variations of our proposed approach on long-form text generation tasks. By improving the coverage of relevant facts, plan-guided retrieval and generation can produce more informative responses while providing a higher rate of attribution to source documents.

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