Aliens on Board: The Effect of Intergroup Contact on Political Ideology at NASA

Abstract

Organizations are major social settings in which interactions between individuals with differences in political ideologies take place. Does interacting with outgroups shape individuals’ political ideologies? To answer this question, we draw from the contact hypothesis, which argues that intergroup contact leads to favorable intergroup attitudes. We go one step further and hypothesize that intergroup contact influences individuals’ political ideologies. We test our theory in NASA’s manned space missions from 1967-2019, which offer a unique, confined, and isolated setting to examine the effects of intergroup contact. Our findings support the notion that positive intergroup contact leads to a shift towards a liberal political ideology.