Allophilia: A cornerstone for citizenship education in pluralistic countries

Abstract

Citizenship education in pluralistic countries often relies on programs to combat negative prejudice and, to a lesser extent, to make various groups feel as if they are all one group. Recent research on allophilia, a largely ignored positive dimension of intergroup attitudes, suggests that these approaches are insufficient. Intergroup attitudes do not have to be negative (prejudice) or neutral (tolerance); they can be positive (allophilia). Allophilia research finds that allophilia takes five forms: affection, comfort, kinship, engagement and enthusiasm. Research also finds that increasing allophilia has different antecedents and predicts different outcomes than decreasing prejudice does. For citizenship education, this means that two goals – reducing existing prejudice among a country's different groups and increasing allophilia among them – can and should be pursued to achieve the goal of a country with different groups that actually want to live and work together. The article suggests ways in which citizenship education programs can promote allophilia, including the use of empathic joy along with the more commonly used empathic sorrow; activities to promote affection, comfort, kinship, engagement and enthusiasm; applications of social-networking technology to promote allophilia; and the use of direct measurements of positive attitudes, such as the Allophilia Scale, rather than assuming that low measurements of prejudice indicate the presence of allophilia.