Getting to Know You: The Contact Hypothesis Applied to the Sectional Beliefs and Attitudes of White Southerners

Abstract

It seems reasonable to suppose that interaction between members of different groups will reduce stereotyping only in those cases where there are preexisting stereotypes. There is some evidence to indicate that American southerners without experience outside the region are unlikely to have firm regional stereotypes. Analysis of survey data from a sample of white North Carolinians reveals that, indeed, the initial effect of exposure to nonsoutherners is to produce conventional regional stereotypes (which suggests that those stereotypes reflect genuine cultural differences). Additional exposure, however, supports the contact hypothesis-i.e., it reduces stereotyping. The relation between exposure and hostility toward nonsoutherners, however, is monotonic and negative. Exposure evidently reduces hostility by some mechanism other than the elimination of derogatory stereotypes. About a decade ago, a sample of white southern college students was given the inventory of traits used in the 1930s study of ethnic stereotypes by Katz and Braley. These students were asked to indicate the typical traits of the same groups evaluated in the earlier study and, in addition, those of white southerners and white northerners (Reed, b). The perceptions of regional differences expressed by these students were not unexpected: southerners were seen as conservative, tradition-loving, courteous, loyal to family ties, conventional, generous, lazy, faithful, very religious, ignorant, stubborn, extremely nationalistic, jovial, and honest (the adjectives are those of Katz and Braley); northerners as industrious, sophisticated, aggressive, progressive, conceited, ostentatious, argumentative, rude, materialistic, loud, ambitious, arrogant, deceitful, mercenary, and so forth.