Positive contact with working-class people reduces personal contribution to inequality

Abstract

The current research investigates the effect of a type of intergroup contact that has rarely been studied to date, class-based contact, on one’s personal contribution to inequality. We conducted two studies with middle and upper class individuals. We first longitudinally examined whether positive contact with working-class people reduces contribution to inequality (i.e., participants stating that they themselves contribute to maintaining the social hierarchy) whilst controlling for ideological factors. Lower levels of contribution to inequality were present in people with more and better contact, but the change over time was small in the absence of experimental manipulation. An experiment then showed that recall of positive (vs. negative) contact with working-class people reduced participants’ contribution to inequality and increased their willingness to participate in collective action for equality. These results suggest that facilitating spaces where members of different social classes can have positive interactions can contribute to reducing inequality.