Abstract
AbstractOver 60 years of research and comprehensive reviews now support Gordon Allport's contact hypothesis that face‐to‐face interactions between members of opposing groups should be promoted to lessen prejudice and improve intergroup relations. Society however does not yet enjoy the full prejudice‐reducing benefits of intergroup contact because opportunities for contact are often not taken up, and segregation persists in the face of diversity. In this article, we review recent investigations on the social psychology of individuals' seeking and avoiding intergroup contact and set the stage for new research in this area. We call for a new generation of research on intergroup contact that addresses a novel and critical research question: What personal, situational, and wider social factors move individuals towards or away from engaging in intergroup contact? This research can help us design intervention strategies to ensure that opportunities for, and benefits of, intergroup contact are fully enjoyed by individuals and groups in increasingly diverse societies.
Highlights
Society does not yet fully enjoy intergroup contact's ability to reduce intergroup prejudice and increase social cohesion
Intergroup contact contributes to health and productivity (Bécares, Stafford, & Nazroo, 2009; Hewstone, 2009)
Growing socio‐psychological evidence suggests that fear and anxiety about “the other” make dominant group members avoid intergroup contact, perpetuating informal group segregation, and impeding the benefits of contact (Paolini, Harris, & Griffin, 2016, for a review)
Summary
Society does not yet fully enjoy intergroup contact's ability to reduce intergroup prejudice and increase social cohesion. In assessing the long‐term effects of intergroup contact over an academic year, Trawalter et al (2012) discovered that those who were low in external motivation to appear nonprejudiced displayed healthier physiological responses to interethnic contact presumably because of the “concerns‐free” way they approached, engaged with ethnic others, and navigated the complexities of these exchanges In line with this reasoning, Dys‐Steenbergen, Wright, and Aron (2015) found that individuals encouraged by a high self‐expansion prime to consider the benefits of being open to new challenges, seeking novelty, and expanding their sense of self, prior to intense (and potentially stressful) friendship‐building activities with an ethnic out‐group partner, reported greater feelings of pleasure and intimacy during the exchange, as well as increased feelings of self‐growth and social efficacy later in time. Intergroup contact researchers have recently started to do this: Next to entries for TABLE 1 Selection of published research that has identified positive predictors of contact approach
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