Teaching and learning guide for: The role of individual differences in understanding and enhancing intergroup contact

Abstract

Intergroup contact, the direct or extended (or virtual/imagined) interaction with members of other groups, has enjoyed a long history in social psychology. Allport (1954) introduced the “Contact Hypothesis”, which has since evolved into a full and complex “Contact Theory” (Brown & Hewstone, 2005; see also Hodson & Hewstone, 2013; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2001; Turner, Hewstone, Voci, Vonofakou, & Christ, 2007). Across different types of groups, different types of contact, and different methodologies, researchers find that having more encounters with specific outgroup members tends to reduce prejudice toward that group as a whole (see meta-analyses by Davies, Tropp, Aron, Pettigrew, & Wright, 2014; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006; Lemmer & Wagner, 2015). Importantly, contact works more reliably at reducing prejudice relative to other interventions (e.g., Beelmann & Heinemann, 2014). Yet researchers historically felt that individual differences in prejudice-proneness (e.g., authoritarianism) were either irrelevant to, or were obstacles to, contact-based prejudice reduction (see Hodson, Costello, & MacInnis, 2013). More recently, interest in individual differences in contact settings has grown steadily. This article serves as an education tool to not only teach students about intergroup contact and personality (among other individual differences), but to encourage them to consider the possibilities for learning and prejudice reduction when these two topics are conceptually integrated.