Allport's Contact Hypothesis and Reducing Prejudice

Introduction

The literature covering the nature of prejudice, its scope, its effects, and methods to reduce it is among the most extraordinary bodies of work in all of social science. The total volume of research on prejudice reflects several decades of scholarly investigation into its meaning, assessment, etiology, consequences, and reduction. Very few areas of study have attracted a greater range of theoretical perspectives. Theorizing about the nature and manifestation of prejudice has been accompanied by spirited debates about the appropriate way to conceptualize reduction strategies, resulting in a rich body of measurement instruments and intervention approaches.

The most enduring strategy for reducing prejudice is known as the contact hypothesis, which states that under certain conditions, contact between groups leads to a decrease in prejudice. The current paper reviews some of the literature both for and against the effectiveness of intergroup contact as a means of prejudice reduction.

Statement of the Problem

For the purposes of this paper, prejudice is defined as it normally appears in the literature: an unfair negative attitude directed toward a particular social group or toward a member of that group. Stereotypes, by contrast, are defined as overgeneralizations about a particular group that are especially rigid, most often factually incorrect, and frequently accompany the negative feelings and attitudes associated with prejudice. Discrimination is defined as the unjust treatment of members of different social groups originating from prejudicial attitudes and stereotyping (Allport, 1954). Thus, prejudicial attitudes toward certain groups are the driving force behind negative beliefs and unscrupulous behaviors directed at those groups. Developing functional and practical methods to reduce prejudice should lead to corresponding reductions in stereotyping and discrimination.

While the methodological complexities and abundance of theoretical contributions found in the prejudice literature are impressive, applying that practical knowledge can sometimes be less straightforward. The study of prejudice attracts considerable attention because researchers and scholars endeavor to understand and address the social problems associated with it — inequality, discrimination, and prejudicially motivated violence. These goals are also shared by many government officials, and large sums of money are spent annually on interventions aimed at reducing prejudice in schools, in the workplace, and in areas afflicted by intergroup conflict. Given these practical objectives, it is important to understand what the extensive body of research has revealed about effective ways to reduce prejudice. The current paper focuses on the most enduring theoretical method for doing so: Gordon Allport's contact hypothesis (Allport, 1954).

Literature Review

Strategies for reducing prejudice that rely on an intergroup approach originate from early theories proposing that most people's perceptions and actions favor members of their own group — termed the "ingroup" — relative to groups they do not belong to — termed the "outgroup." Two major theoretical traditions have inspired specific techniques for addressing this ingroup/outgroup bias. The first is Gordon Allport's contact hypothesis (Allport, 1954), which holds that exposure to outgroup members under certain optimal conditions will result in reduced prejudice. The second tradition comprises "social identity and categorization theories" (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), which advocate interventions that break down or rearrange social boundaries. The contact hypothesis, however, has received far more attention in the literature.

Allport's contact hypothesis states that under certain favorable conditions, contact between two groups should lead to a significant reduction in prejudice. According to Allport, four conditions facilitate positive attitudes and reduce prejudice: the groups must have equal status within the contact situation; there should be no competition within the contact situation; the groups must pursue superordinate goals together; and the relevant authorities must approve the contact and strongly endorse a reduction in tensions between the groups.

The classic study cited in undergraduate and graduate texts as evidence for the validity of the contact hypothesis is the "Robbers Cave" experiment (Sherif, Harvey, White, Hood, & Sherif, 1961). The subjects were 22 eleven-year-old boys taken to a summer camp in Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma. Prior to the experiment, subjects were randomly divided into two groups, which were separately transported to the park and housed in different cabins. Initially, the two groups were unaware of each other's existence. During the first week, each group spent time bonding internally and developed a group name displayed on flags and shirts — the Eagles and the Rattlers, respectively.

Once the groups became aware of each other, a series of competitive activities were introduced, with rewards for the winning group. As antagonism increased, so did name-calling and the singing of offensive songs directed at the outgroup. The hostility escalated to the point where the two groups refused to eat in the same dining room.

The experimenters then arranged a series of joint activities. The groups were told that their water supply had been vandalized and that they needed to cooperate to repair the damage. During this task, significant cooperation and a reduction in antagonism were observed. In a second joint activity, the groups had to agree on a film to watch together; afterward, the boys ate dinner together without hostility. The study is so frequently cited in support of the contact hypothesis that many undergraduate students are taught that simple contact can remedy prejudice.

Several more recent investigations suggest that the process is not as straightforward as Sherif et al. (1961) described. In one of the most supportive studies of Allport's contact hypothesis, Pettigrew and Tropp (2006) report the results of an extensive meta-analysis of studies conducted between 1940 and 2000 examining intergroup contact and its effect on prejudice. Meta-analysis combines the results of many studies addressing a set of related research hypotheses in order to determine the overall pattern of findings (Aron, Aron, & Coups, 2011). The logic is that combining more studies produces more sound evidence for or against a hypothesis. The resulting statistic — the effect size, typically expressed as a weighted average — indicates the overall strength of the findings across the combined studies. Cohen's (1992) classical interpretation suggests that effect sizes of 0.2 to 0.3 represent a small effect, approximately 0.5 a medium effect, and 0.8 or above a large effect.

Pettigrew and Tropp analyzed 713 independent samples from 515 studies. The overall effect size was −.215, indicating a small but statistically significant effect — significant in part because of the large number of studies examined. The contact hypothesis was supported: subjects' scores on measures of prejudice decreased as contact was implemented. Additional tests indicated that the finding was not attributable to publication bias, and that the effects became more robust as studies were more tightly controlled. The effects of contact appeared to generalize to the outgroup as a whole and across different contact settings. Pettigrew and Tropp also found similar patterns of effectiveness for ethnic targets and for samples involving other types of outgroups (e.g., obese individuals, short individuals, gender-based groups), suggesting that Allport's theory can be extended beyond racial groups.

Notably, contact was significantly associated with reduced prejudice even when Allport's four prerequisite conditions were not met — although the reduction was greater when they were. Pettigrew and Tropp argue that these four optimal conditions should not be regarded as mutually independent, but as functioning together to reduce prejudice, and that they may not be strictly essential for prejudice reduction to occur.

There has been increasing interest in the use of imagery as a tool for reducing prejudice. Turner, Crisp, and Lambert (2007) proposed that even imagining intergroup contact may produce beneficial effects on intergroup attitudes. In three experiments, they demonstrated that thinking about contact with outgroup members improved attitudes toward the outgroup as a whole and reduced perceptions of outgroup homogeneity — the tendency to assume that all outgroup members share the same undesirable traits. In two experiments, participants imagined a conversation with an elderly person; in the third, participants imagined sitting next to a homosexual person on a train and conversing with them. Under all three conditions, participants reported significantly less intergroup anxiety and more positive attitudes toward the outgroup.

Building on these findings, Stathis and Crisp (2008) completed three studies investigating the conditions under which imagined intergroup contact leads to greater projection of positive traits onto outgroups. Two imagined-contact conditions were compared: a positive imagined interaction versus a neutral contact experience, given prior research demonstrating that positive — rather than neutral or merely quantitative — contact is more effective in improving intergroup relations. In the first experiment, imagined contact predicted greater self-outgroup positive trait overlap for majority group members but not for minority ethnic group members. In the second experiment, imagined contact led to greater projection of positive traits for individuals who identified less strongly with their own ingroup compared to those with stronger ingroup identification. In the third experiment, imagined contact was more effective when a person's self-image was prominent than when the outgroup image was prominent.

An important question raised by some researchers is whether contact reduces prejudice or whether prejudice reduces contact. Binder, Zagefka, Brown, Funke, et al. (2009) conducted a longitudinal field survey with secondary school students from Belgium, England, and Germany, including large numbers of both ethnic minority and majority participants. Prejudicial attitudes were assessed using two indicators: negative intergroup emotions and desire for social distance. Path analyses — which examine correlations between variables to produce a predicted pattern of causal relations (Aron, Aron, & Coups, 2011) — revealed a bidirectional pattern: contact reduced prejudice, but prejudicial attitudes also reduced contact. Notably, contact effects were not statistically significant for minority participants. The effects of contact on negative emotions toward the outgroup were more robust when outgroup contacts were perceived as stereotypical of their group. The effects of contact were also mediated by intergroup anxiety: the more anxious a person was about outgroup contact, the weaker the contact effects.

Recent research has also explored the effects of intergroup contact on implicit forms of bias. Implicit attitudes are often measured using physiological indicators — such as galvanic skin responses — that reflect autonomic nervous system reactions and conditioned associations. Turner, Hewstone, and Voci (2007) assessed the effects of contact on both implicit and explicit attitudes toward elderly persons and toward Asians. Interestingly, the overall amount of intergroup contact — such as the proportion of one's neighbors who are outgroup members — was a better predictor of lower implicit prejudice than measures of contact quality, which predicted explicit attitudes. Moreover, the factors that typically mediate explicit attitudes did not mediate the effects of contact on implicit attitudes, suggesting that simple exposure to the outgroup may be valuable in reducing unconscious biases. These findings also support the view that implicit and explicit attitudes are qualitatively distinct and do not merely represent different components of the same attitude, meaning that both must be addressed when developing prejudice-reduction interventions.

Despite substantial evidence in support of the contact hypothesis, some researchers have criticized the fact that much of the research has been conducted in experimental rather than real-world settings. Some studies report that contact can, in certain circumstances, actually increase prejudice. Guerin and Guerin (2007) outline numerous subtle discriminations present in refugee communities during outgroup contacts — discriminations that would not be captured by the cross-sectional research designs typical in social science. Similarly, Putnam (2007) found that in the short term, immigration and exposure to ethnic diversity can reduce intergroup trust and camaraderie. In areas where intergroup friction has persisted for a long time and is embedded in cultural traditions, mere contact may be insufficient to reduce prejudice. Putnam notes that in such areas, people tend to retreat and dismiss contact with the outgroup as undesirable.

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