The utility of Allport's conditions of intergroup contact for predicting perceptions of improved racial attitudes and beliefs - Contact Hypothesis

Journal of Social Issues, Winter, 1998 by Michele Andrisin Wittig, Sheila Grant-Thompson

Accelerated global migration and a resurgence of racial/ethnic conflicts have characterized the close of the 20th century. Concurrently, social scientists and educators are increasing their attention to reducing intergroup prejudice as a method of reducing the potential for intergroup conflict. In the United States, such programs as Teaching Tolerance, Days of Dialogue, Study Circles, and related programs have been deemed "promising practices" by the 1997-98 Presidential Advisory Commission on Race, charged with promoting interracial understanding through a national conversation about race. These developments underscore the need to promote better articulation between theory and practice in preventing and resolving intergroup conflict.

In this article, we summarize major psychological theories of prejudice and models of prejudice reduction as well as several recently published reviews of the Contact Hypothesis, one of the most researched theoretical constructs for designing and evaluating programs to promote more positive intergroup relations. We then examine the power of this hypothesis for predicting educators' perceptions of the success of a prejudice reduction program that implicitly incorporates its principles, and compare these perceptions to actual student outcomes. Finally, we consider additional means of intervening in the cycle of intergroup conflict.

Psychological Theories of Prejudice

Among the types of explanations for prejudice that can be discerned in recent reviews of the psychological literature on the topic (e.g., Brewer & Brown, 1998; Brown & Hewstone, 1995; Duckitt, 1992; Fishbein, 1996; Forbes, 1997; Jones, 1997; Stephan, 1985) are evolutionary perspectives, personality/individual differences approaches, theories of group identity, and various social cognitive viewpoints. There is understood to be overlap among the mechanisms posited by the major theorists who have developed these respective approaches. Furthermore, although each of these perspectives might be viewed as foundational to a different approach to prejudice reduction, most researchers acknowledge the need to employ multifaceted approaches in such efforts. Nevertheless, it is helpful to consider the perspectives separately.

Evolutionary perspectives (e.g., Buss, 1990; Fishbein, 1996; Sidanius, 1993) identify the origins of prejudice against outgroup members in the need to protect and promote one's own group members' access to limited resources, resulting in a rational basis for conflict between groups. Whereas some may view this perspective as essentially pessimistic, others emphasize that the evolutionary processes proposed are also foundational to pursuing strategies for reducing intergroup conflict. In addition, because this perspective allows for cultural transmission of beliefs and the reinforcement of behaviors consistent with intergroup hostility, such mechanisms may be harnessed to promote intergroup harmony. Indeed, the Sherifs (Sherif & Sherif, 1953), who are identified with a theory of realistic group conflict that has evolutionary roots, devoted much effort to specifying social contingencies conducive to more positive intergroup relations.

Personality/individual differences approaches (see Duckitt, 1992; Sidanius, 1993) propose that people differ in the personal attributes or traits that predispose them to prejudice. Theorists emphasizing these differences may or may not be concerned with their evolutionary origins. Within psychology, this perspective originated with Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson, and Sanford's (1950) studies of potentially fascistic individuals, summarized in The Authoritarian Personality. Taylor and Moghaddam (1994) have termed Adorno et al.'s view an "irrationalist account," which appeals to emotional needs, rather than to rational self-interest, as an explanation for prejudice. Although much of the Freudian underpinning of this perspective is no longer commonly accepted, subsequent research has supported elements of the original hypotheses about the relation of frustration to aggression (Dollard, Doob, Miller, Mowrer, & Sears, 1939) and its displacement onto others (Allport, 1954/1979). More recent work suggests that predispositions to conventionalism, submissiveness to authority, and aggressiveness, as well as low tolerance for ambiguity, are related to authoritarianism (see Taylor and Moghaddam for this discussion), and that authoritarianism and an array of other individual difference variables are associated with prejudice (see Levin & Sidanius, 1997, for a discussion). To the extent that prejudice reduction programs are based on the personality structure tradition, they target the promotion of more positive traits, such as greater openness and flexibility.

Among the motivationally based theories of prejudice in social psychology are the various group identity theories (e.g., Abrams & Hogg, 1990; Tajfel & Turner, 1979, Turner, 19.82). Within sociology these are sometimes referred to as theories of ethnocentrism (McLemore, 1994). These theories posit that people are highly motivated to evaluate themselves positively and that these self-evaluations, along with their personal identities, are highly related to their identities as members of specific social groups. Self-derogation by oppressed groups notwithstanding, people generally judge their own group more favorably than other groups.