Contact’s prejudice-reducing effect is causal, not a selection or publication artifact.

Evidence

Additional findings suggest that these relationships between contact and prejudice are not artifacts of either participant selection or publication bias. Consistent with past research, the particularly strong effects observed for experimental studies confirm that contact can cause meaningful reductions in prejudice. Moreover, the investigations that allowed no choice for their participants to avoid the intergroup contact yield a slightly larger mean effect size in reducing prejudice than do studies that allowed choice. In addition, of the six tests we conducted to test for publication bias, all but one indicate that this bias is not a serious threat to the validity of our results, and the one exception still revealed a significant contact–prejudice effect among the most rigorous research studies. — Thomas F. Pettigrew, Linda R. Tropp, A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup…, 216

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the difference between a correlation that might be explained away by self-selection and evidence of a genuine causal effect from random-assignment experiments.
• XREF: Ties to readings on voluntary vs. forced exposure contexts, e.g. mandatory school desegregation vs. self-selected friendships. — connects to: Intergroup contact reduces prejudice more strongly than prejudice drives avoidance of contact — Thomas F. Pettigrew, Linda R. Tropp, A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup…, 37; The intergroup contact-prejudice link survives file-drawer checks, indicating limited publication bias. — Thomas F. Pettigrew, Linda R. Tropp, A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup…, 104; The contact-prejudice effect may be partly an artifact of publication bias. — Thomas F. Pettigrew, Linda R. Tropp, A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup…, 108 (+4 more)

Related

• More rigorous contact studies show larger prejudice-reduction effects. (similarity 0.90)
• Randomized contact experiments yield near-large prejudice reduction effects. (similarity 0.89)
• Intergroup contact reduces prejudice even beyond the groups involved. (similarity 0.89)
• The contact-prejudice effect may be partly an artifact of publication bias. (similarity 0.89)
• Intergroup contact reduces prejudice more strongly than prejudice drives avoidance of contact (similarity 0.88)
• Stronger contact effects in rigorous studies would confirm the contact-prejudice link. (similarity 0.87)
• Intergroup contact reduces prejudice across outgroups, and Allport’s conditions are helpful but not essential. (similarity 0.87)
• Negative factors limiting contact’s prejudice reduction remain the least understood (similarity 0.86)
• Comparing published and unpublished studies tests whether reporting bias inflates effects. (similarity 0.86)
• Participant selection bias does not inflate contact-prejudice effect sizes. (similarity 0.86)
• Contact effects persist beyond the immediate contact situation. (similarity 0.85)
• The intergroup contact-prejudice link survives file-drawer checks, indicating limited publication bias. (similarity 0.85)
• The contact-prejudice effect varies across samples by design and context (similarity 0.85)
• No meta-analysis of intergroup contact research existed before this study. (similarity 0.85)
• Intergroup contact research has expanded beyond prejudice to test trust, forgiveness, and ingroup perception. (similarity 0.85)