Contact alone fails to reduce prejudice outside controlled conditions.

Evidence

The basic idea behind the original contact hypothesis was elegantly simple: if separation and unfamiliarity breed stereotypes and intergroup prejudice (negative attitudes, hostility), then these effects should be reversible by promoting contact and increased familiarity between members of different groups or social categories. The underlying theoretical assumptions were that contact under cooperative interactive conditions provides opportunity for positive experiences with out-group members that disconfirm or undermine previous negative attitudes and ultimately change attitudes toward and beliefs about the group as a whole. But contact theory was born in the crucible of racial conflict, and research on the effects of contact during the 1960s and 1970s took place almost entirely in highly politicized field contexts (i.e., schools, public housing, and the military) where a multitude of variables determined the social and psychological conditions of contact and the success or failure of the contact experiences. As a consequence, the contact hypothesis itself accumulated a growing list of qualifiers and modifications (beyond the initial list of equal status, intimate, and cooperative contact) based primarily on experience rather than underlying theory. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2491

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice and the broader social-psych canon on prejudice reduction; also echoes the desegregation/military integration literature. — connects to: Contact alone does not enable fluent multi-ethnic interaction. — Sivamohan Valluvan, Conviviality and Multiculture: A…, 17; Frequent interracial contact alone did nothing to soften apartheid’s hierarchy. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1552
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that a hypothesis born in racial conflict accumulated qualifiers based on experience rather than theory — the divorce between policy-driven field research and underlying theory — is a rich, layered observation about how social science knowledge actually develops.