Cooperative contact only reduces prejudice when it fosters interpersonal over task orientation.

Evidence

A program of studies using this laboratory paradigm confirmed our hypotheses that cooperative contact would be most likely to reduce category-based processing when the nature of the interaction in the contact situation promotes an interpersonal orientation rather than a task orientation to fellow participants (Bettencourt, Brewer, Croak, & Miller, 1992; Miller, Brewer, & Edwards, 1985), and the assignment of roles, status, and functions in the cooperative system is independent of category membership (Marcus-Newhall, Miller, Holtz, & Brewer, 1993). — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2497