Cross-group friendship needs time that short-term contact studies deny it

Evidence

Optimal intergroup contact requires time for cross-group friendships to develop. Past work has focused chiefly on short-term intergroup contact—the very condition that Sherif’s (1966) Robbers’ Cave field experiment found minimally effective. Once we adopt a long-term perspective that allows cross-group friendship to develop and the full decategorization, salient categorization, and recategorization sequence to unfold, we can expect striking results. — Thomas F. Pettigrew, Intergroup Contact Theory, 80

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: an essay on how the replication crisis in social psychology partly traces to studying processes at the wrong timescale — Sherif’s minimal-effect summer camp versus friendships that take years.
• XREF: Connects to the Robbers’ Cave field experiment literature and to critiques of short-duration lab interventions in social psychology. — connects to: True cross-racial friendship requires sustained struggle, not token contact — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 64