Early contact studies showed northern students acquiring racist attitudes at segregated southern schools

Evidence

University of Alabama researchers were among the first to conduct a study focused specifically on the effects of contact (Sims & Patrick, 1936). Their initial results were not encouraging. With each year students from the north attended the southern university, their anti-Black attitudes increased. Because the university’s faculty and student body were then all White, northern students were likely to have met only lower-status Blacks and to respond according to Alabama’s racist norms of that period. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1659

Categorization

• QUESTION: This early negative-contact finding anticipates the modern insight that contact effects depend on the status of the outgroup members encountered — worth chasing the original Sims & Patrick data.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1659
• XREF: connects to: White missionary schools accommodated southern segregation to court white support — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 254