Face-to-face contact with out-group individuals can improve attitudes toward the whole group.

Evidence

Since its inception in the 1940s and 1950s (Allport, 1954; Williams, 1947), intergroup contact theory has been one of the most commonly invoked social psychological approaches to explaining intergroup relations (see, e.g., Miller & Brewer, 1984). The basic notion of intergroup contact theory is that direct, face-to-face contact with individual out-group members may reduce negative and promote positive out-group attitudes via processes of generalization of positive attitudes from the encountered individual(s) to the wider outgroup, especially if certain moderating conditions are met (see, e.g., Pettigrew, 1998). — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 554

Categorization

• XREF: Directly cites Allport 1954, the very reassessment the reader is doing; contextualizes where the contact hypothesis came from.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 554