Group salience strengthens positive contact’s anxiety-reducing effect

Evidence

Voci and Hewstone (2003) examined group salience and intergroup anxiety, a moderator variable and a mediator variable respectively, while looking at the effect of contact on Italians’ attitudes towards immigrants in their country. Using Structural Equation Modeling procedures, they found that intergroup anxiety mediated the impact of combined quality and quantity of contact in reducing subtle prejudice and improving outgroup attitudes. They then tested the effect of group membership salience as a moderator for each path in the model. They found that between contact and anxiety, positive frequent contact reduced anxiety more when group membership was salient than when it was not. The direct path from contact to attitudes was also stronger when group salience was high compared to when it was low. Thus, a combination of positive contact and group salience during that contact resulted in the most positive evaluations of the outgroup. — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 1844

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the contact hypothesis — connects naturally to the reader’s work on institutions and social capital, since contact under salient group membership functions like an institutionalized intergroup mechanism. — connects to: Negative outgroup contact raises anxiety, which breeds hostility and contact avoidance. — Blake M. Riek, Eric W. Mania, and Samuel L. Gaertner, Intergroup Threat and Outgroup…, 47; Outgroup salience boosts conscious ingroup identification when the ingroup is already salient. — Brandon Randolph-Seng, Darcy A. Reich, and Kenneth G. DeMarree, On the Nonconscious Antecedents of…, 47
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years…, 1844