High category salience during contact boosts its prejudice-reducing effects

Evidence

For instance, increased salience of group representations during intergroup contact typically leads to greater reductions in prejudice toward the outgroup as a whole (Brown, Vivian, & Hewstone, 1999). And participants who do not think intergroup contact is important show far less prejudice reduction than those who regard it as important (Van Dick et al., 2004). — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1713

The exact nature of such changes in the structure of social categorization remains disputed, and different theoretical approaches have been put forward. To give a brief overview, in the context of single categorizations, Brewer and Miller’s (1984) “decategorization” perspective argues that the salience of categories should be reduced to allow for more personalized interactions, whereas the mutual differentiation model (Hewstone & Brown, 1986) argues that salience should be retained since personalized encounters may impede generalization of positive attitudes from the individual to the out-group at large. In the context of multiple categorization, the recategorization perspective (Gaertner et al., 1993) argues that intergroup contact should be maximally effective in yielding positive intergroup effects if the encountered individual is cognitively included in a common superordinate in-group, whereby contact may be most effective in predicting positive out-group attitudes if both subgroup and superordinate identities are kept salient (see Gaertner & Dovidio, 2000). — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 561

Categorization

• QUESTION: Group salience improving generalization runs against some intuition that personalization is what generalizes - worth probing.
• XREF: Maps onto the Allport contact-hypothesis reassessment thread; the category-salience dispute is a mechanism-level complication of when contact works.
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1713; Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 561