Interdependence motives make people perceive outgroup members accurately

Evidence

Usually, one is less motivated to be accurate about outgroup members and more motivated to share the ingroups’ understanding of them. Nevertheless, social understanding can also serve intergroup understanding. When people become interdependent with the outgroup, they focus more on the outgroup member’s unique, counterstereotypic attributes. This results from increased motivation to be accurate about someone whose goals one shares (the definition of an ingroup) (for a review, see Fiske, Lin, & Neuberg, 1999). This may explain why expanding the boundaries of us to include them alters people’s views of the outgroup (see chapters by Gaertner & Dovidio and Kenworthy et al., chs. 5 and 17 this volume); people depend on their (expanded) ingroup and need to understand them accurately. — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 332

Categorization

• XREF: This is the mechanism explaining contact theory’s success conditions — ties to Allport-era optimal contact conditions and to existing vault claims about when intergroup contact reduces prejudice.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years…, 332