Merely attending a segregated southern university worsened northern students’ racial attitudes

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. — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 1659

Categorization

• XREF: Early counter-evidence that contact without equal status and supportive norms backfires — foreshadows the equal-status condition central to contact theory.