Personal disclosure plus category typicality generalizes contact benefits to new outgroup members

Evidence

Recent empirical work has considered the combined impact of the intergroup and interpersonal approaches. Specifically, Ensari and Miller (2002, study 1, involving traditional Islamic versus secularist students in Turkey) had a traditional Islamic confederate, whose attire and description of herself were either typical or atypical of her group, disclose either personal and unique information or impersonal and general information to a participant, prior to undertaking a cooperative task (see Miller, 2002). The combined perceptions of disclosure (interpersonal) and typicality (intergroup) reduced subsequent bias toward new outgroup members, who themselves had no connection to the confederate other than shared group membership. … These findings indicate the importance of the intimacy of contact and its potential to personalize the outgroup member, but they also suggest that despite the importance of a personalized interaction, some level of category salience must also be maintained if positive attitudes are to generalize to other members of the outgroup category. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1816

Categorization

• XREF: Directly corroborates and refines the vault’s contact-theory claims: generalization of contact effects requires maintained category salience alongside interpersonal personalization.