Personalized intergroup contact reduces prejudice by making category boundaries less meaningful.

Evidence

In that chapter, we hypothesized that the effectiveness of intergroup contact for reducing prejudice and in-group bias would depend on whether the conditions of contact promoted personbased or category-based information processing. If category membership remains a salient feature of the contact situation, contact merely reinforces in-group–out-group differentiation and associated ethnocentric biases. However, if the interaction context encourages personalized attention to individual group members, then a process of decategorization should result that eliminates category-based favoritism and prejudices. Further, we contended that personalized contact experiences would generalize beyond the contact setting because through personalization experiences, categories lose their diagnostic significance as a way of organizing cognitive representations of the situation. Repeated experiences in which category boundaries are made less salient eventually reduce the social meaningfulness of the category distinction itself. As categories become less socially meaningful, category-based processing and associated category-based biases are reduced in general. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2494

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to contact hypothesis work in social psychology and to the reader’s material on belonging, stigma, and intergroup dynamics; also resonates with the ‘category-based vs individual’ processing distinction seen in stereotype and implicit bias research. — connects to: Effective intergroup contact requires seven preconditions in political contexts. — Rachel Hartman et al., Interventions to Reduce Partisan…, 45; Changing how people categorize others can reduce intergroup threat. — Blake M. Riek, Eric W. Mania, and Samuel L. Gaertner, Intergroup Threat and Outgroup…, 168