Structured cooperative tasks with equal status can reduce prejudice among highly prejudiced people

Evidence

Cook (1984) provided the most extensive laboratory test of the intergroup contact hypothesis. He set up an ideal interracial situation featuring equal status, a stereotype-disconfirming minority member, an interdependent task, task success, high friendship potential, and equalitarian social norms. Highly prejudiced white subjects worked with two partners who were confederates, one black and one white. They operated an imaginary railroad system over 40 sessions, sharing successes and failures but eventually winning bonus money. — Thomas F. Pettigrew, Intergroup Contact Theory, 103

Categorization

• SEED: An angle on how laboratory experiments manufacture the precise social conditions that real communities almost never achieve — the ethics and artificiality of engineering friendship.