Thomas F. Pettigrew, Linda R. Tropp — A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory

55 published claims from this book.

• A one-semester intergroup dialogue can shift attitudes years later.
• Anxiety and threat block both intergroup contact and its benefits
• Contact effects depend on personality traits, societal norms, and timing.
• Contact effects depend on whether social norms reinforce or oppose the interaction.
• Contact effects vary by individual differences, societal norms, and stage of contact
• Contact theory accumulated qualifiers from experience rather than theory
• Contact theory works best as a staged, multi-level longitudinal model.
• Contact without the four optimal conditions can increase prejudice over time
• Contact’s prejudice-reducing effects accumulate only after repeated interventions
• Cross-group friendship needs time that short-term contact studies deny it
• Cross-group friendship weakens national pride and provincialism
• Cross-group prejudice correlation shows attitudes are not driven by intergroup contact
• Cross-sectional contact studies cannot rule out reverse causation by prejudice avoidance
• Desegregation succeeds only after many varied optimal interracial situations
• Early cross-group friendships predict later altruism toward outgroups
• Early evidence showed contact could worsen rather than reduce prejudice
• Early interracial experience compounds into better jobs and earnings later
• Even knowing a friend’s out-group contact reduces prejudice
• Even optimally structured contact changes some people not at all
• Four conditions plus friendship potential are essential, not sufficient, for positive contact.
• Four mediating processes link contact to attitude change.
• Friendship drives reduced prejudice more than prejudice reduces friendship
• Friendship potential is a necessary fifth condition for generalizing contact effects
• Generalizing reduced prejudice requires liking first, then making race salient
• Group power inequalities make equal-status contact structurally unattainable
• Having an ingroup friend predicts greater acceptance of many outgroups
• Improved intergroup attitudes often fail to transfer to new situations
• Inequality is felt as injustice only when groups share a superordinate identity
• Institutional authority endorsement makes intergroup contact more accepted and more effective
• Interdependent interracial work produces more positive racial attitudes and lowers objections
• Intergroup contact research rests on a massive international evidence base
• Intergroup friendship correlates negatively with prejudice even after controlling for other variables
• Intergroup friendship reduces prejudice because it simultaneously engages four distinct processes.
• Learning accurate information about an outgroup reduces prejudice toward it
• Liking one outgroup member may not change attitudes toward the whole group
• Longitudinal designs and constrained-choice settings best establish contact effects
• Longitudinal designs are needed because the strongest contact effects are least studied.
• Mixed neighborhoods reduce prejudice only indirectly, through intergroup friendship
• Null contact results are often misread as refuting Allport when they actually confirm it.
• Open-ended theories inviting unlimited added conditions become unfalsifiable and impractical
• Predicting when contact works does not explain how it works.
• Prejudiced people avoid intergroup contact, making the contact-prejudice causal link two-way.
• Prior interracial contact predicted calmer white reactions to the Watts riot.
• Racially desegregated housing produces more favorable intergroup attitudes than segregated housing.
• Reciprocal role bonds create cross-group contact even without shared similarity.
• Shared dangerous work and interdependence reduced racial prejudice in both sailors and police
• Similarity-based selection of contact partners reduces group salience and weakens generalization.
• Specifying situational conditions makes contact theory both theoretically rare and policy useful
• Status effects on ingroup bias reverse between lab and field settings
• Structured cooperative tasks with equal status can reduce prejudice among highly prejudiced people
• Sumner held that felt superiority makes intergroup hostility an inevitable outcome of contact
• The factors blocking prejudice reduction are less understood than facilitators
• The rare negative factors that block contact’s benefits are the least understood
• Those most likely to have intergroup contact are least likely to change their groups.
• Unbounded lists of qualifying conditions make contact theory unfalsifiable