A Critical Evaluation of Strategies to Reduce Intergroup Prejudice

The experiment worked as follows. In order to investigate intergroup relations, the experimenters designed a field study. They organized a camp and invited middle-class, young American teenagers. The experiment consisted of three stages. In Stage 1, participants were divided into two groups and geographically isolated each other. In Stage 2, the two groups were involved in intergroup contact through competitive activities. In Stage 3, they had to cooperate with the other group to achieve a goal. The experimenters observed the behaviour of all the boys throughout this process, trying to investigate which sort of contact is effective in prejudice reduction. The results showed that contact in the competitive settings (Stage 2) increased prejudice, conflicts, and hostility. Moreover, normal contacts in this stage such as eating food in the same room became the opportunity to display overt acts of hostility. In contrast, when the two groups had to achieve a superordinate goal, behaviours of intergroup cooperation increased while intergroup friction decreased. Thus, contact could yield opposite results in different situations.

At the time, Allport (1954) suggested four conditions for contact to reduce prejudice: equal status, common goals, intergroup cooperation, and support of authorities. Under these circumstances, contact intervention could significantly reduce intergroup tension. This hypothesis has received extensive empirical support from both laboratory and field research (Pettigrew, 1998). One meta-analysis collected 713 independent samples from 515 studies to investigate the effects of contact intervention in different contexts (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). the researchers discovered that contact intervention could generally reduce intergroup prejudice, but the effects were more significant under Allport’s optimal conditions. However, this study was criticized by Hewstone et al. (2014) as the majority of studies in the database were cross-sectional studies, which measured contact and prejudice at the same time. This limits the ability to conclude causal effects between contact and prejudice because in this case, no adequate time was given for causal effects to act on.

Hewthorne highlighted instead the results of his prior longitudinal study, which measured variables within a period of time (Hewstone et al., 2008). There is a long history of antagonism between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Hewstone and fellow researchers measured levels of contact and bias by conducting surveys of Catholics and Protestants. Data were collected at Time 1 and Time 2, one year apart. With contact in the previous year, they observed reduction of bias at Time 2. Bias at Time 1 had no significant effects on the frequency of contact afterward. This suggests a causal effect from contact to reduced prejudice, since bias does not really affect contact. Based on the above papers, we can see that the effect of direct contact is condition-specific, but overall, a nice strategy to adopt especially in favourable conditions.

Although more people are affected by indirect contact, its strength of prejudice-reduction might be weaker than direct contact. This assertion is supported by Pettigrew et al. (2007), who showed that both direct and indirect contact could significantly reduce threats between groups, but that indirect contact only has a subtle effect on interpersonal prejudice. Generally, despite its weaker strength, indirect contact is valuable when groups are segregated, or are more antagonistic to each other before intervention.

Introduction to Social Categorization

Social categorization is another intervention to reconcile intergroup hostility, and it reduces conflicts by modifying group boundaries (Hall et al., 2009). People naturally feel and act positively to their group members while displaying negative attitudes and actions towards outgroup members (Hewstone et al., 2002). This happens even when their group identity is defined by meaningless criteria such as a coin flip (Locksley et al., 1980).

Social categorization involves decategorizing and recategorizing the identities of group members, establishing new group relations (Nier et al., 2001). Houlette et al. (2004) tested this intervention with the green circle program. 830 children from first and second grade were randomly assigned to three groups, including a regular program, an enhanced program, and a control condition. Under the regular green circle condition, children had 12-hour sessions in total with their instructors. Children were guided to include people within a green circle, building their ‘green circle communities’. Some classmates might be excluded by how they looked or where they came from. Instructors led children to think about people out of the circle, and gradually enlarge the circle to include more people. The green circle was akin to a group boundary, and the process of enlarging the circle was the process of restructuring social categorization. In the enhanced program, the perimeter of classrooms was surrounded by a large circle made of green plastic tape, and all students wore the same green vests. This further emphasized their common identity in the classroom. Results showed that children participating in these programs were more willing to play with others different from themselves.