The contact hypothesis, proposed by Gordon Allport (1897-1967), holds that equal-status contact between groups, pursued in the service of shared goals, can reduce prejudice. The effect is strongest when institutions support the contact. Allport was careful to add that contact alone is not enough. Casual, unstructured contact can sometimes make prejudice worse.
Decades of research have tested exactly when contact succeeds and when it does not.
Key Takeaways:
- Core Idea: Groups that have more contact with an outgroup tend to develop more positive, and fewer negative, perceptions of that outgroup.
- Origins: Robin Williams and Gordon Allport proposed conditions for improving intergroup conflict that have shaped decades of research.
- Allport’s Four Conditions: equal status, common goals, cooperation, and institutional support. Recent research suggests these factors help but are not strictly necessary for reducing prejudice.
- Wide Applicability: Though first studied for race and ethnicity, the contact hypothesis also applies to religion, age, sexuality, disability, and homelessness.
- Modern Evidence: A major 2019 re-evaluation confirms contact usually reduces prejudice, but finds the effect is smaller and more conditional than the original meta-analysis suggested.
Contact Hypothesis
The Contact Hypothesis is a psychological theory about intergroup relations. It suggests that direct contact between members of different social or cultural groups can reduce prejudice, improve intergroup relations, and promote mutual understanding.
According to this hypothesis, interpersonal contact can lead to positive attitudes, decreased stereotypes, and increased acceptance between individuals from different groups under certain conditions.
The Contact Hypothesis was first proposed by Gordon W. Allport in 1954 and has since been supported by numerous studies in the field of social psychology.
The contact theory suggests that contact between groups is more likely to be effective in reducing prejudice and improving relations if it meets specific criteria:
1. Equal Status Between Groups
Members of the contact situation should not have an unequal, hierarchical relationship (e.g., teacher/student, employer/employee).
Both groups perceive the other to be of equal status in the situation (Cohen, 1982; Riordan and Ruggiero, 1980; Pettigrew and Tropp, 2005).
Some scholars argue equal status matters throughout — both before (Brewer and Kramer, 1985) and during (Foster and Finchilescu, 1986) a contact situation. Others disagree.
They find equal status during the contact itself can improve intergroup attitudes, even when the groups differed in status beforehand (Patchen, 1982; Schofield and Rich-Fulcher, 2001).
Public housing gave the clearest early test.
- Aim: To test whether integrated versus segregated public housing changed white residents’ attitudes toward Black neighbors.
- Method: Deutsch and Collins (1951) compared four public housing projects. Two in New York City assigned residents without regard to race; two in Newark kept Black and white families in separate buildings.
- Results: Casual, everyday contact was far more frequent in the integrated projects. White residents there reported far more favorable attitudes toward their Black neighbors.
- Conclusion: Housing structure, not residents’ personalities, drove the difference: where architecture forced equal-status, everyday contact, prejudice was lower. The study became one of the empirical foundations for Allport’s (1954) contact hypothesis.
As a quasi-experiment (a comparison of real-world conditions without random assignment), the study cannot rule out differences between the two cities. Attitudes were also self-reported in interviews.
2. Common Goals
Members must rely on each other to achieve their shared desired goal. To have effective contact, typically, groups need to be making an active effort toward a goal that the groups share.
For example, a national football team could draw players from many different racial and ethnic backgrounds (Chu and Griffey, 1985; Patchen, 1982). They must work together. Winning requires everyone to rely on and respond to each other.
This reliance is what leads to Allport’s third condition: intergroup cooperation (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2005).
3. Intergroup Cooperation
Members should work together in a non-competitive environment.
According to Allport (1954), groups must pursue their common goals through cooperation rather than competition.
In Sherif et al.’s (1961) Robbers’ Cave field study, researchers gave two groups of boys tasks that neither could finish alone. Examples included repairing a failed water supply and hauling a stalled truck. Pleasant contact alone had not reduced the boys’ hostility. A series of shared goals gradually did.
- Aim: To test whether pleasant contact, or goals that both groups wanted but neither could reach alone, could undo hostility created by competition.
- Method: Twenty-two unacquainted 11–12-year-old boys at an Oklahoma summer camp were split into two groups, the Rattlers and the Eagles. A competitive tournament bred hostility, then researchers staged pleasant contact followed by a series of shared goals.
- Results: Pleasant contact failed, with some meals ending in name-calling and food-throwing. Across the series of shared goals, the boys began to mix voluntarily, cross-group friendships rose, and stereotypes softened.
- Conclusion: Contact is not sufficient; interdependence is the active ingredient. This supplied the empirical core of Allport’s common-goals condition.
The sample was small and homogeneous (22 white, middle-class, Protestant boys), and the researchers staged the events themselves, which limits how far the findings generalise.
This intergroup cooperation encourages positive relations between the groups. Another instance of intergroup cooperation has been studied in schools (e.g., Brewer and Miller, 1984; Johnson, Johnson, and Maruyama, 1984; Schofield, 1986).
For example, Elliot Aronson developed a “jigsaw” approach such that students from diverse backgrounds work toward common goals, fostering positive relationships among children worldwide (Aronson, 2002).
- Aim: To test whether restructuring classroom tasks so pupils depended on each other could improve liking, self-esteem, and achievement across ethnic lines (Aronson et al., 1978).
- Method: Each child mastered one indispensable lesson segment and taught it to their group. Blaney et al. (1977) compared fifth-graders in these “jigsaw” groups with traditional, teacher-led classes over six weeks.
- Results: Jigsaw pupils showed higher self-esteem and liked their groupmates more than controls did. Minority pupils performed significantly better academically, while majority pupils did as well as in traditional classrooms (Lucker et al., 1976).
- Conclusion: Prejudice reduction in desegregated schools depends on the goal structure inside the classroom, not on desegregation alone.
The studies were short and regional. The strongest liking effects were also for groupmates rather than the outgroup as a whole.
4. The Support of Authorities, Law, or Custom
The support of authorities, law, and customs also tends to encourage more positive intergroup contact. Official sanction helps because authorities can set norms of acceptance and guidelines for how group members should interact with each other.
There should not be official laws enforcing segregation. This importance has been demonstrated in such wide-ranging circumstances as the military (Landis, Hope, and Day, 1983), business (Morrison and Herlihy, 1992), and religion (Parker, 1968).
Legislation, such as the civil-rights acts in American society, can also be instrumental in establishing anti-prejudicial norms (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2005).
Allport (1954) added one caveat. Contact may not help when prejudice is rooted in personality, such as the authoritarian personality, rather than in the social situation.
Later researchers proposed more conditions beyond Allport’s original four.
Positive contact norms, the sense that friendly interaction across groups is socially expected and valued, can strengthen contact’s effects. Personal accountability, taking responsibility for one’s own biases and actively working to change them, does the same.
Empathy and Perspective-Taking
The belief in the importance of empathy and perspective-taking can enhance intergroup contact.
Trying to understand and empathize with the experiences and perspectives of other groups’ members can lead to greater mutual understanding and positive relationships.
Research suggests empathy is one of the two strongest reasons contact reduces prejudice in the first place (see “Why Does Contact Reduce Prejudice?” below).
Why Does Contact Reduce Prejudice?
Brewer and Miller (1996) and Brewer and Brown (1998) suggest that these conditions can be viewed as an application of dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957).
Specifically, someone with negative attitudes toward a group may end up having positive social contact with its members. Their behavior no longer matches their attitude.
This dissonance can then change the attitude to match the new behavior, provided the contact meets Allport’s four conditions.
Forbes (1997) offers a different account, arguing contact mainly works by giving each group more information about the other. Not everyone agrees.
Later research tested these explanations directly. Pettigrew and Tropp (2008) meta-analysed the three most-studied explanations for why contact works: increased knowledge of the outgroup, reduced intergroup anxiety, and greater empathy.
All three helped explain why contact reduces prejudice, but knowledge was the weakest pathway. Anxiety reduction and empathy mattered more: contact works mainly by changing how people feel, not what they know.
Indirect Contact: Extended and Imagined Contact
Direct contact is often impossible in segregated or post-conflict societies. Researchers have therefore tested two indirect forms of contact.
Extended Contact
Extended contact means that knowing an ingroup member has a close outgroup friend can improve attitudes toward that outgroup, even without personal contact.
- Aim: To test whether knowing an ingroup member has a close outgroup friend improves attitudes, without any personal contact (Wright et al., 1997).
- Method: Four studies: two surveys, a laboratory recreation of the Robbers Cave conflict, and a minimal-group experiment (using arbitrary, newly created groups) in which participants observed an apparent cross-group friendship.
- Results: Respondents who knew of a cross-group friendship held less negative attitudes, even controlling for their own direct friendships. In both experiments, learning of or observing such a friendship reduced negative attitudes.
- Conclusion: Contact effects can travel through social networks, possibly because the friend acts as a positive example and the outgroup becomes included in the self.
The surveys were correlational, and the experiments used artificial groups with immediate measures, so durability is untested.
Zhou et al. (2019) meta-analysed 20 years of extended-contact research: 248 effect sizes from 115 studies. The association with intergroup attitudes was r = .25, falling to r = .17 once direct cross-group friendship was removed.
The effect is small to medium. It was larger when extended contact was perceived rather than actual. Most studies were cross-sectional, measuring people only once, so the estimate mainly reflects associations, not demonstrated causal effects.
Imagined Contact
Imagined contact means mentally simulating a positive interaction with an outgroup member. It is a low-cost substitute when real contact is not possible.
- Aim: To test whether mentally simulating a positive interaction improves outgroup attitudes when no contact partner is available (Turner et al., 2007).
- Method: In three experiments, participants imagined talking to an elderly person or a gay man. Controls imagined an outdoor scene, did a control task, or simply thought about elderly people.
- Results: Imagining contact lowered intergroup bias. In the third experiment it also raised perceived outgroup variability and reduced anxiety, which explained the more positive evaluations.
- Conclusion: Imagined contact can be a low-cost preparatory step where real contact is impractical, working largely by reducing anxiety.
These were laboratory studies with immediate post-tests on student samples, so they show short-term attitude shifts rather than durable or behavioural change. Reviewers have also questioned how long such brief “light-touch” effects last (Paluck et al., 2021).
Examples of Contact Hypothesis
Homelessness
Historically, in contact hypothesis research, racial and ethnic minorities have been the out-group of choice. But the hypothesis extends to out-groups created by many other factors. Homelessness is one example.
Like many out-groups, homeless people are more visible than they once were, due to their growing numbers and extensive media and policy coverage.
This has elicited widespread stigma, linking homelessness with poor physical and mental health, substance abuse, and criminality. Ethnographic studies confirm the effect on the ground: homeless people are regularly degraded, avoided, or treated as non-persons by passersby (Anderson, Snow, and Cress, 1994). The stigma runs deep.
Lee, Farrell, and Link (2004) tested whether the contact hypothesis applies here too, using a national survey of public attitudes toward homeless people. None of Allport’s four conditions were present.
The researchers controlled for selection and social-desirability biases. Even so, general exposure to homeless people still predicted more favorable public attitudes toward them (Lee, Farrell, and Link, 2004).
Contact Between Age Groups
In the 1980s, American society saw a trend toward pervasive age segregation, with children and adults tending to pursue separate, independent lives (Caspi, 1984).
This had consequences such as a lack of transmission of work skills and culture, poor preparation for parenthood, and generally inaccurate stereotypes and unfavorable attitudes toward other age groups.
Caspi (1984) tested this by comparing children in an age-integrated preschool, who had daily contact with older adults, to children in a traditional preschool. The contrast was clear.
Children in the age-integrated preschool held positive attitudes toward older adults, while those without such contact held vague or indifferent attitudes. They also showed better differentiation between adult age groups than children in the traditional preschool.
These findings were among the first to suggest that Allport’s contact hypothesis held relevance beyond race relations (Caspi, 1984).
Contact Between Religious Groups in Indonesia and the Philippines
Religion-related conflict resurged in the late twentieth century, including a 1999-2002 outbreak of sectarian violence between Christians and Muslims in Ambon, Indonesia. This motivated researchers to look for ways to reduce religiously motivated intolerance.
Kanas, Scheepers, and Sterkens (2015) studied this question directly. They surveyed Christian and Muslim students in Indonesia and the Philippines about interreligious contact and negative attitudes toward the religious out-group.
They attempted to answer the following questions (Kanas, Scheepers, and Sterkens, 2015):
- Does positive interreligious contact reduce, while negative interreligious contact induces negative attitudes towards the religious out-group?
- Does the perception of group threat provide a valid mechanism for both the positive and negative effects of interreligious contact?
- Does positive interreligious contact reduce negative out-group attitudes when intergroup relations are tense and both groups experience extreme conflict and violence?
The researchers focused on four ethnically and religiously diverse regions across Indonesia and the Philippines: Maluku, Yogyakarta, the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, and Metro Manila. Maluku and the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao had experienced more substantial religious conflict than the other two regions.
Kanas, Scheepers, and Sterkens found something clear. Interreligious friendships reduced negative attitudes toward the religious out-group, even accounting for self-selection. Casual interreligious contact, by contrast, tended to increase negative out-group attitudes.
In regions experiencing more interreligious violence, there was no effect on interreligious friendships but a further deterioration in effect between casual interreligious contact and negative out-group attitudes.
Kanas, Scheepers, and Sterkens believed that this effect could be explained by perceived group threat.
Applications in Education, Work, and Healthcare
The same logic carries into everyday settings where contact can be designed or arises naturally.
Education and Shared Housing
Desegregation alone accomplishes little. The payoff comes from redesigning daily tasks so pupils need each other to succeed. The jigsaw classroom above is one example.
Higher education offers a natural experiment: many universities randomly assign first-year roommates.
Boisjoly et al. (2006) found that white students randomly paired with a Black or other underrepresented-minority roommate expressed more support for pro-diversity campus policies. They also rated interracial interactions more positively, measured months and years later.
Workplace Diversity
Darling-Hammond et al. (2021) asked whether naturally occurring interracial contact at work predicts racial bias among white employees.
More frequent, higher-quality contact with Black co-workers was associated with lower implicit and explicit bias, over and above contact outside work. This points to teamwork: mixing staff on cooperative project teams may do more than one-off training.
Healthcare and Stigma Reduction
Corrigan et al. (2012) meta-analysed outcome studies of programmes that reduce public stigma toward mental illness.
Contact-based programmes, in which audiences meet a person with mental illness who shares their recovery story, produced larger and more durable improvements than education-only programmes. The advantage held for adolescents and adults alike.
Evaluating the Contact Hypothesis
Allport’s testable formulation of the contact hypothesis has spawned research using a wide range of approaches, including field studies, laboratory experiments, surveys, and archival research.
The 2006 Meta-Analysis: Pettigrew and Tropp
Pettigrew and Tropp (2006) conducted a meta-analysis of 515 studies to test the overall effect of intergroup contact on prejudice, and to check which of Allport’s four conditions actually mattered. A meta-analysis pools the results of every available study and analyzes them statistically to find the overall pattern.
Together, the studies included 250,089 participants across 38 countries, drawn from the 1940s to the year 2000 (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2006).
The scale was unprecedented.
Overall, greater intergroup contact was associated with lower prejudice (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2006). Notably, more rigorous studies revealed even stronger contact-prejudice relationships, not weaker ones.
The meta-analysis also found that contact’s effects vary by target group. The differences were substantial. Effects were largest between heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals and smallest between people with and without disabilities (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2006).
Meta-analyses such as Pettigrew and Tropp’s (2006) confirm a strong link between intergroup contact and reduced prejudice. But whether Allport’s four conditions must be present is far more contested.
Not all reviewers agreed.
Some researchers report that contact still reduces prejudice even in situations that do not match Allport’s conditions. The effect is simply weaker than when the conditions are present (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2006).
The 2006 analysis also put the hypothesis through four tests (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2006):
- Overall effect: The mean correlation was r = −.215, and 94% of samples showed less prejudice with more contact.
- Self-selection: Samples with no choice about contact showed slightly larger effects, the opposite of what a selection account predicts.
- Publication bias: Unpublished studies showed a slightly larger effect, and over 1,200 missing null results would be needed to erase the association.
- Allport’s conditions: Structured programmes produced a larger effect (r = −.287) than other contact (r = −.204), though unstructured contact still reduced prejudice.
The authors therefore treated Allport’s conditions as facilitating rather than necessary. Contact should occur often, avoid threat and anxiety, and encourage cross-group friendship. Even so, only 5% of the studies were true experiments, so the pooled result mainly shows an association.
Does Contact Reduce Prejudice, or Prejudice Reduce Contact?
Correlational studies leave one objection open: less prejudiced people may simply seek out more contact. The “no choice” result above argues against a pure selection account, but longitudinal data test it more directly.
- Aim: To separate the two causal paths by measuring contact and prejudice repeatedly in the same people (Binder et al., 2009).
- Method: A longitudinal survey of 512 ethnic-minority and 1,143 ethnic-majority school students in Germany, Belgium, and England. Cross-lagged analyses (which test whether earlier measures predict later ones) examined both directions.
- Results: Both paths were significant: earlier contact predicted less later prejudice, and earlier prejudice predicted less later contact. Contact effects were negligible for minority-group members.
- Conclusion: Causation runs both ways. Pettigrew et al. (2011) accept that the two paths operate with roughly equal strength.
The design was still observational, so unmeasured third variables could play a part. Randomized experiments remove the selection problem by design, but that evidence is much thinner (see Contemporary Research below).
Contemporary Research
A 2019 re-evaluation tightened the evidence bar considerably, restricting attention to randomized studies with delayed outcomes.
- Aim: To identify only randomized, delayed-outcome studies of intergroup contact, since these best support policy conclusions.
- Method: Paluck, Green, and Green (2019) searched for every study through mid-2016 that randomly assigned contact and measured delayed outcomes, finding 27 qualifying studies (31 treatment arms).
- Results: 24 of the 27 comparisons were positive, with a substantial pooled effect (Δ = 0.39). But larger, pre-registered studies showed far smaller effects, and disability-related prejudice dropped much more than racial prejudice.
- Conclusion: Randomized evidence broadly supports Pettigrew and Tropp’s headline claim. But it is far more equivocal about magnitude, target group, and policy value.
Coverage Gaps in the Evidence
Paluck et al. (2019) also found severe gaps in who has been studied and what has been tested:
- Place: 19 of the 27 studies (70%) were conducted in the United States.
- Age: 13 studied college students, and none tested interracial or interethnic contact on anyone over 25.
- Allport’s conditions: No randomized study with delayed outcomes has experimentally varied them, so whether they are necessary remains open.
- Target group: Effects were far larger for disability-related prejudice. Without those studies, the pooled estimate fell to Δ = 0.20, contradicting the 2006 meta-analysis.
Larger studies also showed smaller effects. The projected effect for an infinitely large study was indistinguishable from zero (Δ = −0.014, 95% CI [−0.458, 0.430]), though the authors call these tests statistically equivocal.
Field Interventions and Robustness
Lemmer and Wagner (2015) meta-analysed contact programmes run outside the laboratory. Of their comparisons, 123 (N = 11,371) were measured soon after the programme and 25 (N = 1,650) at least a month later.
Ethnic attitudes improved, and the changes persisted. Both direct and indirect (extended or virtual) programmes worked. So did programmes in settings of serious societal conflict.
Van Assche et al. (2023) ran two meta-analyses covering 34 studies and 63,945 respondents in 19 countries. Contact was associated with lower prejudice among people perceiving high threat (r = .19) as well as low threat (r = .18).
The pattern was similar for perceived discrimination: r = .23 when high and r = .20 when low. These findings are correlational. They show robust association, not causation.
Where the Evidence Tempers the Optimism
Paluck et al. (2021) reviewed 418 experiments on prejudice reduction in general (309 manuscripts, 2007–2019). They found troubling signs of publication bias that may exaggerate effects. Also, 76% of the studies tested “light touch” interventions whose long-term impact is unclear.
Two field experiments in high-conflict settings gave mixed results. Scacco and Warren (2018) randomly assigned 849 Christian and Muslim young men in riot-prone Kaduna, Nigeria, to religiously mixed or single-religion computer classes for 16 weeks.
Prejudice did not change. Mixed-class participants discriminated less in behavioural games. But this was mainly because single-religion participants discriminated more.
Mousa (2020) randomly assigned Iraqi Christians displaced by ISIS to all-Christian or mixed Christian–Muslim amateur soccer teams. Those with Muslim teammates were more likely to vote for a Muslim outside their team for a sportsmanship award.
They were also more likely to register for a mixed team the next season and to train with Muslims six months later. Behaviour in other social contexts did not change substantially. Attitudes showed no consistent effect.
Together, these studies show a recurring pattern. Contact reliably changes behaviour toward the people encountered, but generalisation and change in underlying attitudes are much harder to obtain.
Net Assessment
Weighting the evidence by design quality rather than by count, five conclusions stand out:
- Direction: The direction of the effect is not seriously in doubt: 24 of 27 randomized studies point the same way.
- Magnitude: The effect is probably smaller than the classic estimate, since larger and pre-registered studies show markedly smaller effects.
- Conditionality: Effects vary by target group, are weaker for minority-group members, and shift behaviour toward known individuals more than general attitudes.
- Causation: Contact reduces prejudice and prejudice reduces contact, at roughly comparable strength.
- Evidence base: It is mostly US, student and child samples, with no randomized evidence on adults’ racial or ethnic prejudice.
As Paluck et al. (2019) conclude, contact is among the best-supported prejudice-reduction strategies. It is also not yet supported well enough to prescribe as policy with confidence.
Are Allport’s Conditions Necessary, or Just Facilitating?
Gordon Allport taught sociology in Turkey as a young man (Nicholson, 2003). The experience pushed him toward proximal, individual-level explanations of intergroup conflict. He favoured these over broader societal ones.
He and Williams (1947) both doubted that contact alone reduced prejudice. This led them to specify the “positive conditions” under which it does (Allport, 1954; Williams, 1947).
Researchers have criticized Allport’s “positive factors” approach because it invites the addition of different situational conditions thought to be crucial that actually are not.
Other researchers went on to propose a host of further conditions for positive contact (e.g., Foster and Finchilescu, 1986). Eventually, so many conditions had been proposed that almost no real-world contact situation could meet all of them (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2005).
Pettigrew (1998) raised a further criticism: Allport never specified the processes behind these effects, or whether they extend to outgroups not directly involved in the contact.
The criticism landed.
Theorists have since shifted their view: intergroup contact generally does reduce prejudice, but many facilitating factors can increase or decrease how much.
Some factors even work against contact’s usual effect (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2005). Groups already feeling anxiety or threat toward each other show less prejudice reduction from contact (Blair, Park, and Bachelor, 2003; Stephan et al., 2002).
The mechanism itself has also been reconsidered. More recent research suggests contact reduces prejudice mainly through empathy and lower intergroup anxiety. The mechanism is not simply knowing more about the outgroup (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2008; Kanas, Scheepers, and Sterkens, 2015).
When Common Goals Backfire
Shared goals do not always help. If the cooperation fails to achieve its aims, antagonism between the groups can increase rather than fall (Brown, 1988).
Groups also need distinctive, complementary roles so that each contribution is clearly defined. Without them, liking may decrease because members become concerned with the integrity of their own group (Brown, 1988).
The Generalisation Problem
Hewstone and Brown (1986) called this “a crucial criticism” of the contact hypothesis. Reduced prejudice among children in a mixed jigsaw classroom does not automatically extend to their whole ethnic group.
Mutual differentiation offers one answer. Contact generalises best when both people stay aware, during the contact, that they belong to different groups (Hewstone, 2003).
In one study, contact with grandparents predicted more positive attitudes toward older people in general only when age-group membership was salient (Harwood et al., 2005).
Researchers are now more optimistic. Positive shifts can carry over from one setting to another and from the individuals met to the whole outgroup.
They can even spread to groups the person never met. This is the secondary transfer effect (Pettigrew, 2009). In Northern Ireland, for example, contact across the Catholic-Protestant divide also improved attitudes toward racial minorities (Tausch et al., 2010).
Early Studies of Intergroup Contact
Not everyone agreed. Social Darwinist William Graham Sumner (1906) believed intergroup contact almost inevitably led to conflict, since most groups saw themselves as superior.
Jackson (1993) and Levine and Campbell (1972) made similar predictions. Perspectives began to diversify through the twentieth century.
Some theorists believed contact between groups, such as different races, bred “suspicion, fear, resentment, disturbance, and at times open conflict” (Baker, 1934). Others, like Lett (1945), believed interracial contact led to “mutual understanding and regard.”
Nonetheless, these early investigations were speculative rather than empirical (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2005). The emerging field of social psychology emphasized theories of intergroup contact.
The University of Alabama researchers Sims and Patrick (1936) were among the first to study intergroup contact empirically. Discouragingly, anti-Black attitudes among northern white students increased after they were immersed in the then all-white university.
The pattern was not universal.
Brophy (1945) later studied Black and white sailors serving together in the nearly desegregated Merchant Marine, aligning more closely with Allport’s later thinking. The more voyages white seamen took with Black seamen, the more positive their racial attitudes became.
The trend held elsewhere too.
In Philadelphia, white police officers with Black colleagues raised fewer objections to working alongside them. They were also more accepting of Black officers joining all-white districts and taking orders from qualified Black superiors (Kephart, 1957; Pettigrew and Tropp, 2005).
The evidence was mounting.
Cornell sociologist Robin Williams Jr. then proposed 102 propositions on intergroup relations, an early formulation of contact theory. These held that contact reduces prejudice under certain conditions (Williams, 1947).
- The two groups share similar statuses, interests, and tasks;
- the situation fosters personal, intimate intergroup contact;
- participants do not fit stereotypical conceptions of their group members;
- the activities cut across group lines.
Stouffer et al. offered the first extensive field study of the effects of intergroup contact (1949).
Stouffer et al. studied white soldiers who fought alongside Black soldiers in the 1944-1945 Battle of the Bulge. They held far more positive attitudes toward their Black colleagues. This held true regardless of status or place of origin (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2005).
Studies of racially desegregated housing projects added further evidence. Deutsch and Collins (1951), Wilner, Walkley, and Cook (1955), and Works (1961) all found that contact reduced racial prejudice among both Black and white residents.
Contact Theory Compared With Rival Theories
Contact is one of several accounts of why prejudice arises and how it might be reduced. The table sets it against its main rivals.
| Theory | Core claim | Relation to contact theory |
|---|---|---|
| Social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) | Merely sorting people into “us” and “them” can produce ingroup favouritism, even with no history, competition, or contact. | Creates tension: contact that keeps categories visible may reinforce the boundary it aims to soften, so category salience must be calibrated. |
| Common ingroup identity model (Gaertner et al., 1993) | Bias falls when contact leads people to recategorise former outgroup members as part of one inclusive group. | A refinement of Allport: equal status and common goals work because they make recategorisation likely. |
| Realistic conflict theory (Sherif et al., 1961; LeVine & Campbell, 1972; see Robbers Cave) | Groups become hostile when they compete for scarce, mutually exclusive resources. | The mirror image of the common-goals condition. It predicts that contact between competing groups raises hostility, as at Robbers Cave and army base camps (Stouffer et al., 1949). |
| Social dominance theory (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999) | Some prejudice serves to maintain group-based hierarchies that benefit the dominant group. | Predicts that contact may change feelings toward individuals without changing the motive to preserve group status. |
| Stereotype content model (Fiske et al., 2002) | Stereotypes vary on two independent dimensions: perceived warmth and perceived competence. | Contact aimed at one dimension may not shift the other, which may help explain why effects differ by target group, such as disability and race. |
Later contact researchers responded to these tensions by specifying how much category salience is optimal, rather than treating “more contact” as an unqualified good.
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Further Information
- Dovidio, J. F., Love, A., Schellhaas, F. M., & Hewstone, M. (2017). Reducing intergroup bias through intergroup contact: Twenty years of progress and future directions. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 20(5), 606–620. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430217712052
- Pettigrew, T. F., Tropp, L. R., Wagner, U., & Christ, O. (2011). Recent advances in intergroup contact theory. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 35(3), 271–280. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2011.03.001
- Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(5), 751–783. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.90.5.751
