The contact hypothesis, proposed by Gordon Allport (1897-1967), holds that prejudice between groups can be reduced by equal-status contact pursued in the service of shared goals, especially when that contact has institutional support. 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 two housing policies. One city assigned residents without regard to race; the other 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. The gap was striking.
Conclusion: Housing structure, not residents’ personalities, drove the difference. Where architecture forced equal-status, everyday contact, prejudice was lower. This became one of the empirical foundations for Allport’s (1954) contact hypothesis.
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 created barriers to a shared goal, such as a planned picnic. The barrier could only be resolved if both groups cooperated.
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: “Jigsaw” classrooms split each lesson into segments. Every child had to master one indispensable segment and teach it to the group. Blaney et al. (1977) compared fifth-graders in these interdependent groups with fifth-graders in traditional, teacher-led classrooms over six weeks.
Results: Pupils in jigsaw groups showed higher self-esteem. They also liked their groupmates more than pupils in the control classrooms. Minority pupils performed significantly better academically in the interdependent classrooms, while majority pupils performed just 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.
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.
7. Empathy and Perspective-Taking
The belief in the importance of empathy and perspective-taking can enhance intergroup contact.
When individuals try to understand and empathize with the experiences and perspectives of members from other groups, it 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.
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.
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).
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. The pooled effect (Δ = 0.39) was substantial, but larger, pre-registered studies showed far smaller effects. 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.
Are Allport’s Conditions Necessary, or Just Facilitating?
Gordon Allport taught sociology in Turkey as a young man (Nicholson, 2003), an experience that pushed him toward proximal, individual-level explanations of intergroup conflict rather than 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).
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 (1983) 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 (1946) 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. found that white soldiers who fought alongside Black soldiers in the 1944-1945 Battle of the Bulge 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.
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