Following WWII and the desegregation of the military and other public institutions, policymakers and social scientists had turned an eye towards the policy implications of interracial contact.
[1] The premise of Allport's hypothesis states that under appropriate conditions interpersonal contact could be one of the most effective ways to reduce prejudice between majority and minority group members.
[1] According to Allport, properly managed contact should reduce issues of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination that commonly occur between rival groups and lead to better intergroup interactions.
[2] In some subfields of criminology, psychology, and sociology, intergroup contact has been described as one of the best ways to improve relations among groups in conflict.
[6][7][8] In 1947, sociologist R. M. Williams described interpersonal collaboration with goal interdependence as a worthwhile strategy to reduce intergroup hostility.
[12][13] A range of social scientists, from Kenneth Clark to Floyd and Gordon Allport, weighed in on the psychological effects of desegregation, and conditions under which interracial contact might attenuate racial prejudice, including an amicus curiae brief filed in the Brown v. Board case.
[16] Wilner, Walkley, & Cook, two years prior to The Nature of Prejudice, studied segregation and integration in housing projects, and also suggested four conditions under which intergroup attitudes would change for the better.
Under the assumption that prejudice arises from racial segregation, they suggested that it would diminish when members occupy “the same or equivalent roles in the situation,” share background characteristics like education, age, gender or socioeconomic status, perceive common interests or goals, and when the “social climate […] is not unfavorable to interracial association.”[17] Concurrently, Carolyn Sherif and Muzafer Sherif developed their Robbers Cave experiment, an illustration of realistic conflict theory.
[18] The Sherifs highlighted the importance of superordinate goals and equal status between groups, but notably, did not weigh in alongside other social scientists in their amicus brief for Brown v. Board of Education.
In Allport's own words, "[Prejudice] may be reduced by equal status contact between majority and minority groups in the pursuit of common goals.
Allport (1954) claimed that prejudice is a direct result of generalizations and oversimplifications made about an entire group of people based on incomplete or mistaken information.
[25] Herek and Glunt's (1993) national study of interpersonal contact and heterosexuals' attitudes toward gay men found that increased contact "predicted attitudes toward gay men better than did any other demographic or social psychological variable" (p. 239); such variables included gender, race, age, education, geographic residence, marital status, number of children, religion and political ideology.
[27] Savelkoul et al. (2011) in their study from the Netherlands found people living in regions with high numbers of Muslims (i.e. those more exposed to unavoidable intergroup contacts) get used to and are more experienced with their integration and express lesser perceived threats.
For example, in many countries, racial and religious groups are often residentially, educationally or occupationally segregated, which limits the opportunity for direct contact.
[38] For example, positive media portrayals of intergroup interactions on television and radio, also known as the parasocial contact hypothesis, have the potential to reduce the prejudice of millions of viewers and listeners.
[47] In the context of sexual prejudice, research also has shown that interacting online with a member of the outgroup is particularly useful as a prejudice-reduction strategy among individuals who typically report ideologically intolerant beliefs.
[49] In the Latin American context, recently Rodriguez-Rivas et al. (2021) demonstrated a positive impact on the reduction of stigma towards people with mental illness in Chilean university students, following participation in a multi-component online program that incorporated electronic contact (E-contact) via videoconferencing with a person diagnosed with schizophrenia.
[50] In the Afghanistan context, recently Sahab et al. (2024) studied whether using an AI-powered software agent as a facilitator for intergroup electronic contact led to better interactions and reduced prejudice between rival ethnic groups.
The findings suggest that using an AI-assisted chatbot in intergroup E-contact can enhance interaction and reduce interethnic prejudices and hostility among Afghanistan’s ethnic groups.
Key's examination of Southern politics, which found that racism grew in areas where the local concentrations of black Americans were higher.
[55] In that context, absent the specific conditions of Allport, contact comes to produce more negative effects, namely increasing prejudice.
Stefania Paolini, Jake Harwood, and Mark Rubin (2010) proposed that intergroup contact may have more negative than positive effects on prejudice, because it makes outgroup members' social group more salient during encounters.