Abstract
Guided by the early findings of social scientists, practitioners have long advocated for greater contact between groups to reduce prejudice and increase social cohesion. Recent work, however, suggests that intergroup contact can undermine support for social change towards greater equality, especially among disadvantaged group members. Using a large and heterogeneous dataset (12,997 individuals from 69 countries), we demonstrate that intergroup contact and support for social change towards greater equality are positively associated among members of advantaged groups (ethnic majorities and cis-heterosexuals) but negatively associated among disadvantaged groups (ethnic minorities and sexual and gender minorities). Specification-curve analysis revealed important variation in the size—and at times, direction—of correlations, depending on how contact and support for social change were measured. This allowed us to identify one type of support for change—willingness to work in solidarity— that is positively associated with intergroup contact among both advantaged and disadvantaged group members.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals
Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription
$29.99 / 30 days
cancel any time
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 12 digital issues and online access to articles
$119.00 per year
only $9.92 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on SpringerLink
- Instant access to full article PDF
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
Data underlying the analyses reported in the paper have been deposited on the Open Science Framework under the following link: https://osf.io/wgdhb/.
Code availability
R code and scripts to reproduce the analyses presented in the manuscript can be found on the Open Science Framework at: https://osf.io/8rcz9/.
Change history
23 June 2020
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0915-9
References
Allport, G. W. The Nature of Prejudice (Addison-Wesley, 1954).
Schofield, J. W. School desegregation and intergroup relations: a review of the literature. Rev. Educ. Res. 17, 335–409 (1991).
Lemmer, G. & Wagner, U. Can we really reduce ethnic prejudice outside the lab? A meta-analysis of direct and indirect contact interventions. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 4, 152–168 (2015).
Pettigrew, T. F. & Tropp, L. R. A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 90, 751–783 (2006).
Çakal, H., Hewstone, M., Schwär, G. & Heath, A. An investigation of the social identity model of collective action and the ‘sedative’ effect of intergroup contact among black and white students in South Africa. Br. J. Soc. Psychol. 50, 606–627 (2011).
Dixon, J., Durrheim, K. & Tredoux, C. Intergroup contact and attitudes toward the principle and practice of racial equality. Psychol. Sci. 18, 867–872 (2007).
Saguy, T., Tausch, N., Dovidio, J. F. & Pratto, F. The irony of harmony: intergroup contact can produce false expectations for equality. Psychol. Sci. 20, 114–121 (2009).
Wright, S. C. & Lubensky, M. E. in Intergroup Misunderstandings: Impact of Divergent Social Realities (eds Demoulin, S. et al.) 291–310 (Psychology Press, 2009).
Kamberi, E., Martinovic, B. & Verkuyten, M. Intergroup contact and minority group empowerment: the perspective of Roma and non-Roma adolescents in Macedonia. J. Community Appl. Soc. Psychol. 27, 424–434 (2017).
Reimer, N. K. et al. Intergroup contact and social change. Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 4, 121–136 (2017).
Tropp, L. R. & Barlow, F. K. Making advantaged racial groups care about racial inequality: intergroup contact as a route to psychological investment. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 27, 194–199 (2018).
Jackman, M. R. & Crane, M. ‘Some of my best friends are Black’: interracial friendship and Whites’ racial attitudes. Public Opin. Q. 50, 459–486 (1986).
Van Stekelenburg, J. & Klandermans, B. The social psychology of protest. Curr. Sociol. 61, 886–905 (2013).
Van Zomeren, M., Postmes, T. & Spears, R. Toward an integrative social identity model of collective action: a quantitative research synthesis of three socio-psychological perspectives. Psychol. Bull. 134, 504–535 (2008).
Droogendyk, L., Louis, W. R. & Wright, S. C. Renewed promise for positive cross-group contact: the role of supportive contact in empowering collective action. Can. J. Behav. Sci. Rev. Can. Sci. Comport. 48, 317–327 (2016).
Patel, C. J., Burford, B. & Ioannidis, J. P. A. Assessment of vibration of effects due to model specification can demonstrate the instability of observational associations. J. Clin. Epidemiol. 68, 1046–1058 (2015).
Rubin, D. Meta-analysis: literature synthesis or effect-size surface estimation? J. Educ. Stat. 17, 363–374 (1992).
Steegen, S., Tuerlinckx, F., Gelman, A. & Vanpaemel, W. Increasing transparency through a multiverse analysis. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 11, 702–712 (2016).
Nosek, B. A. et al. Promoting an open research culture. Science 348, 1422–1425 (2015).
Alba, R., & Foner, N. Strangers No More: Immigration and the Challenges of Integration in North America and Western Europe (Princeton Univ. Press, 2015).
Herek, G. M. & McLemore, K. A. Sexual prejudice. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 64, 309–333 (2013).
Discrimination and Violence Against Individuals Based On Their Sexual Orientation And Gender Identity A/HRC/29/23 (UN Human Rights Council, 2015); http://www.refworld.org/docid/5571577c4.html
Simonsohn, U., Simmons, J. P. & Nelson, L. D. Specification curve: descriptive and inferential statistics on all reasonable specifications. Preprint at SSRN http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2694998 (2015).
Benjamini, Y. & Yekutieli, D. The control of the false discovery rate in multiple testing under dependency. Ann. Stat. 29, 1165–1188 (2001).
Tausch, N., Saguy, T. & Bryson, J. How does intergroup contact affect social change? Its impact on collective action and individual mobility intentions among members of a disadvantaged group. J. Soc. Issues 71, 536–553 (2015).
Ufkes, E. G., Dovidio, J. F. & Tel, G. Identity and collective action among European Kurds. Br. J. Soc. Psychol. 54, 176–186 (2015).
Saguy, T. Downside of intergroup harmony?: When reconciliation might backfire and what to do. Policy Insights Behav. Brain Sci. 5, 75–81 (2018).
Fingerhut, A. W. Straight allies: what predicts heterosexuals’ alliance with the LGBT community? 1. J. Appl. Soc. Psychol. 41, 2230–2248 (2011).
Subašić, E., Reynolds, K. J. & Turner, J. C. The political solidarity model of social change: dynamics of self-categorization in intergroup power relations. Pers. Soc. Psychol. Rev. 12, 330–352 (2008).
Pettigrew, T. F. & Hewstone, M. The single factor fallacy: implications of missing critical variables from an analysis of intergroup contact theory. Soc. Issues Policy Rev. 11, 8–37 (2017).
Becker, J. C., Wright, S. C., Lubensky, M. E. & Zhou, S. Friend or ally: whether cross-group contact undermines collective action depends what advantaged group members say (or don’t say). Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 39, 442–455 (2013).
Droogendyk, L., Wright, S. C., Lubensky, M. & Louis, W. R. Acting in solidarity: cross-group contact between disadvantaged group members and advantaged group allies. J. Soc. Issues 72, 315–334 (2016).
Tankard, M. E. & Paluck, E. L. The effect of a Supreme Court decision regarding gay marriage on social norms and personal attitudes. Psychol. Sci. 28, 1334–1344 (2017).
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J. & Norenzayan, A. The weirdest people in the world? Behav. Brain Sci. 33, 61–135 (2010).
Acknowledgements
This project received direct financial support through the Swiss Bilateral Programme of the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation awarded to J.U., R.G., T.H., M.Bernadino and D.V. The Chilean research team was supported by Fondecyt (grant no. 1161371), the Center for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (grant no. FONDAP 15130009) and the Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Research (grant no. FONDAP 15110006) awarded to R.G. The Dutch part of this research was funded by FWO Odysseus grant no. G.O.E66.14N awarded to C.L. The English part of this research was funded by the ESRC commissioning grant no. 403006662 awarded to D.A. and G.T. S.W. was funded by a grant from the Social Science & Humanities Research Council of Canada. I.Ž. was funded by the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development (grant no. 179018). The Polish part of this research was funded by the Foundation for Polish Science (TEAM), co-financed by the EU ERDF (‘Language as a Cure’ Project) awarded to M.Bilewicz and O.K. E.O. was supported by the HSE University Basic Research Programme and the Russian Academic Excellence Project ‘5–100’. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. We thank L. Liekefett, D. Kokdemir, D. Indreica, A. Figueiredo, N. Mühlemann and Y. Koc for their additional help with the translation and/or data collection. We also thank J. Ginges and L. Eisner for their insightful comments. Finally, we thank the SoSci Panel, PlanetRomeo, East meets West, Psychologie Heute and all other LGBTIQ+ organizations for distributing our survey.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
T.H. and J.U. conceived the primary idea. T.H., J.U., M.Bernardino, D.V. and R.G. conceptualized the project and acquired the seed money. T.H., J.U., M.Bernardino, D.V., N.S., C.V., S.S., E.P.V., L.R.T., R.G., R.D., D.A., H.S., J.Z. and A.A. were involved in research design/instrument construction. T.H., J.U., M.Bernardino and D.V. wrote the draft of preregistration. T.H. and J.U. coordinated the project. T.H., J.U., M.Bernardino, N.S., C.L., D.V., S.S, L.R.T., E.P.V., R.G., R.K.D., D.A., H.P.S., M.Brankovic., S.W., J.Z., M.P., A.L.A., I.Z., A.P., N.A.L., M.S., A.G., H.O., M.Bilewicz., A.K., O.K., S.O., E.M., M.N., P.G., J.P., R.B., M.J., E.O., O.B., D.C.B., J.C., M.D., L.D., A.H.L., K.K. and L.M.U. were involved in data collection. T.H. and S.S. undertook data preparation. A.G., J.U., T.H. and S.S. conducted data analysis. T.H. and J.U., supported by S.S., prepared the draft manuscript. C.V., N.S., L.R.T., E.P.V., M.Bernadino, D.V., R.D., S.W., H.S., M.P., M.Brankovic., R.G. and D.A., supported by A.K., E.M., J.Z., I.Z., N.L., M.N., J.P., M.S., A.A., M.Bilewicz, R.B., P.G., S.O., O.B. and E.O., revised the manuscript. L.R.T. did the final editing.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Peer review information Primary Handling Editor: Stavroula Kousta.
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary information
Supplementary Information
Supplementary Figs. 1–5, Supplementary Tables 1–13, and Supplementary methods and references.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hässler, T., Ullrich, J., Bernardino, M. et al. A large-scale test of the link between intergroup contact and support for social change. Nat Hum Behav 4, 380–386 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0815-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0815-z
This article is cited by
-
A social ecological approach to belonging in LGBTQ+ people
Nature Reviews Psychology (2024)
-
Human mobility networks reveal increased segregation in large cities
Nature (2023)
-
Minority stress, resilience, and health in Italian and Taiwanese LGB+ people: A cross-cultural comparison
Current Psychology (2023)
-
People or Ideology? Social Conservatism and Intergroup Contact Moderate Heterosexuals’ Responses to a State-sponsored Anti-LGBT Campaign
Sexuality Research and Social Policy (2023)
-
The social psychological roots of violent intergroup conflict
Nature Reviews Psychology (2022)
