Indirect Contact Flashcards
“In Conflict Zones, People Often Know Someone Who Has Been Affected By The Conflict” - What Does This Lead To? (3)
- Intergroup anxiety -> contact avoidance
- Such negatively evaluated objects more likely to be avoided, as well as people with initial negative impressions of them
- How do we heal divided relations if groups are too scared to come into contact with each other?
4 Indirect Forms of Intergroup Contact:
- Extended contact (Wright)
- Parasocial contact (Paluck)
- Storytelling
- Imaginary
Extended Contact:
Having an ingroup friend who has outgroup friends reduces prejudice towards the outgroup, enough to change your own attitudes
Extended Contact - How does it get stronger?
The effect is stronger when more ingroup friends have outgroup friends
If the number of extended contacts increase its effects, does the relationship between you and the ingroup friend affect it as well?
Findings: the closer the ingroup member is to you, the stronger the contact effects (hence, positive effects with friends/family, not with neighbours/work colleagues)
How does self-consciousness tie into extended contact?
People who tend to care what others think show stronger extended contact effects
Meta-Analytic Results:
Some evidence that extended contact has powerful effects of prejudice:
- R = .42 (k = 8, 95%)
- Most powerful meta-analysis
- R = .25 (95%)
Why do cross-group friendships not affect ingroup norms? What’s the general takeaway?
- Subtyping, Friendships lead to decategorization/lower salience
- TAKEAWAY: extended contact affects outgroup attitudes - positive increases/impacts on inclusion of other in the self, ingroup norms, outgroup norms, and intergroup anxiety
HINT: 4 PARTS OF EC
How does extended contact work? (4)
1: Inclusion of other in the self:
- Cognitive inclusion of the target ingroup and outgroup members in the self
2: Ingroup norms
- Members expressing tolerant, expected behaviour
3: Outgroup norms
- Outgroup members exhibit tolerant behaviour towards ingroup
4: Intergroup anxiety
- Lower anxiety - not involved in direct contact
Extended contact is primarily cognitive in nature (3)
- Knowledge (a cognitive variable - not a feeling about) of an ingroup member’s contact with an outgroup member
- Inclusion of other in the self is a cognitive measure of interpersonal closeness (Overlap of your values and the other person’s values)
- Group norms (in and outgroup) are cognitive
(What are expected versus actual behaviours)
Extended contact in segregated societies:
- Where positive contact experiences are limited (Lack of opportunity for direct contact - EX: peace walls in Northern Ireland)
- Rely on more heavily extended contact: Effects of extended contact predicted better attitudes (1 year later)
Extended contact group-level variables:
- Extended contact increases group salience
- Affects group-level variables (ingroup norms, outgroup norms etc.) because it takes place at the group level
Extended contact in conflict zones - Infrahumanization
(similar to dehumanization) perceiving the outgroup as less human than the ingroup
- Being “less human” makes it easier to kill in conflict
- We have two derivative emotions:
- Primary Emotions: happiness, anger
- Everyone can experience these - even animals
- Secondary Emotions: hope, bewilderment
- Unique to humans
- Infrahumanization involves when we ascribe more secondary emotions to the ingroup, fewer to the outgroup (thus, dehumanizing outgroup members with traits similar to literal animals)
- Has unique brain regions associated with it - specifically those dealing with social cognition
Extended contact in conflict zones - Competitive Victimhood:
- One’s ingroup = the only legitimate victim of the conflict
- “my group is the only one that have suffered”
- If competitive victimhood is high, stalls any reconciliatory efforts as groups try to “out-victimise” each other
2 problems with extended (and direct) contact:
- How do you highlight who has contact?(someone still needs to come into contact with the outgroup)
