Seeking and avoiding intergroup contact: Future frontiers of research on building social integration

By Stefania Paolini, James T Harwood, Miles Hewstone, David L. Neumann. Social & Personality Psychology Compass, 2018

130 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over 60 years of research and comprehensive reviews now support Gordon Allport's contact hypothesis that face‐to‐face interactions between members of opposing groups should be promoted to lessen prejudice and improve intergroup relations. Society however does not yet enjoy the full prejudice‐reducing benefits of intergroup contact because opportunities for contact are often not taken up, and segregation persists in the face of diversity. In this article, we review recent investigations on the social psychology of individuals' seeking and avoiding intergroup contact and set the stage for new research in this area. We call for a new generation of research on intergroup contact that addresses a novel and critical research question: What personal, situational, and wider social factors move individuals towards or away from engaging in intergroup contact? This research can help us design intervention strategies to ensure that opportunities for, and benefits of, intergroup contact are fully enjoyed by individuals and groups in increasingly diverse societies.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4cab65fe6ff2e633a9b3771b08ceacb7bbcac41d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Applied Psychology

1. Clifford Stevenson
2. Oliver Christ

In Social Psychology

1. Clifford Stevenson
2. U. Wagner
3. Stefania Paolini
4. Oliver Christ
5. M. Bilewicz
6. Miles Hewstone
7. T. Pettigrew

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Oliver Christ
2. Clifford Stevenson
3. U. Wagner
4. Stefania Paolini
5. Mathias Kauff
6. M. Bilewicz
7. Miles Hewstone
8. T. Pettigrew

Citations in the corpus

• How do we get people into contact? Predictors of intergroup contact and drivers of contact seeking (2020, background): “In contrast to the broad overviews of a multitude of predicting variables presented by Paolini et al. (2018) and Ron et al. (2017), the present article provides an in-depth discussion of a selected number of predictors that our research laboratories and other researchers are working on currently or…”