Written by: Allison Ralph and Michelle Garred
Michelle Garred, PhD, Founder of Ripple Peace Research & Consulting has partnered with Cohesion Strategy to offer enhanced measuring and evaluation services! Get in touch to learn more.
Welcome to the second installment of a three-part series on bridgebuilding, behavior, and effectiveness, co-authored by me, Allison Ralph, and evaluation specialist Michelle Garred, PhD, of Ripple Peace Research & Consulting. This series comes out of some concerns I had about the efficacy of how contact theory is being applied in a lot of bridgebuilding work in the prodemocracy space in the US, and about the frequent focus I see on attitude change in evaluating that work. I reached out to Michelle to ask her to explore these themes with me.
Our first blog, published December 2 explored approaches for evaluating behavior change in bridgebuilding work. Our final piece will look at some effectiveness tools from the conflict sensitivity and peacebuilding spaces, developed internationally and highly applicable in US contexts.
This installment focuses on understanding the underlying social science of contact theory. It’s a brief start-up primer on a very large field of knowledge - and one that we hope will be useful.
What is Contact Theory?
Contact theory was originally developed by Gordon Allport and others in the early 1950s in an attempt to understand and interpret the experience of racial desegregation in the US. In The Nature of Prejudice (1954), Allport argued that personal contact between people of different identity groups can promote positive attitudes toward out-groups–groups we perceive as different from our own–and reduce prejudice. In the seventy years since the theory came out, this basic premise has been tested and studied in both real-life and laboratory settings.
Contact theory informs the central core of many bridgebuilding interventions in the US. Contact has also been adapted and mixed with or married to other theories of change in creative ways. We find this creativity very present in the wider prodemocracy space in the US, with organizations like Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, Braver Angels, Millions of Conversations, and BridgeUSA leaning on contact theory, among other strategies, to argue that reducing ill-feeling by contact between people of different groups will improve our social fabric and democracy. For example, Tanenbaum relies on contact and on conflict resolution skills to reduce prejudice across religious difference. Millions of Conversations combines contact work with empathy development to reduce animosity.
Given the ongoing – and worsening – levels of distrust and prejudice in American society, it’s no wonder that contact theory is an important approach. Research on contact theory shows that intergroup contact “does typically decrease intergroup prejudice and hostility – but not always or under all conditions” (Pettigrew and Tropp 2013, p.2). To use contact theory well, we must hold both of those realities in tension at all times.
Underlying the argument that contact does typically decrease prejudice, Pettigrew and Tropp report a modest but consistent reduction in prejudice across 515 intergroup contact studies. They also present evidence that prejudice reduction results are long-lasting, transferrable to other types of prejudice, and may have sustainable impacts on willingness to support policy change to address systemic discrimination.
At the same time, those “not always or under all conditions” caveats are big ones and should not be dismissed. If the right conditions are not in place, contact work can produce no effect, or it can even backfire, worsening intergroup relations. So let’s talk about those conditions of success.
Contact’s Conditions for Success
Allport had originally set out four conditions he believed necessary for contact to work.
1. Equal status during contact;
2. Working toward common goals;
3. Intergroup cooperation; and
4. Support from authorities and/or institutions.
An additional condition has been proposed since (see for example Tropp and Morhayim 2022, p.13):
5. Repeated and sustained contact over time.
A couple of years ago, Linda Tropp and Trisha Dehrone wrote a great Guide to Building Bridges and Meaningful Connections Between Groups that Michelle recommends to help program developers integrate these five conditions successfully. And it is important to get the conditions right, because if they aren’t, the intervention could produce no effect or even make things worse instead of better. Interactions that replicate divisions or exacerbate tensions are often referred to as “negative contact.”
In situations where some groups are less advantaged than others, getting the first condition (equal status) right is particularly tricky. In the US, there are many divisions that affect our social status, and they may all have to be attended to. Race, gender, wealth, education, immigration status, country of origin, religion, sexual identity and orientation, and other factors can all affect personal and collective power. Those external realities influence how people experience mixed groups, and real care in crafting and facilitating the groups is necessary to transform, rather than replicate, those status differences.
In other manifestations of the first condition (equal status), it’s important to note that contact work may have different effects on disadvantaged versus advantaged participants. For example, if disadvantaged participants feel forced or threatened by the status conditions, or do not feel respected by facilitators or other participants, they may have a negative contact experience even if the experience positively affects advantaged participants’ feelings and actions. On the other hand, advantaged participants may end up with more positive feelings about their disadvantaged co-participants, but still exhibit prejudiced behavior. This is called the principle-implementation gap (Dixon, Durrheim, and Thomae, 2017, Saguy et al 2016).
In other examples, “single-identity contact”– which emphasizes a single common overarching identity over all other identities–can end up decreasing the engagement of disadvantaged people in collective action to improve their own situation. This is clearly not desirable, but it can happen because single-identity contact reduces prejudice by reshaping individuals’ sense of group belonging, thus minimizing individuals’ connection to disadvantaged identities, and reducing their ability to recognize and desire to address discrimination (Reicher 2007; Cocco et al 2024, Saguy et al 2009, Saguy et al 2016). In the same way, single-identity contact can lead already-advantaged participants to become less aware of, and less willing to address, discrimination against disadvantaged participants because that identity has been erased (Saguy et al 2016).
Dual identity contact–which encourages the development of an overarching identity while maintaining other personal identities--seems to have less of these negative effects than single identity contact. Dual identity contact interventions aim to develop a shared superordinate identity while also recognizing other subgroups’ identities. This type of contact has been shown to maintain disadvantaged participants’ engagement with collective action to address discrimination, while also improving intergroup relations (Glasford and Davidio 2011). Dual identity contact has also been shown to encourage not just improved feelings for, but greater willingness to act to address discrimination against disadvantaged on the part of advantaged participants (Banfield and Davidio 2013).
For bridging projects in the US, we want to emphasize that contact work cannot afford to disregard social justice and equity work, or vice versa, because in fact the two approaches need each other. There must be a recognition of complementarity and a consistent deep listening to the perspectives of disadvantaged participants within contact projects (Ralph 2024, Vezzali & Stathi 2020 Ch.7, Powell and Menendian 2024).
This appreciation can take many forms. One method is to lean into collective action for social justice as Allport’s second and third conditions of common goals and collaboration. This is the type of approach taken by the Needham Resilience Network in the Boston area, which centers contact in the context of community problem solving. NRN has collectively created “a rapid response and prevention capability to counter hate-based events and foster social cohesion.”
Another approach would be to develop partnerships between contact and collective action organizations, where contact interventions can serve as an introduction and on-ramp to collective action or other pro-democratic projects like deliberative democracy opportunities. We believe this is a growth area for contact-based bridging programs in the US.
In addition to direct contact, some interventions use extended, vicarious, or imagined contact. These forms of contact are often used when groups have few opportunities for meeting directly, or as more scalable types of contact. Extended contact is when an ingroup member is known to have developed a close relationship with an outgroup member. Vicarious contact is when a person observes such contact. Imagined contact merely requires individuals to imagine positive interactions with outgroup members (Brown and Paterson 2016). Pettigrew and Tropp (2013, Chp 3) regard these types of extended contact positively, but some scholars are less sanguine about light-touch interventions like extended or imagined contact. (Paluck et al., 2021).
Contact’s Relation to Political Difference and Pro-democracy Initiatives
Prejudice reduction is an important tool in a multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious democracy with a history of discriminatory policies and social norms. Therefore it is no surprise that many organizations centering contact interventions, whether they are aimed at differences of race, class, or religious differences, bill themselves as pro-democracy organizations. These are sometimes referred to as “bridging” organizations; +More Perfect Union is one such organization.nites the country and strengthens communities through social connection, service, and civic engagement.”
In the current situations of high affective polarization, prejudice between political groups has also been an important target of contact interventions. Braver Angels is one among many contact initiatives aiming to reduce severe prejudice across political parties, a prejudice sometimes called “affective polarization.”
Although the vast majority of contact interventions are aimed at racial or ethnic prejudice, a few study the effects of contact on reducing severe prejudice against political outgroups. Because every situation of difference is unique, affective polarization has its own quirks. Thomsen and Thomsen (2021) found that contact between highly polarized political groups was effective, but only on participants who identified weakly or moderately with their party, leaving out those most polarized who need to be reached.
Among pro-democracy contact and wider prejudice reduction initiatives, there has been a common presumption that reducing affective polarization would result in greater pro-democracy behavior. For example, some initiatives in the American political context connect increased understanding to collaborative problem solving.
However, this assumption may be erroneous. The Strengthening Democracy Challenge out of Stanford University studied 25 light-touch interventions that aimed at reducing partisan animosity (some were extended or imagined contact). Among those interventions that successfully reduced partisan animosity, many had much smaller effects on support for undemocratic processes or for partisan violence. Some backfired, making those aspects worse. These results and others beg the question of whether reducing affective polarization through contact has overall positive results for democracy, and suggest that further research be done (Voelkel et al., 2023).
Concluding Thoughts
We hope that the contact theory concepts we’ve mentioned above - as well as the resources cited - will prove useful to program developers and bridging practitioners. We want to reiterate that across contact work, to really understand effectiveness, evaluations should focus on behavior change as much as possible–see our first blog for the reasons why. While much of the research about contact is very positive about the approach’s ability to reduce prejudicial attitudes, links between attitude and behavior can be tenuous in the real world - mediated by other social norms, and personal stressors and limits.
We also want to emphasize that unintended effects are not unique to contact and democratization work. Such challenges are common in any kind of social impact effort. Unintended consequences, including negative ones, are almost never a reason to stop doing the work. Instead, they are a reason to cultivate the transparency and skills necessary to prevent, mitigate and/or adapt to keep a program design on an effective track. This will be a focus of our next blog.
Finally, we believe that intergroup contact is necessary but probably not sufficient for building cohesive unity in the US. In addition to contact, thriving intergroup relations also need other supports, such as equitable access to opportunities and resources, reliable public safety infrastructure, etc. (Tropp & Dehrone 2022, p.5). This is not unusual; most social problems have multiple facets and so they need to be addressed in multiple ways. We'll explore some practical resources for thinking about this in our upcoming post.
Michelle Garred, PhD, is a guest author this week and is the Founder and Principal at Ripple Peace Research & Consulting LLC, which provides program design, program evaluation and practical research services to organizations working to improve intergroup relations across cultural, religious, racial, ethnic and other lines of difference.