ABSTRACT
The British city of Bradford has a large Asian population that is educa¬tionally and residentially segregated from the white population. So deep is the division that the local education authority has started a “Linking project”, bussing children from all-Asian schools to all-white schools, and vice versa. The hope is that barriers will be broken down, and contact made among children from different ethnic groups (Malik, 2003). A journalist asked an Asian child what it was like the first time he visited the all-white school. “I was nervous,” the child replied. “Why?” “Because I didn't know what they’d be like. I’d never met them before.” “You’d never met white children before?” “No.” This brief exchange shows why intergroup contact is so important, and suggests why the interplay between increased knowl¬edge and revised affect may be central to it. Knowledge, rather than affect, has been at the heart of research on the contact hypothesis. The causal sequence traditionally implied in most contact research is that lack of or biased (i.e. stereotyped) knowledge about the outgroup promotes prejudice, which in turn promotes discrimination (Mackie & Smith, 1998). From this premise, contact with outgroup members is meant to increase or rectify the knowledge about the outgroup and reverse this sequence of events (W. G. Stephan & Stephan, 2000). However, intergroup contact cannot be considered only in terms of its cognitive processes (Johnston & Hewstone, 1990; Pettigrew, 1998); a deeper understanding requires recognition of the role of affective processes.
