ABSTRACT
Researchers have traditionally dismissed the relevance of individual differences in domains such as intergroup contact, or have expressed pessimism about contact as a means to reduce prejudice among highly prejudiced (HP) individuals. Consider some of the following prominent examples:
Certain personalities … will not be affected positively by interracial contact. Their inner insecurity and their personal disorder will not permit them to benefit from the contact with a group against whom they are prejudiced because they will always need a scapegoat.
(Amir, 1969, p. 335)The social identity perspective … suggests that personality tends to become irrelevant to prejudice where social identity or group membership is salient.
(Reynolds et al., 2007, p. 519)Contact, as a situational variable, cannot always overcome the personal variable in prejudice.
(Allport, 1954, p. 280)The deeply prejudiced both avoid intergroup contact and resist positive effects from it.
(Pettigrew, 1998, p. 80)Intergroup interactions are also doomed when the interactants are prejudiced against each other’s groups.
(Nelson, 2006, p. 154) If individual differences are indeed irrelevant, situational interventions would work with efficiency and efficacy across all individuals. Unfortunately this is not the case, and dismissing such variance as measurement error does not reflect the reality that some individuals (e.g., Hitler, Stalin) are arguably more prejudiced than others (e.g., Ghandi, Mandela), with most falling on a continuum somewhere between these extremes. If prejudice-relevant individual differences are considered obstacles to intergroup contact, the field might prematurely dismiss contact as an effective prejudice-reduction strategy targeting those most in need of intervention. As noted by Dhont and Van Hiel (2009, p. 176), “the idea that contact ‘only works’ among those who are already at a low level of prejudice precludes it from being adapted as a social engineering tool.” A prejudice-reduction strategy is valuable, in part, to the extent that it improves intergroup attitudes among intolerant persons. As our review and analyses of new data will soon reveal, contact may not only improve intergroup attitudes among intolerant persons, but it may even work best among such individuals.