Intergroup Contact and the Reduction of Bias 493be structured to reduce the salience of category distinctions
and promote opportunities to get to know out-group mem-
bers as individual persons, thereby disarming the forces of
categorization.
The conditional specifications of the contact hypothesis
(e.g., cooperative interaction) can be interpreted as features
of the situation that reduce category salience and promote
more differentiated and personalized representations of the
participants in the contact setting. Interdependence typically
motivates people to focus more on the individual characteris-
tics of a person, with whom their outcomes are linked, than
more general category representations (Fiske, 2000). Attend-
ing to personal characteristics of group members not only
provides the opportunity to disconfirm category stereotypes,
but it also breaks down the monolithic perception of the out-
group as a homogeneous unit (Wilder, 1978). In this scheme,
the contact situation encourages attention to information at
the individual level that replaces category identity as the most
useful basis for classifying participants.
With a more differentiated representation of out-group
members, there is the recognition that there are different types
of out-group members (e.g., sensitive as well as tough profes-
sional hockey players), thereby weakening the effects of
categorization and the tendency to minimize and ignore dif-
ferences between category members. When personalized in-
teractions occur, in-group and out-group members slide even
further toward the individual side of the self as individual ver-
sus group member continuum. Members “attend to informa-
tion that replaces category identity as the most useful basis for
classifying each other” (Brewer & Miller, 1984, p. 288) as
they engage in personalized interactions. Repeated personal-
ized contacts with a variety of out-group members should,
over time, undermine the value and meaningfulness of the
social category stereotype as a source of information about
members of that group. This is the process by which contact
experiences are expected to generalize—via reducing the
salience and meaning of social categorization in the long run
(Brewer & Miller, 1996).
A number of studies provide evidence supporting this
perspective on contact effects (Bettencourt, Brewer, Croak, &
Miller, 1992; Marcus-Newhall, Miller, Holtz, & Brewer,
1993). Miller, Brewer, and Edwards (1985), for instance,
demonstrated that a cooperative task that required personal-
ized interaction with members of the out-group resulted not
only in more positive attitudes toward out-group members in
the cooperative setting but also toward other out-group mem-
bers shown on a videotape, compared to cooperative contact
that was task focused rather than person focused.
During personalization, members focus on information
about an out-group member that is relevant to the self (as an
individual rather than as a group member). Repeated person-
alized interactions with a variety of out-group members
should over time undermine the value of the category stereo-
type as a source of information about members of that group.
Thus, the effects of personalization should generalize to new
situations as well as to heretofore unfamiliar out-group mem-
bers. For the benefits of personalization to generalize, how-
ever, it is of course necessary for the identities of out-group
members to be salient—at least somewhat—during the inter-
action to allow the group stereotype to be weakened.
Further evidence of the value of personalized interactions
for reducing intergroup bias comes from data on the effects
of intergroup friendships (Hamberger & Hewstone, 1997;
Pettigrew, 1997; Pettigrew & Meertens, 1995). For example,
across samples in France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and
Germany, Europeans with out-group friends were lower
on measures of prejudice, particularly affective prejudice
(Pettigrew, 1998a). This positive relation did not hold for
other types of acquaintance relationships in work or residen-
tial settings that did not involve formation of close interper-
sonal relationships with members of the out-group. In terms
of the direction of causality, although having more positive
intergroup attitudes can increase the willingness to have
cross-group friendships, path analyses indicate that the path
fromfriendshiptoreduction in prejudice is stronger than the
other way around (Pettigrew, 1998a).
Other research reveals three valuable extensions of the per-
sonalized contact effect. One is evidence that personal friend-
ships with members of one out-group may lead to tolerance
toward out-groups in general and reduced nationalistic pride,
a process that Pettigrew (1997) refers to asdeprovincializa-
tion.Thus, decategorization based on developing cross-group
friendships that decrease the relative attractiveness of a per-
son’s in-group provides increased appreciation of the relative
attractiveness of other out-groups more generally.
A second extension is represented by evidence that contact
effects may operate indirectly or vicariously. Although
interpersonal friendship across group lines leads to reduced
prejudice, even knowledge that an in-group member has be-
friended an out-group member has the potential to reduce bias
while the salience of group identities remains high for the ob-
server (Wright, Aron, McLaughlin-Volpe, & Ropp, 1997). A
third extension relates to interpersonal processes involving the
arousal of empathic feelings for an out-group member, which
can increase positive attitudes toward members of that group
more widely (Batson et al., 1997). Thus, personalized interac-
tion and interpersonal processes more generally can directly
and indirectly increase positive feelings for out-group mem-
bers through a variety of processes that can lead to more gen-
eralized types of harmony and integration at the group level.