Intergroup Contact
Can Social Contact Reduce Prejudice and Discrimination?
Project overview
2019
Documents
2025
- Intergroup Contact, Empathy Training, and Refugee-Native Integration: Evidence from a Field Experiment in LebanonSalma Mousa, Lennard Naumann, and Alexandra Scacco2025
Can intergroup contact improve relations between refugees and host communities? If so, are there added returns to combining contact and empathy education? Does either approach unlock spillover effects among household members? To answer these questions, we conduct a field experiment that brings together Syrian refugees and Lebanese nationals in three localities in Lebanon, where refugees make up a quarter of the population. Working with a Lebanese NGO, we randomly assign Lebanese and Syrian youth participants to an ethnically heterogeneous or homogeneous classroom for a 12-week psycho-social support program. We further randomize whether participants received additional empathy education or a placebo curriculum focused on health and nutrition. We find that contact is more effective at teaching conflict resolution, but reduces the willingness to engage in further contact, as measured by attending an event celebrating the ougroups culture. By contrast, empathy education decreases prejudice without negative effects on behavior. We do not find clear interaction effects of contact and empathy training, nor significant spillover effects among parents. The results point to the different trade-offs associated with both contact and empathy interventions in fragile settings.
@unpublished{scacco_empathy_2025, author = {Mousa, Salma and Naumann, Lennard and Scacco, Alexandra}, title = {Intergroup Contact, Empathy Training, and Refugee-Native Integration: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Lebanon}, year = {2025}, status = {WP}, proj = {socialcont}, keywords = {horizontal contestation}, proj.1 = {socialcont} }
2023
- ChapterReducing prejudice through intergroup contact interventionsRebecca Littman, Alexandra Scacco, and Chagai Weiss2023
Intergroup contact interventions have long been heralded as a promising method for reducing prejudice and improving intergroup relations. Contact can occur through face-to-face interactions or indirectly through real or fictional others. Meta-analyses of intergroup contact interventions typically show that contact with outgroup members reduces prejudice. However, well-powered field experiments testing contact interventions find more mixed results: some show large, positive effects of contact on attitudes and/or behaviors, while others find no or mixed effects. These findings raise a number of important questions about the conditions under which different kinds of intergroup contact are likely to improve intergroup relations and what outcomes are most likely to be affected. This chapter will provide a theoretical background of direct and indirect forms of intergroup contact, and will review evidence from meta-analyses on whether these contact interventions reduce prejudice. It will then take a deeper look at a series of intergroup contact studies conducted recently in field settings. Finally, it will outline the big open questions in intergroup contact research and provide tips for conducting contact interventions.
@inbook{scacco_littman_2023, author = {Littman, Rebecca and Scacco, Alexandra and Weiss, Chagai}, title = {Reducing prejudice through intergroup contact interventions}, year = {2023}, pages = {45732}, publisher = {Routledge: Taylor and Francis AS}, booktitle = {Psychological Intergroup Interventions: Evidence-based Approaches to Improve Intergroup Relations}, editor = {Halperin, Eran and Hameiri, Boaz and Littman, Rebecca}, status = {peer}, proj = {socialcont}, keywords = {horizontal contestation}, proj.1 = {socialcont} }
2018
- Can social contact reduce prejudice and discrimination? Evidence from a field experiment in NigeriaAlexandra Scacco, and Shana S WarrenAmerican Political Science Review, 2018
Can positive social contact between members of antagonistic groups reduce prejudice and discrimination? Despite extensive research on social contact, observational studies are difficult to interpret because prejudiced people may select out of contact with out-group members. We overcome this problem by conducting an education-based, randomized field experiment – the Urban Youth Vocational Training program (UYVT) – with 849 randomly sampled Christian and Muslim young men in riot-prone Kaduna, Nigeria. After sixteen weeks of positive intergroup social contact, we find no changes in prejudice, but heterogeneous-class subjects discriminate significantly less against out-group members than subjects in homogeneous classes. We trace this finding to increased discrimination by homogeneous-class subjects compared to non-UYVT study participants, and we highlight potentially negative consequences of in-group social contact. By focusing on skill-building instead of peace messaging, our intervention minimizes reporting bias and offers strong experimental evidence that intergroup social contact can alter behavior in constructive ways, even amid violent conflict.
@article{scacco_2018, author = {Scacco, Alexandra and Warren, Shana S}, title = {Can social contact reduce prejudice and discrimination? Evidence from a field experiment in Nigeria}, journal = {American Political Science Review}, year = {2018}, number = {3}, pages = {654--677}, volume = {112}, publisher = {Cambridge University Press}, status = {peer}, proj = {socialcont}, keywords = {horizontal contestation}, proj.1 = {socialcont} }
A foundational idea from social psychology is that intergroup contact can reduce prejudice and discrimination in divided societies. Alexandra Scacco and Shana Warren conducted one of the first field experiments examining contact’s impact in a setting (Kaduna, Nigeria) of recent intergroup violence. Subsequent work at IPI in this area includes studies of refugee-native contact in Lebanon and ongoing work looking at contact via dating apps among migrants and natives in Germany.