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Project

Intergroup contact and resistance against ethnic minority groups: the role of acculturation orientations and intergroup emotions.

A recent meta-analysis has provided support for the prejudice reducing effect of intergroup contact (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). The presentproject raises the question whether contact always reduces prejudice orthat important cognitive and contextual factors play an intermediate role. Furthermore, we try to shed light on the processes that underlie theimpact of contact on prejudice. First, we investigate the role of acculturation orientations and of interethnic ideologies as important variables that influence how contact is experienced and how people behave during interethnic contact. Then, we look at intergroup emotions and categorization perspectives as underlying processes of the effect of intergroup contact on prejudice. Interethnic contact automatically evokes emotions such as anger, fear and sympathy among the people who interact. We investigate whether (and which) emotions play an important role during interethnic contact and how these emotions influence attitudes towards the other group. People spontaneously categorize their environment into different groups. Different ethno-cultural groups can be seen as separate groups, as subgroups within the broader society or as all belonging to one overarching group. We examine the effect of contact on this categorizationprocess and the relation between this categorization process and attitudes towards another ethno-cultural group.
Date:1 Oct 2008 →  13 Dec 2012
Keywords:Ethnic minority
Disciplines:Social psychology, Biological and physiological psychology, General psychology, Other psychology and cognitive sciences, Applied sociology, Policy and administration, Social stratification, Social theory and sociological methods, Sociology of life course, family and health, Other sociology and anthropology
Project type:PhD project