Changing attitudes through intergroup contact: the effects of group membership salience

✍ Scribed by Rupert Brown; James Vivian; Miles Hewstone

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 206 KB
• Volume: 29
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0046-2772
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-0992(199908/09)29:5/6<741::aid-ejsp972>3.0.co;2-8

✦ Synopsis

Two studies were conducted to test the hypothesis that heightened membership salience, achieved by increasing the prototypicality of particular outgroup members during cooperative intergroup contact, facilitates the generalization of positive attitudes toward the outgroup as a whole. The ®rst study (N 64) utilized an experimental paradigm in which the perceived typicality of a target outgroup member and the perceived homogeneity of the outgroup as a whole were manipulated. Consistent with our hypothesis, results indicated that positive attitudinal generalization was facilitated by encounters with typical outgroup members. The eects of membership prototypicality were further examined in a second study (N 293) where a survey was administered in six European Community countries. Results supported the hypothesis that membership salience moderates the impact of contact on a generalized measure of favourable orientation towards another country.