Hope everyone is going well with exam preparation and the final blog! Below is a detailed plan for my essay, if anyone wants to make any comments or anything they would be greatly appreciated!
Contact Hypothesis- What is it? Describe and critique with reference to theory & research.
Introduction
Paragraph 1: What is the contact hypothesis?
- Proposed by Gordon Allport (1954)
- States that regular interaction between members of different groups reduces prejudice.
- Contact results in positive attitude changes and reduces stereotypes.
- Assumes that prejudice and stereotypical views arise out of ignorance, limited contact and lack of understanding about outgroup members.
- Interracial contact provides information about values, lifestyles, behaviours and experiences of other groups.
- Four conditions for successful intergroup contact including, interaction between individual of equal status, under cooperative conditions, sharing a common goal and with the encouragement of authority figures.
Paragraph 2: Argument that contact does not reduce prejudice or stereotypes.
- Conditions that cause positive change are unlikely in real life.
- If contact is with individuals who are considered to be atypical or not representative of their group, members of the ingroup will class them in a separate category and prejudice will not be reduced.
- Research has found that encounters with people who are exceptions to stereotypes do not lead to any change in how the group as a whole is evaluated.
- Positive views formed during contact might not be generalized to the whole group.
- Trying to arrange contact with individuals who are most representative of their group is likely to be problematic as contact with a very typical person is more likely to be viewed as a negative occurrence and attitude change only results from positive contact.
- The effect of contact might be that people keep the stereotype but become more aware that it is not representative of all group members.
- Contact may lead to increased intergroup conflict.
Paragraph 3: Limitations of the research into the Contact Hypothesis.
- Studies that support the Contact Hypothesis probably outweigh those that contradict it however research on the contact hypothesis has been criticized for being conducted in limited or laboratory settings.
- Most research has been conducted in settings designed to create interracial contact (including in the army, educational or organizational settings or in laboratory settings) not in natural or casual settings.
- Findings of some natural experiments do not support the Contact Hypothesis, in a natural experiment which investigated whether white baseball players were less prejudiced towards black players than fans found no difference in prejudiced attitudes and provides no support for the contact hypothesis under natural conditions (Hanssen, 2001)
- This makes generalizing the findings of the studies to the general population difficult, as most interracial contact does not occur in such monitored conditions.
- Questions whether the contact hypotheses can be applied to the general population.
- Research has focused largely on whether contact reduces prejudice in white Americans with generally supportive results.
- The limited research that has been conducted with members of different races (e.g. Jews, Hispanics, Asians etc.) has suggested that contact might have different affects on prejudice in individuals of other races.
- For example, Robinson & Preston (1976) found that African Americans prejudice towards white Americans reduced less than white people after contact, suggests contact might have a different meaning for African Americans.
- Implies that it may be necessary to revise the original contact hypothesis in order to more accurately depict how contact among different groups leads to attitude change.
- Suggests the need for further research.
Paragraph 4: Causal assumptions of the Contact Hypothesis.
- The contact hypothesis has been criticized for assuming that contact causes a reduction in prejudice, however it might be that less prejudiced and more tolerant people seek out contact with outgroup members.
- If this is the case the research that has been conducted over the past four years may have been misguided and consequently the results may not be generalizable to the general population.
Conclusion
Good luck!
2 comments:
This looks thorough.
What you call paragraphs, I'd suggest are headings/subheadings.
Note Ausssie vs. American spelling - ize vs. ise.
A concept map (optional) could be helpful to help illustrate the variables which would help to ensure that contact is successful in reducing prejudice.
Hey Jaimee
Your blog plan looks good to me. Just as another point though, I would be interested in finding out if there are many situations in which the contact hypothesis is supported when some of the 4 conditions you mentioned are not satisfied.
For example can racial prejudice be reduced through contact with members of other races by participating in some cooperative activites (superordinate goals), even when the individuals are regarded as having different status?
Also does age have any effect?
Can racial prejudice be reduced by an adult of one race working with, cooperating and teaching young children of another race?
These questions may be too complex to consider in a blog of only 1500 words, but they were just some queries that came to mind when I read your plan.
Good luck!
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