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So far in this course, we've been putting a lot of emphasis on the effects of positive contact (both direct and indirect forms of intergroup contact). This emphasis reflects a broader positivity bias in the literature on intergroup contact. For instance, in Pettigrew and Topp's (2006) impressive meta-analysis of over 700 students on intergroup contact, fewer than 5% of the studies included a measure of negative intergroup contact. This glaring gap is somewhat surprising given that, historically, Allport and Williams both agreed that not all types of contact reduced prejudice, as illustrated by this quote from Allport in his seminal book, The Nature of Prejudice
It has sometimes been held that merely by assembling people without regard for race, color, religion or national origin, we can thereby destroy stereotypes and develop friendly attitudes. The case is not so simple. (Allport, 1954, p. 261)
As it turns out, Allport was right.
Positive and Negative Contact: Related or Separate Constructs
Indeed, this positivity bias highlights a glaring omission in contact theory. It is naive to think that individuals only experience positive intergroup contact. Moreover, the way positive contact has been measured over the past 60 years has placed positive and negative contact at opposite ends of the same spectrum. For instance, a typical survey item used to measure contact quality looks as follows:
To what extent did you experience the contact with [outgroup] as competitive or cooperative (1 = very competitive; 7 = very cooperative; see Islam & Hewstone, 1993; Lolliot et al., 2015)
Placing positive and negative contact at opposite ends of the same spectrum seems short-sighted. Just as a thought exercise, it is possible to have both high levels of positive contact AND negative contact with people. If you think to experiences with a best friend or a sibling, you are likely able to recall happy memories as well as memories where you were fighting.
If positive and negative contact are opposite to each other, what would you expect the correlation to be between a measure of positive contact and a measure of negative contact?
We can statistically evaluate these claims that positive and negative contact are (not) at opposite ends of the contact quality spectrum. If positive and negative contact are indeed polar opposites to each other, we would expect separate measures of them to correlate strongly and negatively with each other (as the number of positive contact experiences increases, the number of negative contact experiences decreases). Early studies that measured positive and negative intergroup contact on separate measures found that these two measures of valenced contact correlated weakly with each other. For example, Aberson and Gaffney (2008) found that their separate measure of positive and negative contact correlated weakly with each other (r = -.05).
Other more recent research has corroborated this weak correlation between positive and negative contact
| Study | Correlation |
|---|---|
| Kauf et al. (2017) | r = .01 |
| Pettigrew (2008) | r = -.18 |
| Schafer (2020) | r < -.18 |
| PSYC 208 (WT2 2019) | r = -.08 |
| PSYC 208 (WT1 2020) | r = -.19 |
These weak correlations between positive and negative intergroup contact suggest that they are two separate constructs and that it is, indeed, fairly common to find instances where people have lots (or little) of both types of valenced contact.
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