Specific emotions as mediators of the effect of intergroup contact on prejudice: findings across multiple participant and target groups

ABSTRACT

Emotions are increasingly being recognised as important aspects of prejudice and intergroup behaviour. Specifically, emotional mediators play a key role in the process by which intergroup contact reduces prejudice towards outgroups. However, which particular emotions are most important for prejudice reduction, as well as the consistency and generality of emotion–prejudice relations across different in-group–out-group relations, remain uncertain. To address these issues, in Study 1 we examined six distinct positive and negative emotions as mediators of the contact–prejudice relations using representative samples of U.S. White, Black, and Asian American respondents (N = 639). Admiration and anger (but not other emotions) were significant mediators of the effects of previous contact on prejudice, consistently across different perceiver and target ethnic groups. Study 2 examined the same relations with student participants and gay men as the out-group. Admiration and disgust mediated the effect of past contact on attitude. The findings confirm that not only negative emotions (anger or disgust, based on the specific types of threat perceived to be posed by an out-group), but also positive, status- and esteem-related emotions (admiration) mediate effects of contact on prejudice, robustly across several different respondent and target groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Intergroup contact
• emotions
• attitudes
• prejudice
• intergroup relations
• social image

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In this study we do not measure emotions in the sense of episodic reactions to appraisals of a specific event, but broader emotional sentiments directed towards a target (as one might feel anger towards the landlord or fear of a dog). Work on intergroup emotions describes how such group-targeted emotions may become associated with groups, after building up on the basis of repeated emotional episodes (e.g., Cottrell & Neuberg, 2005; Mackie et al., 2000).

2 Attitudes towards lesbians may be more multifaceted than attitudes towards gay men, especially for male respondents (Herek, 2000). Therefore, gay men rather than homosexuals or “gays and lesbians” were used as the target group.

3 These questionnaires were completed at the end of an unrelated study that assessed evaluations of target individuals who had a large versus small number of out-group friends. That study focused on racial groups and consequently was judged as being sufficiently unrelated to the content of this study.

4 Additional questions, not analysed here, asked about feeling awkward, competent, happy, relaxed, and self-conscious.

5 Of course, seeing a potentially competing group as competent without warmth or positive valuation in such a situation may lead to negative attitudes and feelings of anger, envy, or anxiety (Fiske et al., 2002).

Additional information

Funding

Preparation of this manuscript was supported by NSF [BCS-0719876]. We are grateful to Catherine Cottrell and Steve Neuberg for proposing the collection of these data and to the TESS project supported by NSF [0094964] (Diana C. Mutz and Arthur Lupia, Principal Investigators) for collecting the data and making them freely available for research use. Austin Chapman, Elizabeth Collins, and Ashley Waggoner Denton provided helpful advice and suggestions.