upside

• How to save the world


  Topic of this study material
• Intergroup contact


  The avenue to prejudice reduction (?)
• Intergroup contact


  • Equal status in the contact situation
  • Cooperation between groups
  • Potential for personal relationships
  • Institutional support
• Intergroup contact reduces prejudice if Allport's optimal contact conditions are present
• Intergroup contact is a controversial issue with lots of research
• Decategorized Contact Model


  If categorization leads to ingroup bias, then reduce category salience
• Common Ingroup Identity Model

  Dissolve existing group boundaries and create a new, inclusive ingroup
• Mutual Intergroup Differentiation Model

  Retain salience of group categories, have typical group members, have a non-threatening setting, maximum generalisation of positive attitudes to outgroup as a whole
• Dual-identity model


  Emphasise both common ingroup and subgroup membership, suited for majority-minority settings
• How to design an intergroup contact setting

  1. No groups

  2. One group

  3. Two groups

  4. Two-in-one groups
• Cooperation and one group representation both reduce ingroup bias
• Contact is effective, but generalised ingroup bias only reduced for minorities under dual identity
• Disadvantage of survey research in the field: correlational evidence
• Longitudinal studies help to establish temporal precedence: better indicator for causality
• Challenges in intergroup contact field studies: attrition, need to keep participants in the study for "long enough", need to be able to match data across time points
• Contact did not work for minority members in the Binder et al. (2009) study, possibly because it did not reduce intergroup anxiety for minority members
• In the Swart et al. (2011) study, complex effects work best in the direction from contact to prejudice, e.g. contact increased empathy, which in turn improved attitudes and decreased hostile tendencies
• Prosocial behaviour


  Mostly treated as helpful behaviour
• Bystander intervention


  How do people conclude for themselves they have to intervene in an emergency?
• Diffusion of responsibility


  Someone else will do it
• Audience inhibition


  Fear of social blunders
• Social influence


  What are the others doing?
• These effects add up to result in "bystander apathy"
• The "lady in distress" experiment demonstrated diffusion of responsibility
• Stereotypes and prejudice are related to negative behaviours towards others, but are they also related to positive ones like helping behaviour?
• A common ingroup should increase helping behaviour
• Altruism


  Prosocial behaviour that comes at a clear cost and benefits others
• Altruism contradicts (simplistic) notions of evolutionary selection
• Kin selection


  We help those with whom we share a genetic interest, which increases "gene fitness"
• Reciprocal altruism


  We help if we can expect reciprocity at some later point
• Group selection


  A group with more altruists has an advantage over a group of selfish members
• Competitive altruism


  Altruistic behaviour as costly signalling, "nice guy finishes first"
• Altruistic punishment


  Negative emotions towards anti-social behaviour triggers costly punishment, enables large-scale cooperation in a non-selfish way
• Empathy-altruism


  Empathic reaction is what triggers altruistic behaviour, does not assume selfish motives
• The bystander-calculus model subscribes to the view that emotions are the result of cognitive interpretation, and self-serving needs (not other's needs) are crucial
• The empathy-altruism hypothesis states that people do not walk away when an empathic response has been triggered
• Specific cortical areas have been identified in empathic responses, chiefly in fMRI studies
• Empathy-inducing techniques are used in various interventions, but the effects of empathy are complex and not always do we get the desired effect