Modeling the Dynamics of Positive and Negative Contact: the Role of Affective Variables, Deprovincialization, and Individual Dispositions

In recent years intergroup contact research has called for analyzing the effects of both positive and negative contact experiences on attitudes, affective variables, and intergroup appraisals and the possible explanatory role of individual differences in such effects. Relying on these research topics and to the related literature, we conducted five studies with different methodologies: three cross-sectional (NStudy1=347, NStudy2=307, NStudy3=374), one longitudinal (NStudy4=565), and one employing a diary method (NStudy5=365). Throughout these studies, we examined how positive and negative contact with various target groups (i.e., immigrant people, Muslim people, and gay people) are associated with several prejudice indexes (i.e., attitudes, islamophobia, prejudice toward the outgroup, subtle prejudice, and positive and negative emotions felt toward the outgroup). In studying these relationships, we investigated the mediational role of intergroup anxiety, empathy, and deprovincialization as well as the joint effect of positive and negative contact. In addition, we explored the role of prejudice- and prosociality-related dispositional variables (i.e., SDO, quiet ego, NFC, entitlement, and agreeableness) that in past research have been associated both to intergroup contact and to prejudice. Results consistently showed that anxiety, empathy, and deprovincialization are robust mediators of both positive and negative contact effects on attitudes and prejudice. Moreover, we found consistent evidence for interactions between positive and negative intergroup contact in all the five studies. On one hand, positive contact buffered the detrimental effects of negative contact on outgroup attitudes and other dependent variables (buffering effect). On the other hand, negative contact enhanced the beneficial effects of positive contact (facilitation effect). As regard to the effects of individual dispositions, they were associated with most of the intergroup outcomes. Particularly, SDO and quiet ego showed strong and opposite associations with outgroup evaluations, affective variables, and deprovincialization. The main effects of positive and negative contact were resistant to the influence of dispositional variables, and also controlling for socially desirable responding and socio-demographic variables (i.e., age, gender, level of education). Furthermore, distinguishing between intra-individual variations and inter-individual variations in positive and negative contact (in Studies 4 and 5) we found that not only having more positive and negative contact than other individuals was reliably associated to outgroup attitudes and prejudice, but also experiencing more positive and negative contact than usual had specific effects on outcome variables. These results highlight the importance of having frequent and positive contact interactions.