Generalization of Positive and Negative Attitudes Toward Individuals to Outgroup Attitudes

Abstract

The generalization of attitudes toward individual outgroup members into attitudes toward the outgroup as a whole can affect intergroup relations. However, little is known about the relative strengths of the generalization of negative and positive interpersonal attitudes into attitudes about the outgroup. The unique contribution of negative (disliking) interpersonal attitudes to intergroup attitudes was examined and its strength was compared with the effect of positive (liking) interpersonal attitudes, using cross-sectional (Study 1; N = 733, age 10-12) and longitudinal data (Study 2; N = 960, age 12-13). Disliking uniquely contributed to respondents' outgroup attitudes. The generalization of interpersonal liking and disliking was about equally strong in both studies. This underpins the importance of examining the effects of both positive and negative intergroup contact experiences on the formation of outgroup attitudes.

School ethnic diversity and students' interethnic relations

“…A study in the Netherlands among ethnic majority and minority adolescents (13–16 years) found positive contact to be associated with more favourable attitudes and negative contact with less favourable attitudes (Bekhuis et al ., ). Likewise, in their research on (pre)adolescent students (12–14 years), Stark, Flache, and Veenstra () found that both liking and disliking of individual outgroup classmates had independent positive and negative effects on students' attitudes towards the ethnic outgroup in general.…”

The Impact of Adolescents' Classroom and Neighborhood Ethnic Diversity on Same‐ and Cross‐Ethnic Friendships Within Classrooms

“…This phenomenon has been suggested to be one of the underlying mechanisms of contact theory (Allport, ; Pettigrew, Tropp, Wagner, & Christ, ). People who have contact with outgroup members develop positive intergroup relationships and subsequently generalize from these intergroup relationships to more positive intergroup attitudes (Stark et al., ). Thus, the mere‐exposure effect suggests that having more cross‐ethnic classmates increases the likelihood that at least some of the outgroup members are liked, which might induce cross‐ethnic friendships, overriding—or at least weakening—the homophily effect.…”

Inter-ethnic friendship and negative ties in secondary school

“…The first is self-declared ethnicity, which refers to one's own ethnic identification and is very commonly used in network studies (Munniksma et al, 2013;Stark et al, 2013;Tolsma et al, 2013). The second is peers' perceptions of each others' ethnicity, which captures the way someone is identified by others, which, by our knowledge, has not yet been used in social network models.…”