Learning to fear outgroups: An associative learning explanation for the development and reduction of intergroup anxiety

Abstract

Pavlovian conditioning is a form of associative learning shown to contribute to the development and reduction of clinical anxiety and fear, and more recently, intergroup anxiety and fear. The current review provides a synthesis of the --This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

How do we get people into contact? Predictors of intergroup contact and drivers of contact seeking

“…One explanation are feelings of intergroup threat, anxiety, and insecurity (Bettencourt et al, 2019;Dixon et al, 2019). Contact avoidance often reflects threat avoidance (O'Donnell et al, 2019), that is people's concerns that contact with outgroup members might be harmful to their physical, social, or emotional well-being (Cottrell & Neuberg, 2005;Plant & Devine, 2003;Stephan, 2014). A different line of research proposes that certain individual differences, such as high levels of prejudice (e.g., Hodson, 2008;Schlüter et al, 2018;Wölfer & Hewstone, 2018) or authoritarian attitudes (e.g., Pettigrew, 2016;Rosenthal & Levy, 2012), limit the exploitation of contact opportunities for some individuals (for an overviews see Hodson these characteristics might refrain from engaging in contact because they fail to anticipate a tangible or psychological benefit from the encounter or, again, anticipate high levels of threat.…”

“…At the most basic level, programs aimed at encouraging intergroup contact could communicate contact's personal benefits for self‐expansion, social development, and professional advancement (see Dunne, 2013; Paolini et al., 2016). More complex iterations of such programs could consider the specific context in which the contact occurs and the specific parties involved (for in‐depth discussions see Halperin & Schori‐Eyal, 2020; O'Donnell et al., 2019; Turner et al., 2020).…”

“…Interventions and policies that simultaneously focus on critical (and changeable) variables at multiple levels of analysis might be most effective in ending tendencies for (re)segregation. In fact, upcoming theoretical work outlines the benefits of combining person‐ and group‐centered approaches when developing programs aimed at increasing contact seeking (Halperin & Schori‐Eyal, 2020; O'Donnell et al., 2019). Accordingly, societal norms should not only communicate that intergroup contact is frequent and desirable but could also state that intergroup contact can be beneficial in a way that satisfies individuals’ needs and motives such as self‐expansion.…”

Technological and analytical advancements in intergroup contact research

“…Most self‐report measures ask participants to think about all their experiences over a set period of time, obscuring, and muting some of these important distinctions (Keil & Koschate, 2020; Keil et al., 2020). Indeed, previous research and theoretical work has highlighted the importance of intergroup contact “episodes,” or singular encounters with the outgroup that can have potent effects on outgroup perceptions (Kauff et al., 2018; Paolini et al., 2006; O'Donnell et al., 2019, 2020). In traditional single‐use survey research the salience and recency of these events are likely to interfere with peoples’ global assessment of their contact experiences (e.g., recency bias), thereby hindering our investigations into the typical contact experience.…”

“…In an intergroup context, research has shown that watching an intergroup encounter ( vicarious contact; Mazziotta et al., 2011), viewing a person from an outgroup ( mediated contact; Park, 2012), or forming a perceived connection with an outgroup character ( parasocial contact; Schiappa et al., 2006) can all reduce intergroup prejudice (Banas et al., 2020). Evidence also indicates that intergroup encounters are shaped by what individuals have previously learned about the outgroup (MacInnis & Page‐Gould, 2015; O'Donnell et al., 2019; Paolini et al., 2016). Hence, analysis of media content offers two suggestions for contact research, (1) media as a vehicle for indirect contact (vicarious, mediated, or parasocial), and (2) media as a source of information about outgroups.…”