The Extended Contact Hypothesis: A Meta-Analysis on 20 Years of Research

Abstract

According to the extended contact hypothesis, knowing that in-group members have cross-group friends improves attitudes toward this out-group. This meta-analysis covers the 20 years of research that currently exists on the extended contact hypothesis, and consists of 248 effect sizes from 115 studies. The aggregate relationship between extended contact and intergroup attitudes was r = .25, 95% confidence interval (CI) = [.22, .27], which reduced to r = .17, 95% CI = [.14, .19] after removing direct friendship's contribution; these results suggest that extended contact's hypothesized relationship to intergroup attitudes is small-to-medium and exists independently of direct friendship. This relationship was larger when extended contact was perceived versus actual, highlighting the importance of perception in extended contact. Current results on extended contact mostly resembled their direct friendship counterparts, suggesting similarity between these contact types. These unique insights about extended contact and its relationship with direct friendship should enrich and spur growth within this literature.

Seeking and avoiding intergroup contact: Future frontiers of research on building social integration

“…Intimate contact, like direct experiences of intergroup friendship, is particularly effective (see also Davies, Tropp, Aron, Pettigrew, & Wright, ). Their benefits and some of their psychological underpinnings are shared with indirect intergroup friendships (or “extended contact”; Paolini, Hewstone, Cairns, & Voci, ; for reviews, Turner, Hewstone, Voci, Paolini, & Christ, ; Zhou, Page‐Gould, Aron, Moyer, & Hewstone, ). Novel social network analyses now provide structural maps (Wölfer et al, ), and diary methods offer temporal analyses (Page‐Gould, ) of the positive downstream consequences of intergroup intimacy.…”

Intercultural Relations among Ukrainian Immigrants Living in Portugal

“…The second objective concerns the contact hypothesis (Allport, 1954;Pettigrew & Tropp, 2011;Zhou, Page-Gould, Aron, Moyer, & Hewstone, 2019). It proposes that, under most of conditions (namely that of equal status contact) more contact is related to more positive encounters and outcomes.…”

What children want to know about in‐ and out‐groups, and how knowledge affects their intergroup attitudes

“…Nevertheless, in spite of these successes, one major impediment to this strategy is that in many places in the world, intergroup contact is extremely uncommon and even unviable, especially for young children. An alternative strategy used to overcome this challenge is to present “indirect” situations of contact, that is, contact between in‐ and out‐group members that does not involve actual interactions between the subject and out‐group members (Zhou, Page‐Gould, Aron, Moyer, & Hewstone, ). Some of its forms are extended contact (Wright, Aron, McLaughlin‐Volpe, & Ropp, ), imagined contact (Crisp & Turner, ), and parasocial contact (Schiappa, Gregg, & Hewes, ), through which people become aware of friendships between in‐ and out‐group members by means of literature, imagination, or media, respectively.…”

“…Some of its forms are extended contact (Wright, Aron, McLaughlin‐Volpe, & Ropp, ), imagined contact (Crisp & Turner, ), and parasocial contact (Schiappa, Gregg, & Hewes, ), through which people become aware of friendships between in‐ and out‐group members by means of literature, imagination, or media, respectively. A great deal of research has demonstrated the benefits of indirect contact for intergroup attitudes and intergroup relationships among adults (for meta‐analyses, see Lemmer & Wagner, ; Zhou et al, ), as well as among children (Cameron, Rutland, & Brown, ; Vezzali, Capozza, Giovannini, & Stathi, ).…”

“…This strategy shares the viability of the various indirect contact approaches, but differs from them in that it does not present any contact between in‐group and out‐group members. Arguably, indirect contact may be effective not only because it provides information about the out‐group—what may be considered, a purely cognitive effect—but also because it creates some identification with/simulation of the portrayed in‐group member, which by extension engages the subject's empathy—in other words, an emotional effect (see Aron et al, ; Vezzali et al, ; Zhou et al, ; for discussions). By providing information about out‐groups, we were thus capable of assessing whether the sheer cognitive path suffices to alter children's attitudes.…”