Overcome Intergroup Biases

Learning about other cultures is a great start to improving intercultural communication. But many scholars also recommend spending time with members of other cultures and co-cultures, virtually and face to face.

Intergroup contact theory is one prominent idea for addressing intercultural challenges (Allport, 1954). According to this theory, interaction between members of different social groups generates a possibility for more positive attitudes to emerge (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). In other words, if you have contact with people who are different from you, you have a chance to understand and appreciate them better. Although contact theory has some support, researchers also find that mindlessly getting people from different groups together can actually backfire and reinforce cultural stereotypes (Paolini, Harwood, & Rubin, 2010). This happened in many U.S. cities during the 1970s and 1980s, when there was a highly controversial effort to racially integrate schools by busing children to schools on faraway sides of their cities. Even staunch proponents of the plan admitted that racial tensions became worse, not better (Frum, 2000).

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GOOD-QUALITY contact with members of a campus fraternity could serve to counter the bias that frat brothers are nothing more than jocks and partiers. © Jeff Greenberg/PhotoEdit

Part of the problem is that when different groups get together we often engage in behavioral affirmation—seeing or hearing what we want to see or hear. In other words, if you think teenagers are lazy, then regardless of how hard your fourteen-year-old cousin studies, you don’t see the effort. Instead, you notice his eye-rolling or slumped shoulders, so you still perceive him as unmotivated. We may also engage in behavioral confirmation—when we act in a way that makes our expectations about a group come true (Snyder & Klein, 2005). Again, if you think your teenage cousin (like all teens) is lazy, you’ll more likely give him tasks that do not require much effort. When he, in turn, fails to put in a great deal of effort, you confirm to yourself, “See? I knew he wouldn’t try very hard.”

So, how do we make successful intergroup interactions more likely? First, intergroup researchers argue that we must have good-quality contact with outgroup members, because negative contact can increase the perception of differences (Paolini, Harwood, & Rubin, 2010). But good contact is not enough, because it makes it easy to explain away such positive interactions as unique to the individual or the situation. For example, if you believe that fraternity brothers are simply party boys and you wind up in a study group with a particularly hardworking member of Phi Sigma Phi, you can mentally create excuses: “Ben is the exception to the rule.”

Researchers argue that we must have good 1ontact with people we think are “typical” of their group (Giles, Reid, & Harwood, 2010). If you attended a few fraternity events and got to see Ben and several of his brothers more regularly in their fraternity setting, you might learn that many of them are serious students and that some of them aren’t even into the party scene. We all need to be aware of our own behaviors and biased perceptions when interacting with members of other cultures and groups, so we do not simply confirm our existing expectations.