Prejudice and How to Reduce It

Earlier you saw how quickly the mind sorts the world into "us" and "them." That sorting is where prejudice begins, but it does not have to be where it ends. Prejudice is not a fixed feature of certain people; it is a set of habits of thought and feeling that can be strengthened or weakened by circumstances.

That is the practical hope in this lesson. Schools, workplaces, and neighbourhoods routinely try to reduce hostility between groups, and many of their efforts fail because they get the mechanism wrong. Knowing what genuinely lowers prejudice, and what merely looks like it should, is the difference between good intentions and real change.

Stereotype, prejudice, discrimination

These three words are often blurred, but they name different things. A stereotype is a belief about what members of a group are like. Prejudice is a feeling or attitude, usually negative, toward a group and its members. Discrimination is behaviour: treating people unfairly because of the group they belong to. You can hold a stereotype without acting on it, and you can discriminate for reasons other than personal hostility. Keeping them separate lets you locate exactly where a problem sits.

How prejudice forms

Stereotypes form partly because the mind economises: it stores rough group summaries so it need not judge each person from scratch. Prejudice then grows through several channels — learning attitudes from family and culture, competition over real resources, and the in-group favouritism that mere categorisation produces. Once in place, a stereotype is self-protecting: we notice cases that fit it and explain away those that do not.

The contact hypothesis

Gordon Allport proposed that contact between groups can reduce prejudice, but only under the right conditions. He named four: equal status within the situation, common goals, cooperation rather than competition, and support from authorities, law, or custom. Under these conditions, contact replaces abstract stereotypes with concrete acquaintance and can prompt recategorisation — coming to see former outsiders as part of a shared, larger group.

A hospital merges two teams that distrust each other. Simply seating them together changes little, and may harden lines. A manager who understands Allport instead gives them a shared patient-safety target that neither team can hit alone, ensures both have equal say, and has senior leadership publicly back the collaboration. Now the contact meets the conditions, and cooperation on a common goal does the work.

Contact is not a cure-all. Put two rival groups in the same space with unequal status and scarce resources — say, competing for the same few promotions — and proximity can deepen resentment rather than dissolve it. Contact that violates Allport's conditions can confirm stereotypes instead of correcting them. The conditions are not decoration; they are the mechanism.

Allport set out the contact hypothesis in The Nature of Prejudice (1954), drawing partly on observations of desegregation in the United States. For decades researchers debated whether the four conditions were each strictly necessary. In 2006, Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp published a meta-analysis pooling 515 studies with over 250,000 participants across many countries and groups. They found that intergroup contact was, on average, associated with lower prejudice, and that the effect held even when Allport's conditions were not all met — though it was stronger when they were. Contact appears to work partly by reducing anxiety and increasing empathy. The evidence is largely correlational, so causal claims should stay measured, but the pattern is broad and consistent.

• "Any contact between groups reduces prejudice." Contact helps under the right conditions; badly structured contact can make things worse.
• "Prejudiced people are simply bad people." Prejudice runs on ordinary mental shortcuts and learned attitudes, not just malice.
• "If you fix the stereotype, the behaviour follows." Belief, feeling, and behaviour are distinct and can move separately.
• "Meta-analysis proves contact causes lower prejudice." Much of the evidence is correlational; the finding is strong but not a clean experiment.

You are shown contact scenarios — a classroom, a workplace, a sports league. For each, decide which of Allport's four conditions are present or missing, and predict whether prejudice is likely to fall, hold, or rise.

Think Like a Maester: Before hoping that simply mixing groups will heal a divide, ask whether the contact gives them equal footing and a goal they can only reach together.

1. Define stereotype, prejudice, and discrimination, and give one way they differ.
2. What are the four conditions Allport argued make intergroup contact effective?
3. Why can contact sometimes increase prejudice rather than reduce it?
4. What did Pettigrew and Tropp's 2006 meta-analysis find, and why should its conclusions stay measured?
5. What does recategorisation mean, and how does cooperation encourage it?

Prejudice is built from stereotypes, feelings, and behaviour that ordinary minds acquire and defend. It is not permanent. Allport's contact hypothesis holds that bringing groups together reduces hostility when they meet as equals, pursue common goals, cooperate, and have institutional backing. A large body of later evidence, above all Pettigrew and Tropp's meta-analysis, broadly supports the idea while reminding us the effect is average, not automatic, and mostly correlational. Structured contact, not mere proximity, is the lever worth pulling.

• Culture and the Mind
• Why People Harm: The Psychology of Aggression