Page 359 - The Social Animal

Prejudice 341

but through the medium of equal-status contact. If diverse racial
groups can be brought together under conditions of equal status,
they stand a chance of getting to know each other better. As Petti-
grew has recently found, this can increase understanding and de-
83
crease tension, all other things being equal. It should be noted that
the Deutsch and Collins study took place in public housing proj-
ects rather than in private residential areas. This is a crucial factor
that will be discussed in a moment.

The Vicarious Effects of Desegregation It wasn’t until
much later that social psychologists began to entertain the notion
that desegregation can affect the values of people who do not even
have the opportunity to have direct contact with minority groups.
This can occur through the mechanism referred to in Chapter 5 as
the psychology of inevitability. Specifically, if I know that you and I
will inevitably be in close contact, and I don’t like you, I will experi-
ence dissonance. To reduce dissonance, I will try to convince myself
that you are not as bad as I had previously thought. I will set about
looking for your positive characteristics and will try to ignore, or
minimize the importance of, your negative characteristics. Accord-
ingly, the mere fact that I know I must at some point be in close con-
tact with you will force me to change my prejudiced attitudes about
you, all other things being equal. As we saw earlier, laboratory exper-
iments have confirmed this prediction: For example, children who
believed they inevitably would have to eat a previously disliked veg-
etable began to convince themselves that it wasn’t as bad as they had
thought. 84 Similarly, college women who knew they were going to
spend several weeks working intimately with a woman who had sev-
eral positive and negative qualities developed a great fondness for
that woman before they even met her; this did not occur when they
were not led to anticipate working with her in the future. 85
Admittedly, it’s a far cry from a bowl of vegetables to relations
between blacks, Latinos, and whites. Few social psychologists are so
naive as to believe that deep-seated racial intolerance can be elimi-
nated if people reduce their dissonance simply by coming to terms
with what they believe to be inevitable events. I would suggest that,
under ideal conditions, such events can begin to unfreeze prejudiced
attitudes and produce a diminution of hostile feelings in most indi-
viduals. I will discuss what I mean by “ideal conditions” in a moment;