Miles Hewstone

• DSc
• Professor (Full) at University of Oxford

This study integrates research on intergroup contact and the rejection–identification model to examine how negative and positive contact interact to influence both the health and well-being as well as the group identification (assessed as ingroup affect, ingroup ties, and centrality) of disabled people. We analysed data from a week-long diary study...

More and more research is considering the effects of both positive and negative intergroup contact on intergroup attitudes. To date, little is known about what factors may differentially influence these effects. We propose that differentiating not only between positive and negative contact (i.e., its valence), but also considering the intensity (i....

Both homophily and heterophily are observed in humans. Homophily reinforces homogeneous social networks, and heterophily creates new experiences and collaborations. However, at the extremes, high levels of homophily can cultivate prejudice toward out-groups, whereas high levels of heterophily can weaken in-group support. Using data from 24,726 adul...

Objectives: The present research investigates the associations between immigrants’ positive and negative contact with the majority group and their psychological well-being, as indicators of their psychosocial adjustment to the host society. Perceived personal discrimination and relative deprivation in comparison to the majority group are assessed a...

This study investigates the impact of intergroup contact of White British adults (N = 192) on the language used when describing their recent interactions with Asian British people. Specifically, we assessed the role of different forms of intergroup contact (i.e., cross-group friendship, positive and negative, and direct and extended contact) on the...

Intergroup contact research has rarely considered the intra-individual (within-person) variability of contact. Using a three-wave longitudinal dataset (N = 565), this research aimed to (a) test the within-person simultaneous associations between positive and negative contacts and several intergroup outcomes (i.e. attitudes, prejudice, perceived var...

This research investigates the positive and negative contact experiences of African migrants with native Italians and the association between contact and behavioural intentions to reduce social inequalities. Two studies examined the associations between intergroup contact of migrants and their collective action in support of their or other group me...

Intergroup contact provides a reliable means of reducing prejudice. Yet, critics suggested that its efficacy is undermined, even eliminated, under certain conditions. Specifically, contact may be ineffective in the face of threat, especially to (historically) advantaged groups, and discrimination, experienced especially by (historically) disadvanta...

The extensive literature on the contact hypothesis reports a positive association between intergroup contact and outgroup attitudes, yet it remains unknown whether this association reflects within-person (i.e., situational changes within individuals) or between-person (i.e., stable differences between individuals) effects. To investigate this quest...

A longitudinal field study tested the long‐term effects (three years) of intergroup contact on both explicit and implicit outgroup attitudes. Participants were majority (Italian) and minority (immigrant) high‐school students, who were tested at four waves from the beginning of their first year in high‐school to the end of the third school year. Res...

Research has proposed different models of how contact situations should be structured to maximize contact effects, focusing in particular on the role of categorization during contact. We conducted two experimental field interventions ( Ns = 247 and 247) to test models that integrate different levels of categorization. Each of the tested models was...

Little is known about whether the benefits of intergroup contact extend to contexts (e.g., a diverse underdeveloped township) likely to prove demanding for improved intergroup relations. There is a need for further research in these contexts on the potential inhibitors of contact (such as diversity and threat) and their effects. Perceived social di...

The contact hypothesis proposes that intergroup contact improves outgroup attitudes. Existing cross-sectional and longitudinal studies provide valuable insights into the association between contact and attitudes, but are mostly uninformative regarding within-person and between-person effects. To investigate such effects, we applied (random-intercep...

In our current globalised, multicultural world, understanding antecedents of reciprocal interactions between native people and people of immigrant background is a major issue, because intergroup contact plays a crucial role in building inclusive societies. In this vein, using daily diary data, we examined the relation between the number of daily po...

Past research has shown that intergroup contact can be a promising intervention to improve intergroup relations and that contact-based interventions might be most effective during adolescence. In postconflict Northern Ireland, widespread residential segregation and a largely separate school system limit opportunities for intergroup contact between...

Several countries have enacted personal assistance (PA) legislation over the past few decades. Although this policy has been associated with improvements in the quality of life, here we explore how it interacts with the social environment. We examine how the existence of PA legislation influences the effect of social equality on the health and well...

Positive contact between members of different groups reduces prejudice and increases cooperation, findings known as intergroup contact effects. Yet in real-world settings not only positive, but also negative intergroup contact occurs, which have opposing effects. To date little is known about whether and how an individual’s valenced history of inte...

The success of populist radical right parties (PRRPs) in Europe has, in part, been attributed to growing immigration, but previous findings have found an inconsistent relationship between immigration and voting for PRRPs. We address previous inconsistencies by suggesting a time-focused perspective on intergroup relations. We disentangle short-term...

Friendships with members of our own group (ingroup) and other groups (outgroups) shape our attitudes toward outgroups. Research on intergroup contact has shown that the numbers of outgroup and ingroup friends we have influence our outgroup attitudes, whereas research on socialization has shown that the attitudes held by our friends influence our ou...

Dominant majority-group members living in areas with larger proportions of outgroup members tend to express more ingroup bias. However, prior research has rarely considered this in tandem with the bias-reducing effects of intergroup contact or tested whether outgroup proportions have similar effects for oppressed minority-group members. In two prer...

Intergroup contact is key to social cohesion, yet psychological barriers block engagement with diversity even when contact opportunities are abundant. We lack an advanced understanding of contact seeking because intergroup contact is often an independent variable in research, and studies on contact seeking have favoured experimental probing of sele...

Immigration is increasing around the world. Academic work suggests that increasing immigration reduces social cohesion and subjective wellbeing. These studies, however, have mainly focused on the white majority. Using the 2002-2014 European Social Survey, we analyze data from 5,149 ethnic minority respondents living in 24 European countries. We exa...

COVID-19 represents a multidimensional threat with the potential to worsen intergroup relations, but perceiving a common belonging with various outgroups may prevent intergroup tensions. During the Italian lockdown, we conducted an online survey with 685 Italian participants investigating whether perceptions of common belonging (belonging to a comm...

Past research has found intergroup contact to be a promising intervention to reduce prejudice and has identified adolescence as the developmental period during which intergroup contact is most effective. Few studies, however, have tested whether contact-based interventions can be scaled up to improve intergroup relations at a large scale. The prese...

This longitudinal, quasi-experimental field study investigated affective forecasting as a moderator of positive intergroup contact effects among adolescents. We also examined a novel mediating mechanism that underlies this effect, namely accuracy of perceived outgroup willingness for intergroup contact. Three annual waves of survey data were used f...

This paper examines the relationship between religious diversity, religious and national identity, and neighbourhood trust. Using data from 6,089 individuals in England matched to census-based statistical estimates for 300 local areas, we find that religious diversity is negatively associated with neighbourhood trust. Further analyses tested indire...

We examined cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between national and religious identification, Bicultural Identity Integration (BII), and Social Identity Complexity (SIC) among Muslim adolescents in the UK (Study 1, n = 773, M = 17.5 years) and the U.S. (Study 2, n = 190, MW1 = 14.1 years). Using person-oriented approaches, we identified...

Past research has shown that intergroup contact can be a promising intervention to improve intergroup relations and that contact-based interventions might be most effective during adolescence. In post-conflict Northern Ireland, widespread residential segregation and a largely separate school system limit opportunities for intergroup contact between...

Modern societies are facing unprecedented changes in their ethnic composition. Increasing ethnic diversity poses critical new challenges as people interact with new cultures, norms, and values, or avoid such encounters. Heated academic and political debates focus on whether and how changes in ethnic composition affect societies and local communitie...

Past research has found intergroup contact to be a promising intervention to reduce prejudice and has identified adolescence as the developmental period during which intergroup contact is most effective. Few studies, however, have tested whether contact-based interventions can be scaled up to improve intergroup relations at a large scale. The prese...

Harsh parenting attitudes and behaviors negatively impact children’s behavior and development, and are linked to heightened levels of violence in children. Parent training programs are effective preventive interventions, but only reach caregivers who attend them. In this study, programs were implemented alongside a community mobilization process, i...

We examined how people construct their social identities from multiple group memberships—and whether intergroup contact can reduce prejudice by fostering more inclusive social identities. South Indian participants ( N = 351) from diverse caste backgrounds viewed 24 identity cards, each representing a person with whom participants shared none, one,...

Two preregistered studies examined whether, why, and for whom intergroup contact is associated with more egalitarian implicit racial attitudes. Performance on implicit attitude measures depends on both the activation of group-relevant evaluations (e.g., positive ingroup and negative outgroup evaluations) and the inhibition of those evaluations. We...

This paper studied affective generalization from intergroup contact, namely when and how affective empathy, anxiety, and trust-related feelings towards specific outgroup members (contact-related affective variables) generalize to the whole outgroup (outgroup-related affective variables). We analysed affective generalization using multilevel models,...

The present research aims to test whether varying the sequential position in which majority members recall positive and negative contacts with migrants affects the linguistic descriptions of these episodes - in terms of abstraction and valence - provided by majority group members. We also tested whether participants' prior contact with migrants and...

Previous research shows that acculturation challenges predict immigrants’ support for terrorism. Here, we acknowledge the central role of mass media use in the acculturation process. We investigate whether immigrants who infrequently use ethnic and host country media, a possible indicator or driver of marginalisation, report higher sympathy with te...

Previous research shows that acculturation challenges predict immigrants’ support for terrorism. Here, we acknowledge the central role of mass media use in the acculturation process. We investigate whether immigrants who infrequently use ethnic and host country media, a possible indicator or driver of marginalisation, report higher sympathy with te...

In this chapter, we provide an overview of social psychological theories on social identity, including social identity theory (Tajfel, 1978; Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and self-categorization theory (Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher & Wetherell, 1987), and review newer approaches (e.g., to multiple categorization) that relate social identification to inter...

In this study, we investigated the effect of intergroup contact on processing of own- and other-race faces using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Previous studies have shown a neural own-race effect with greater BOLD response to own race compared to other race faces. In our study, white participants completed a social-categorization ta...

The evidence for differential effects of positive and negative intergroup contact on prejudice is mixed. We propose that the closeness of the relationships respondents have with contact partners can explain inconsistencies in previous findings. In three studies (total N = 953), we tested the associations between positive intimate, negative intimate...

Two studies investigated outgroup-to-outgroup generalization, addressing whether members of negatively perceived minority outgroups are perceived as prototypical of larger partially-inclusive outgroups and whether this tendency is enhanced under intergroup threat. Both experimental studies were conducted with Italian undergraduate participants. Exp...

Dual identity (e.g., strong ethnic and national identity) is a psychological resource for minority groups, but how it develops during adolescence is less clear. In this 3-wave longitudinal study, a person-oriented approach was used to examine dual identity development in a sample of 2145 Muslim adolescents (MT1 = 15 years, 51% female) in four Weste...

We examined how people construct their social identities from multiple group memberships—and whether intergroup contact can reduce prejudice by fostering more inclusive social identities. South Indian participants (N = 351) from diverse caste backgrounds viewed 24 identity cards, each representing a person with whom participants shared none, one, t...

Discrimination has negative consequences for the health and well‐being (HWB) of individuals belonging to disadvantaged groups. Due to social and attitudinal barriers, we argue that disabled people comprise one of the groups most affected by discrimination. Using data from the European Social Survey, including representative samples from 32 countrie...

This research examined the impact of a change in school diversity on school children's intergroup relations. A longitudinal survey tracked 551 White British and Asian British students (Mage = 11.32) transitioning from elementary (time 1) to secondary (time 2) school in an ethnically segregated town in the United Kingdom. We estimated a multivariate...

Significance Changes in social diversity constitute a key factor shaping today’s world, yet scholarly work about the consequences of diversity has been marked by a critical lack of consensus. To address this concern, we propose a multidisciplinary approach where psychological, sociological, and evolutionary perspectives are integrated to provide an...

We examined the association of the combination of direct intergroup contact and mass media news with attitudes toward immigrants and gay people in Italy, hypothesizing that direct intergroup contact would buffer the negative association between media news and attitudes, but only when contact was intimate or positive. Measuring contact variables and...

Although intergroup contact is an effective means to improve intergroup attitudes, it does not always have a positive impact on them. This study introduces contact capacity as a factor that may impede intergroup contact. Longitudinal social network data (N = 6,600; Mage = 14.87 years) was collected in Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden and used t...

This study examines whether the values prevalent in one's social environment moderate the link between immigration-related ethnic diversity and social trust. Drawing on arguments related to intergroup relations and anomie, we expect that contexts characterized by a comparatively high degree of openness mitigate a trust-eroding effect of immigration...

Based on social network theories, outgroup contact does not only improve intergroup relations, but can also facilitate the academic development of students due to the social capital and the uniquely supportive information and resources it provides. In the present study, 12,376 students (14.42 years; 50% girls; 38% immigrant students) from 591 class...

Extensive research explores how increasing ethnic out-group populations in society affects inter-group attitudes. Drawing on the threat and contact hypotheses, this study develops and tests a framework examining the role of segregation in the out-group size/prejudice relationship. We suggest that whether increasing minority share in a community gen...

There is ample evidence of the beneficial effects of intergroup contact in reducing negative attitudes towards immigrants. Although the valuable role of institutional support, one of the initial optimal conditions for contact, has been demonstrated, the impact of actual immigration integration policies, as a manifestation of institutional support,...

We aimed to create an engaging and dynamic intervention for schools that uses videos of direct school peer contact to implement a vicarious contact intervention. Participants were ethnic majority (Italian) and minority (immigrant) high school students (N = 485; age ranging from 14 to 22 years old, Mage = 17.24 years), who were asked to watch and ev...

Demographic trends reveal that modern societies have become more heterogeneous in terms of their ethnic composition. Concerns about social diversity and its implications have received critical scholarly attention, and it has become a prominent topic in several social sciences. The recent but already impressive amount of published research has exami...

Although the effects of direct and indirect forms of contact on intergroup relations are well documented, little is known about their longitudinal co-development. Based on the social-psychological literature, we hypothesize that indirect contact predicts future direct contact by reducing intergroup anxiety. Across five longitudinal studies (Study 1...

Over 60 years of research and comprehensive reviews now support Gordon Allport's contact hypothesis that face‐to‐face interactions between members of opposing groups should be promoted to lessen prejudice and improve intergroup relations. Society however does not yet enjoy the full prejudice‐reducing benefits of intergroup contact because opportuni...

Despite six decades of research in the field of intergroup contact, the special role of the school setting as a key context for mixing has, after an initial focus on studies of school desegregation in the U.S., received relatively little attention, especially in Europe. In this chapter, we will explain why the school setting can provide particularl...

Online poker has become a multibillion dollar industry, with millions of people from around the world both playing and watching online poker each year. Unlike live poker, players and watchers, typically cannot rely on physical cues of other players; in fact, the only information often available to poker players is others’ nationality. Because these...

Although literature provides strong evidence for the beneficial role of outgroup contact, longitudinal knowledge regarding the formation and change of outgroup contact remains improvable. Using a longitudinal, large-scale data set including 6,726 majority and minority participants (Mage = 14.98 years at Wave 1; 55% female) from 4 western European c...

Research frequently demonstrates diverse communities exhibit lower intra-community cohesion. Recent studies suggest there is little evidence perceived ethnic threat plays a role in this relationship. This paper re-examines the roles of ethnic threat and prejudice in the diversity/cohesion relationship. First, we test threat/prejudice as conceptuali...

We report findings from three longitudinal studies investigating the extent, quality and consequences of intergroup contact in schools between young Asian-British and White-British secondary (high-school) students. Results provide robust support for Allport’s ‘contact hypothesis’ in this setting. Specifically, mixing (vs segregation) in high school...

Building on and extending prior research demonstrating the role of both quality and quantity of intergroup contact in reducing negative attitudes toward outgroup members (Allport, 1954; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006), the present study takes the novel approach of applying both contact theory and Intergroup Emotions Theory (IET; Mackie & Smith, 2002) to t...

Indirect forms of intergroup contact, such as extended and vicarious contact, are thought to provide a promising alternative to direct contact, but very few studies have compared the effectiveness of these two types of contact to confirm this claim. Furthermore, Wright, Aron, McLaughlin-Volpe, and Ropp (1997) postulated, but did not test, that the...

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 con...

This study advances the current literature investigating the relationship between contextual out-group exposure, inter-group attitudes and the role of inter-group contact. Firstly, it introduces the concept of contact-valence into this relationship; that is, whether contact is experienced positively or negatively. Secondly, it presents a comparativ...

Previous research has demonstrated that there is a negative relationship between ethnic diversity in a local community and social cohesion. Often the way social cohesion is assessed, though, varies across studies and only some aspects of the construct are included (e.g., trust). The current research explores the relationship between diversity and s...

SPSS data set. Data set in SPSS. (SAV)

Technical report. Survey items. (PDF)

Excel data set. Data set in Excel. (XLSX)

Five experiments examine the interactive power of descriptive and injunctive norms regarding intergroup friendships on the effects of extended contact – knowing ingroup members having outgroup friends – on intergroup orientations. We propose that the positive effect of extended contact can occur even when the ingroup members having outgroup friends...

Two experiments examined the effect a leader has when supported by a numerical majority or minority. In both experiments, participants read a team problem-solving scenario where a solution was supported by either a numerical majority or minority of the team. In some conditions, the team leader also supported the same solution as the majority or min...

This research reports a novel investigation into the comparative effects of positive and negative direct and extended intergroup contact on intergroup orientations. It tested the generality of the positive-negative asymmetry effect among majority (N = 357) and minority (N = 101) group members in Iceland. Little evidence of asymmetry was observed: t...

Previous research has shown negative effects of discrimination on ethnic minority members’ health and well-being. In this study, we examined cross-sectional and longitudinal effects of discrimination by members of the police and security personnel over and above other types of discrimination and ethnic victimization on the health of immigrant minor...

Previous research has demonstrated that in-group favouritism occurs not only in higher-level judgments such as reward allocation, but also in low-level perceptual and attentional tasks. Recently, Moradi, Sui, Hewstone, and Humphreys (2015) found a novel effect of in-group bias on a simple perceptual matching task in which football fans responded mo...

Based on two cross-sectional probability samples (Study 1: N = 1,382, Study 2: N = 1,587), we studied the interplay between positive and negative intergroup contact, different types of intergroup emotions (i.e., episodic intergroup emotions encountered during contact and more general chronic intergroup emotions), and outgroup behavior in the contex...

Computer-mediated intergroup contact (CMIC) is a valuable strategy to reduce negative sentiments towards members of different social groups. We examined whether characteristics of communication media that facilitate intergroup encounters shape its effect on out-group attitudes. Specifically, we propose that concealing individuating cues about out-g...

Traditionally, studies of intergroup contact have primarily relied on self-reports, which constitute a valid method for studying intergroup contact, but has limitations, especially if researchers are interested in negative or extended contact. In three studies, we apply social network analyses to generate alternative contact parameters. Studies 1 a...

A science of groups needs to take different levels of analysis into account since only multilevel perspectives provide a full and realistic picture of processes within and between social groups. A multilevel perspective, however, requires appropriate statistical models. Conventional multilevel regression models suffer from a number of limitations....

Classic research on the contact hypothesis focused on the direct relationship between the antecedents (conditions under which contact occurs) and the outcomes (primarily, the reduction of prejudice) of intergroup contact. Recent work has taken a broader view of contact processes and effects. We review key developments over the past 20 years, identi...

This article reexamines the so-called “wallpaper effect” of intergroup contact, which contends that for minority group members living in areas more densely populated by majority group members, intergroup contact fails to reduce prejudice. We tested this claim in five studies, using data from five countries, two types of contexts, a range of measure...

Studies have shown that attending to salient group relevant information could increase the BOLD activity across distributed neural networks. However, it is unclear how attending to group relevant information changes the functional connectivity across these networks. We investigated this issue combining resting states and task-based fMRI experiment....

Studies have shown that attention prioritizes stimuli associated with the in-group. However, the extent to which this so-called in-group favoritism is driven by relevance is not clear. Here, we investigated this issue in a group of university rowers using a novel perceptual matching task based on the team label–color associations. Across three expe...

Outgroup projection is the tendency to generalise among members of different outgroups as if their members were all alike. The present study analysed this almost unexplored phenomenon and tested whether intergroup threat enhances the tendency to generalise the members of a negativelyvalued outgroup (i.e., Roma) onto another larger (partially) inclu...

We examined the effects of in-group relevance on inhibitory control in anti-saccades. In Experiment 1, following a central coloured cue, football fans were instructed to look at the target on pro-saccade trials or its mirrored position on anti-saccade trials. The targets were badges of participants’ favourite football team (in-group), its closest r...

This article presents 10 reasons why social network analysis, a novel but still surprisingly underused approach in social psychology, can advance the analysis of intergroup contact. Although intergroup contact has been shown to improve intergroup relations, conventional methods leave some questions unanswered regarding the underlying social mechani...

Using a sample of Bosnian adults (N � 381) we investigated the association between intergroup contact, measures of intergroup relations, and mental health. Structural equation models with latent variables showed that postwar contact had beneficial effects, being positively related to outgroup trust and intergroup forgiveness, and negatively associa...

The single factor fallacy occurs when social scientists model their applied work largely around a single factor. The problem generally arises when either a highly relevant theory is ignored or when missing key variables distort the results. Examples of this fallacy are drawn from the expanding research literature on intergroup contact, where we dis...

Broadly speaking, our survey set out to shed light on the day-to-day nature of ethnic relations in Malaysia and the factors that encourage and impede meaningful inter-ethnic interactions and understanding between the main ethnic and religious groups. We hope that the evidence presented offers valuable insights into the complex social dynamics in Ma...

Previous research has shown that (1) positive intergroup contact with an advantaged group can discourage collective action among disadvantaged-group members and (2) positive intergroup contact can encourage advantaged-group members to take action on behalf of disadvantaged outgroups. Two studies investigated the effects of negative as well as posit...