nucleation

LIT-1405: How Does Intergroup Contact Reduce Prejudice? Meta-Analytic Tests of Three Mediators

1 min read

Properties5
StatusActive — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1405) in full, from the published article's PDF in a University of Washington course's readings folder (https://courses.washington.edu/pbafhall/563/Readings/pettigrew.pdf); worth reading as the meta-analytic test of how contact reduces prejudice: knowledge of the outgroup, intergroup anxiety and empathy all mediate, knowledge much the most weakly, and anxiety and empathy together carry about half the association. Read it knowing that the mediation is statistical, on pooled correlational data, over a different set of samples for each mediator (17, 60, 14), that empathy and perspective taking could not be separated, and that Table 3 misprints the empathy Sobel statistic (4.38 for 12.43).
Version3
Tagssocial-science, emotion-and-affect
ExtendsLIT-1413 — A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1405 — Pettigrew and Tropp — Meta-analytic tests of three mediators of contact

Graph View

Pettigrew, T. F. and Tropp, L. R. (2008). How does intergroup contact reduce prejudice? Meta-analytic tests of three mediators. European Journal of Social Psychology, 38(6), 922–934. doi:10.1002/ejsp.504.

Read in full on 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1405).

Why this is here

The exchange cited it for the mechanism: anxiety reduction and empathy mediate more than knowledge does. The abstract agrees, with one qualification the exchange’s wording could lose: knowledge mediates too, only less strongly; the abstract does not say it fails. For the owner’s “perspectival invitation” reading, the point is that contact changes how the other is felt and taken, more than what is known about them. Bears on CLAIM-275 and CLAIM-417.

Backlinks