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LIT-1831: Can Social Contact Reduce Prejudice and Discrimination? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Nigeria

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StatusActive — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1418) in full, from the published version deposited by the WZB on EconStor (https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/194860/1/f-21548-full-text-Scacco-et_al-Contact-v3.pdf); worth reading as a randomized field test of intergroup contact in a conflict city that measured attitudes and behaviour separately and found that sixteen weeks of cooperative contact left stated prejudice unchanged while reducing discrimination in two incentivized games. Read it knowing that its behavioural measures are games played at home four to six weeks after the course, that the contact effect is mostly a rise in discrimination in the single-religion classes rather than a fall in the mixed ones, that the effect on unfamiliar out-group members holds only for Christians, and that its "pre-analysis plan" was registered in August 2015, after the endline survey, though before the authors had the outcome data.
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Tagssocial-science, social-identity, society-and-governance
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1418 — Scacco and Warren — Can social contact reduce prejudice and discrimination?

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Scacco, A. & Warren, S. S. (2018). Can social contact reduce prejudice and discrimination? Evidence from a field experiment in Nigeria. American Political Science Review, 112(3), 654–677. doi:10.1017/S0003055418000151

Read in full on 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1418).

Why this is here

The triage of 2026-10-29 put it in the File tier for three entries. QUESTION-262 asks for its contrasts to be measured “by conduct and not only self-report”, toward unfamiliar members of the other group. This trial measured attitudes and incentivized behaviour separately, and set apart play with classmates from play with strangers. CLAIM-430 says taking part can come before the reinterpretation it later seems to express, and CLAIM-275 is that order in general; a change in conduct with no change in stated attitude is the pattern the order predicts. It is also one of the three pre-registered studies whose pooled effect of 0.016 is behind the “near zero” in QUESTION-262’s note (LIT-1420, NOTE-1393).

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