Negative Intergroup Contact is More Influential, but Positive Intergroup Contact is More Common: Assessing Contact Prominence and Contact Prevalence in Five Central European Countries

The present research tested the idea that the ecological impact of intergroup contact on outgroup attitudes can be fully understood only when relative frequency and relative influence of positive and negative contact are considered simultaneously. Participants from five European countries (Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland and Slovakia; N = 1,276) freely described their contact experiences with people of neighboring nationalities and then reported on their outgroup attitudes. Contact descriptions were coded for positive versus negative valence and for person- versus situation-framing. Consistently across the five participants groups, positive intergroup contact was reported to occur three times more frequently than negative intergroup contact; however positive contact was found to be only weakly related to outgroup attitudes. On the contrary, the less frequent negative (vs. positive) contact was comparatively more influential in shaping outgroup attitudes, especially when negativity was reported around the contact person, rather than the contact situation. This research’s findings reconcile contrasting lines of past research on intergroup contact and suggest that the greater prevalence of positive contact may compensate for the greater prominence of negative contact, thus leading to modest net improvements in outgroup attitudes after intergroup contact.