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The election of Barack Obama as President of the United States can have profound impact, currently and into the future, on Whites’ racial attitudes by providing unprecedented virtual intergroup contact. The present chapter considers the extent and nature of contemporary racial attitudes and discusses how, drawing on fundamental psychological principles related to intergroup contact, Obama’s election can transform the internalized racial attitudes of Whites. We examine not only how, by virtue of his role as president, Obama can change the way Blacks are perceived but also how his rhetoric can shape the perceptions of race relations. We also explore the circumstances that can promote or limit President Obama’s effectiveness and positive impact on race relations.

The contact hypothesis predicts that racial prejudice diminishes when whites and non-whites interact in a setting that fosters cooperation among people of equal status. This hypothesis has seldom, if ever, been tested using randomized experimentation outside the laboratory. This chapter reports the results of a randomized field experiment in which white students were randomly assigned to Outward Bound two- and three-week wilderness courses. In the control group, all the students in each course were non-Hispanic whites. In the treatment group, most of the students were non-Hispanic whites, but at least three of the participants were African-Americans. One month after completing the course, the white participants were interviewed by telephone. As expected, the group that experienced a racially heterogeneous environment expressed greater levels of tolerance than the control group. Although these findings require replication, the research design provides a template for future field-experiments examining the validity of the contact hypothesis.

This chapter both summarizes the current social science theories behind attitude change on lesbian and gay issues and develops the theory of affective liberalization from new research findings in social and political psychology. Demographic theories of attitude change, value-framing theory, issue evolution, elite-led theories of change, and attribution theory are all discussed and found to provide only a partial explanation for change. Affective liberalization is then derived by combining current research in intergroup contact theory with dual process models of decision making. The theory argues that contact primarily acts on the subconscious attitudes that the public holds towards lesbians and gays and explains all the distinctive features of attitudinal change including its durability, broadness, and concentration among young people. The chapter closes with a brief discussion of issues unique to the challenge of analysing change in mass opinion over time.

This chapter outlines the unifying new efforts that led to modern psycholinguistics, in order to form a practical science of the users of language. It first takes a look at the 1950 Conference on Speech Communication, where the different papers presented reveal that engineers, mathematicians, biophysicists, etc. did not consider behaviorism as a vital feature of communication. It then identifies some developments in Britain that contributed to psycholinguistics, including Colin Cherry's ‘cocktail party effect’ and Dennis Fry's interdisciplinary perspective in the analysis of speech communication. The next section focuses on other developments on brain and language in certain countries, including Russia, the United States, and Italy. It also discusses Géza Révèsz, his ‘contact theory’, and a symposium on thinking and speaking that was held in Amsterdam. This chapter concludes with a discussion on old and new approaches in developmental psycholinguistics and the state of general psycholinguistics since 1951.

This chapter begins by describing the dramatic increase in direct contact of the American public with LGBTQ people documented using polling data. Trends in depictions of LGBTQ people on television and film are outlined, which mirror the expansion of direct contact with LGBTQs. These two factors---direct contact and meditated contact---are processed in similar ways psychologically according to affective liberalization. Both are predicted to be more effective at attitude change among younger people. The theory is then empirically tested using four different expansive cross-time public opinion datasets. All four analyses of the data-sets come to same conclusion, contact with LGBTQs (mediated and interpersonal) explains all the distinctive features of attitude change---its large magnitude, its timing, its broadness across specific gay rights issues, and its concentration among the millennial generation.

This chapter tries to discover why civil society should matter for peace. It also describes the contact hypothesis developed by G. W. Allport. Additionally, a new theoretical framework that attempts to overcome the disadvantages in existing theory is presented. Contact theory, social capital theory, and the three-tier model of John Paul Lederach are all theories about why civil society should matter for peace. Contact theory and social capital theory both concentrate on features of societies where conflict is restricted and the intensity of disagreements is dulled. Lederach argued for a more programmatic approach where interventions simultaneously occur at the three levels recognised in social capital theory. Civil society organisations defied any attempt to interpret social problems in terms of ethnic competition. It is shown that the formation of new collective identities and forms of solidarity in civil society may be an essential but can never be enough of a condition for larger-scale change.

In this chapter the analysis is situated in a “shared” secondary school—a private school that co-educates children coming from the two conflicting ethnic communities in Cyprus—Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. The discussion focuses on teachers’, students’, and parents’ perspectives about the struggles to negotiate coexistence in this school. The findings provide insights into how teachers, students, and parents from the two conflicting communities draw selectively from various discourses and practices on collective identity and ethnic conflict in Cyprus (e.g. refugees, missing persons) that are “emotionalized” to support the preexisting values and beliefs adopted from family, schooling, and ethnic community.

The relationship between the separate education system for Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland and the perpetuation of the conflict continues to be subject of considerable debate. There is broad agreement, however, that schools have an important role to play in healing division. This chapter examines and evaluates a recently established non-statutory initiative, the Sharing Education Programme, which aims to provide an effective contact model between the two systems. Our analysis suggests that the success of the Programme is clearly related to helping schools meet statutory obligations and that, in the long run, there are important lessons to be learned regarding how the programme can contribute towards improving relations between the communities.

Chapter 2, “Out of the Head,” in A New Narrative for Psychology argues that psychology’s conceptual problem becomes even more acute when one considers conclusions drawn about the relationship between variables. Interpreting the statistical relationship between two or more variables, researchers commit a serious error; they misinterpret correlations derived from group data as an indication of what must be happening inside persons. Only an approach that allows one to get close enough to persons, to observe how they tell and interpret their experience, can allow one to understand how subjectivity operates. Psychologists need to observe the phenomenon in order to argue that they really know how it works. But observations made in variable-centered research cannot extend to this level of analysis, and researchers must speculate about what must be happening inside persons. Examples from research on personality development and contact theory are examined in order to make this point.

If groups are strange to each other and therefore fearful or hostile, why not bring them together so they can get to know each other and become friendly? This plausible approach is more complicated than it looks at first glance. Under what conditions will intergroup contact be helpful? Can it sometimes be harmful? A variety of field and laboratory experiments support the hypothesis that intergroup competition tends to strengthen social relations within each group and to disrupt relations between the groups. If the experiments are arranged in a way that deliberately fosters competition between the groups, these effects are heightened. But even in the absence of such direct instruction or arrangement, potent factors favor interpersonal attraction or mutual attachment within a group: frequency of social interaction, proximity to each other, familiarity, and similarity of attitudes and values. Almost any sort of interaction within a group tends to promote in-group favoritism. Actually, it seems rather difficult to avoid this effect even if one tries to do so. Humans are highly susceptible to invidious in-group/out-group distinctions. Extensive experimental work strongly confirms the rich variety of observations from fieldwork in many cultures over extended times and in a variety of societies. This does indeed seem to be a profound and pervasive human characteristic—one of great practical significance throughout history. We will return to this theme and examples throughout the book. Findings of this sort have led some psychologists to formulate a principle of social identity, which emphasizes the powerful effects of social categorization in its own right. Such categorization seems to highlight an important aspect of the individual self-concept (and self-esteem) based on group membership. Such membership has, from the evolutionary and historical record, been an important feature in human survival over the millennia. In contemporary people—at least, in those who participate in psychological experiments—the cognitive delineation into an in-group and out-group, even without invidious attributions, tends to set in motion a process by which there is an accentuation of similarities within groups and differences between groups. It seems very convenient, easy, and somehow natural for people to deal with these via simple schemas or stereotypes.

U.S. society is becoming increasingly multicultural. With the proliferation of enclaves of arriving immigrants, it follows that conflict will often be defined along ethnic lines. Unfortunately, a legacy of prejudice, sometimes even hatred, has been passed on to some youth by parents, grandparents, and their ethnic communities. Although in general acts of intolerance in the United States are at a more subtle level than that of 20 years ago, currently there are more obvious expressions of violent discrimination and prejudicial behavior in schools. The wide spectrum of U.S. diversity is also experienced in the public school setting, with the racial and ethnic mix far greater than it was even 10 years ago. Similar circumstances now exist in many countries, because immigration and refugee movements have increased in a globalized, turbulent world. The challenges this presents for educators are great. Schools must seek to create safe environments for students to reach out across racial and ethnic borders and begin to empathize with members of other groups. One of the educators’ responses to this challenge has been the development of cooperative learning techniques. In cooperative learning programs, the traditional classroom of one teacher and many students is reorganized into heterogeneous ability groups of four or five students who work together to learn a particular subject matter. Cooperative learning is also an excellent example of contact theory, as previously discussed in Chapter 7, and the relationship is elaborated later in this chapter. Cooperative learning has grown steadily since the early 1970s. These efforts stem partly from a desire to find alternatives to the usual lecture mode and to involve students actively in the learning process. In part, coopera- tive learning builds on the recognized benefits of peer tutoring. Cooperative learning can offset the negative impacts of traditional individual competitiveness for grades, approval, and achievement in which there are inevitable and (after a while) predictable winners and losers. Moreover, cooperative learning can instill appreciation for student diversity and belief in the value of mutual aid. Teachers utilize cooperative methods in small groups in a variety of ways, seeking to strengthen students’ motivation to learn as well as providing individual help for students in the quest for content learning such as mathematics. They also seek to develop skills that lead to high productivity in joint problem solving.