This book addresses some basic issues and topics in the sociology of majority-minority relationships and attempts to evaluate and reformulate the conceptual and theoretical tools of the field. It is argued in Part I that majority-minority relationships must be understood as a case study in social stratification and as an opportunity for the…

A summative evaluation of a unique television experience for children is presented in this document. Vegetable Soup, a multi-ethnic television series, is designed to reduce the adverse effects of racial prejudice. A major focus of the program is to assist elementary school children in the development of genuine appreciation of members of all…

On November 9-10, 1998, the Forum on Adolescence of the Board on Children, Youth, and Families, a cross-cutting initiative of the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, convened a workshop entitled Research to Improve Intergroup Relations Among Youth. Held at the request of the Carnegie…

Investigates the subjective experience of control and how this experience moderates the impact of sterotypic vs individuating information in social judgment. In the 1st section of this chapter, the authors review the literature on control. It is proposed that control might be conceived as a kind of subjective experience, that is, a cognitive…

How do people form expectations about interaction with members of other groups, and decide whether to engage in intergroup interactions? In five studies, I demonstrated the significance of prediction processes in intergroup interaction by showing that they can influence expectations and anxieties involved in such interactions, and affect…

This study aimed to build on existing research on the effects of imagined contact with stigmatized individuals. Specifically, this study examined the effect of imagining contact with a person with depression on attitudes towards other persons with depression. University student participants were randomized into four conditions where…

Imagined intergroup contact was introduced as an easy and efficient method of improving the quality of intergroup interactions allowing better prejudice reduction. It has proven effective at improving many intergroup outcomes, however some previous research points to limitations of the method and suggest that perhaps imagined intergroup contact…

The purpose of this research was to analyze whether viewing mediated (onscreen) intergroup contact including a character with disabilities would affect non-disabled viewers’ attitudes towards people with disabilities. Utilizing the theoretical developments from cultivation analysis (Gerbner, 1998, Morgan & Shanahan, 2010), social cognitive…

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…