The Promise and Limits of Intergroup Contact, with Salma Mousa

In this episode, we talk about improving relations between social groups. For decades, social scientists and policymakers have been examining whether meaningful social interaction between groups can help reduce prejudice and conflict,  or what’s been known as the “contact hypothesis.”

Whether social interaction breeds tolerance has implications, of course, for a huge range of political outcomes: for instance, for the risks of violence, civil war, and genocide; patterns of discrimination; and how societies respond to increased flows of immigration. It’s only recently, however, that social scientists have been experimentally testing the contact hypothesis in real-world, high-stakes settings.

Our guest is Dr. Salma Mousa, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Immigration Policy Lab. Mousa's research uses field and natural experiments to examine the possibility that contact between groups can foster both more positive attitudes and more positive behaviors across group lines.

We talk with Mousa about two recent papers of hers that delve into real-world settings to examine how and under what conditions intergroup contact can help. The first paper, recently published as the cover article in the journal Science, tests the contact hypothesis under especially tough conditions: in the context of Christian-Muslim tensions in post-conflict Iraq. Working among communities displaced by the war with ISIS, Mousa conducted an innovative field experiment in which she randomly assigned Christian soccer teams to either receive additional Christian players or additional Muslim players for a season — and then she observed whether this changed the Christian team members’ attitudes and behaviors towards Muslims.

In the second paper, Mousa examines the effects of virtual contact -- between school children of different ethnicities and nationalities -- to see whether the benefits of contact can be achieved online.

We discuss the substance of Mousa's findings, the research designs she deploys, and, more generally, how to make sense of and draw policy lessons from findings in the field of group conflict. Among the issues we discuss are the difference between generating cross-group tolerance among individuals who directly interact with one another and producing generalized tolerance toward an entire social group; why it may be easier to change behaviors toward outgroups than to change attitudes; and the challenge of scaling up carefully designed experimental treatments into society-wide policies that breed more positive intergroup relations.

For references to all academic works mentioned in this episode, please visit our website at scopeconditionspodcast.com.