Linda Tropp on Reducing Threat and Bridging Groups through Contact

The Answer is Community gets our questions answered by a *real* social psychologist!

Introduction from Eric:

Regular readers will know that over the past couple of years I’ve become a social psychology neophyte.

Social psychology holds incredible insights into how we bridge our group differences and form new shared identities. And given our overlapping crisis of social isolation, fragmentation and polarization, we desperately need this wisdom.

Even more so, it’s time for those who work with communities in design, planning, and policy to cross-pollinate with this social psychology knowledge. It’s just like what happened with ecology and biology in response the environmental crisis to birth sustainable design. Now we need to it with our civic environment.

In particular, Intergroup Contact Theory identifies the psychological conditions that foster understanding, tolerance, and connection between people of different identity groups. Those conditions are called “optimal contact.”

The Answer is Community has shown how we can apply optimal contact theory to community engagement. The goal is to transform our typically transactional processes into powerful tools for restitching our frayed social fabric. If you need a refresher about how this works, start with this first of a four part series, “How to Craft a Public Process for Community Building.”

After accumulating an impressive stack of academic papers and books on social psychology, I figured it was finally time to talk to a *real* social psychologist. I wanted to geek-out with someone about what I’ve learned and probe a deeper into the overlap between disciplines.

So I reached out to Linda Tropp, Professor of Social Psychology and Faculty Associate in Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Linda comes from a noble lineage of social psychologists. Her work with Thomas Pettigrew is some of the most cited academic literature on Intergroup Contact Theory. Thomas, in turn, was a student of Gordon Allport, and was integral to formulating the four conditions for Optimal Contact published in Allport’s seminal 1954 book, The Nature of Prejudice.

Linda is currently doing amazing work, like applying Optimal Contact to help bridge differences between native-born and immigrant communities. For example. check out her publication for the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), “Designing, Implementing, and Evaluating the Impact of Social Mixing Programs: A Toolkit.”

Linda graciously agreed to entertain my layman’s questions. Below is an edited and abbreviated transcript of of our conversation. We talk about empathy, anxiety, superordinate identities, place-based communities, segregation, diversity, and more. It’s a little longer and geekier than my typical posts, but thorough readers will be well rewarded.

Enjoy!

PS. And don’t forget to check out the “What Else I’m Reading” at the end!’'

---

The Answer is Community (TAIC): I first learned about Intergroup Contact Theory through the work of Gordon Allport and the Four Conditions for Optimal Contact [equal status, common goals, intergroup cooperation and authority support] proposed in his book, The Nature of Prejudice (1954).

But then later I learned about your 2006 meta-analysis of Intergroup Contact Theory with Thomas Pettigrew, which found that those original four conditions, although valuable, were not actually necessary for Optimal Contact.

As I understand it, the contemporary study of Intergroup Contact Theory now centers on two emotional mechanisms: reducing anxiety and encouraging empathy or perspective taking. These emotional states are what is really at the heart of optimal contact and bridging group differences.

Is that the right story? For example, when I read the toolkit you co-authored for the UN’s International Office of Migration, you lead with the Conditions, but then treat empathy and anxiety as more as a side effect than a causal driver. How do you see the relationship between Optimal Contact conditions and empathy and anxiety?

Linda: Those are great questions. At the time that Allport was writing, it was generally believed that contact between groups wouldn't always reduce prejudice—and for this reason, we have to be intentional about structuring social conditions to maximize the likelihood of reducing prejudice. Contact theory was born in that context.

What started happening in later decades was that researchers focused more on people's lived experiences in those contact situations, rather than just focusing on the contact situations themselves. And that's where you see the emphasis on anxiety reduction and building empathy coming through.

So, I wouldn't say that one is more important than the other. Temporally, the discussion of optimal conditions comes first because of the tendency, especially in experimental social psychology, to explore how situations can be engineered to elicit outcomes we would regard as beneficial or desirable. But more people have started to think about what happens through the process of engaging with people who are different, especially under those optimal conditions.

And what's likely to happen is that we start feeling less defensive, and this helps reduce our feelings of threat and anxiety. That, in turn, provides more psychological and emotional space for empathy to develop.

When I talk with practitioners or community organizations, I often emphasize how it’s a tall order to ask people to care about others’ lived experiences if they feel threatened by them. So, dialing down that sense of threat is of paramount importance to make space for empathy.

TAIC: In community engagement practice we often have those four conditions already in place. For example, in a typical community meeting, there are lots of people in a room together cooperating for a shared purpose, on equal status, and with oversight of an entity or custom. I think this is why I have been drawn to empathy and anxiety/perspective taking, and how to weave those into our community engagement practices. Community engagement is not starting from scratch with the conditions, so we can focus on a deeper emotional level.

So, what I'm hearing from you is that those conditions are, in a way, the practical tools to get to an emotional space. And that when you're talking about execution, it's helpful to talk more about the conditions because, for example, you can't really organize an “empathy” meeting. You need a different vehicle under which to create the right conditions first.

Linda: Absolutely. I think about those conditions much more in terms of program implementation. That is, how do you create the space for groups to engage in ways that are likely to facilitate the outcomes you want? And if you're trying to reduce prejudice or improve relations between groups, some of the pathways involve reducing anxiety and threat, and building capacity for empathy.

TAIC: A lot of your work is about bridging — about how the right kinds of interpersonal contact can reduce prejudice and conflict between identity groups. But there’s another aspect to this work that social psychologists discuss — that of creating larger shared identities. I often see these identities referred to as “superordinate identities.”

I'm interested in how we form superordinate identities. Throughout my community engagement work, I’ve seen incredible potential in the role of place-based communities as a container, or super-ordinate identity, for belonging amongst people of many different identity groups.

I’m struggling to understand the relationship between these two psychological threads – bridging groups through contact and developing super-ordinate identities. Could you cast some light on how these two things work together?

Linda: Yes, those are two tools in our toolbox for creating spaces or situations that improve attitudes between groups.

One approach is the superordinate identity model that you are referencing. It's also referred to as “re-categorization” or the “common in-group identity model.”

It’s worth noting that there are some critiques of that approach. One challenge is that, by focusing on a superordinate identity, people from subordinate groups may feel like their identities are being dismissed, or not adequately acknowledged. Or they might feel that they must cast aside their subordinate identities to be recognized as part of the superordinate group.

For example, if we're thinking about the larger social category of being an American, you can imagine how White people and Black people might not equally feel a part of that larger “American” category. We have to think about ways both subgroup identities and superordinate identities can be salient at the same time.

So “re-categorization” is one strategy. And it can be used instead of, or in addition to, a “contact” strategy that’s focused on how to bring groups together to engage with each other.

In one of Tom Pettigrew's papers, he talks about how intergroup contact steps can lead to re-categorization. I'm mixed on that personally. Nothing against Tom or the re-categorization approach — I just see contact and re-categorization as somewhat separate strategies.

But I would agree that having some sequential approach makes sense. As Pettigrew suggests, you could start by deemphasizing social categories or minimizing the salience of group differences. For example, focusing on the differences between groups like US-born Americans and immigrants would highlight the salience of their differences. Instead, you could bring them together to engage in ways through which they get to know each other as people. You could focus on other characteristics beyond their US-born and immigrant categories. And that can help to build a reservoir of rapport and trust, hopefully reducing feelings of threat and building capacity for empathy. Then, you could potentially go deeper and talk about those US-born and immigrant group differences and the lived experiences of those differences, once there is some degree of rapport or trust between the groups.

So following that kind of example, I think it’s possible to re-categorize first, but I don't know that it's necessarily part of the sequence. I think re-categorization is just another tool that might be used.

TAIC: When talking about superordinate identities, I feel like place-based identities have a kind of superpower. It seems like we are evolutionarily hard-wired to easily find shared group identity at a smaller geographic place-based scale, like in a neighborhood or township. And that's why national identities, like being an American, can sometimes be problematic for people.

This perspective comes from my training as a landscape architect where I learned about the meaning of place-attachment and place-identity. I see being a “neighbor” as more effective and powerful for creating belonging than other potential super-ordinate identities. I'm curious about your take on that.

Linda: Yeah, there’s definitely something to place attachment and place-based identity. I was just at a conference, and the questioner behind me started by saying he grew up on the South side of Chicago. And I'm like, “Oh! I'm from the Chicago area and went to high school in the South side of Chicago,” and I immediately wanted to know more about him. There is something about place-based attachment and identity that evokes a sense of shared experience or shared understanding.

Or, at least it can. I'm also thinking about what happens when neighborhoods change. Gentrification, for example. I grew up in Gary, Indiana, a place of major northern Black migration to the industrial Midwest. So, for Black migrants and many of their descendants, what “being from Chicago” means is probably something different than what it might mean for people from other demographic backgrounds, or from different neighborhoods within the Chicago area. Sometimes when you're embedded in a local environment, it's contested what being “local” means or who we want to regard as part of our local community.

At the same time, especially when you're removed from that local context — like being an American traveling in Europe — place, place-based identity or place-based attachment feels more unique and special. You feel like you have more in common all of a sudden – even if you are Americans from different parts of the country.

TAIC: Is segregation the Achilles heel of intergroup contact? Thomas Pettigrew, for example, suggests this in his book Contextual Social Psychology when he critiques Robert Putnam’s controversial 2007 study for not controlling for segregation. Is that characterization correct? Is segregation the kryptonite to scaling up the work of bridging identity groups?

Linda: Yeah, to a large extent, segregation is like that. It can limit contact, and the potentially positive outcomes of contact. But segregation doesn't happen without social and political will.

This is part of why I continued to study contact and contact-related processes so much. The more people have contact with people from different groups, the more psychologically invested they are in their welfare, and the more they see value in social integration. I want to enhance the social and political will for people to believe in the value of integrated neighborhoods. I want there to be greater interest in diversity instead of having it forced on to people. Like what happened during the desegregation of public schools in South Boston, where people were asking, “Why are you making us go through this?”

TAIC: Coincidentally, on the cover of a recent New York Times there was a piece on segregation that channeled Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort. The article showcased infographics illustrating how people are moving out of mixed political communities into politically segregated communities and how that's driving large-scale polarization.

This kind of sorting and segregating seems to be the elephant in the room when considering the potential of Place as a vehicle for bridging different groups. Because if everyone is sorted, then you lose the tolerance-building opportunity that arises when people of different identity groups live next to each other. Without the potential for integrated neighborhoods, what hope is there for a diverse and tolerant society?

Linda: I guess I see the issue as deeper, and in many ways, psychological. Because we've stopped teaching civics in schools, we’ve become so individualistic as a society. We’ve become outcome-focused and deliverable-focused. There’s not a sense of social responsibility. We don't necessarily value the exchanges that have historically occurred between neighbors. It’s not something that we make a priority.

And so it gets overlooked. And then, only after the fact, once the social fabric has frayed so much that we don't function well together, then it becomes this issue of polarization.

But instead of saying, “Okay, let's double down and reinvest in building communities and our sense of obligation to each other,” for a lot of people their answer is, “Well, if I have the resources, I'm just going to live in my own gated community. So I don't have to worry about those other people.”

And I don't think that's sustainable. So I’m trying to think about how we can become a more racial and diverse society. If we want that multiracial society to succeed, we have to recognize that diversity – in and of itself – isn't the problem. It's inequality and segregation that are really the problems driving the sense that we're competing with other groups for our own livelihoods.

This doesn't have to be the case. And unfortunately, as we see all too well these days, a sense of competition between groups is used as a cudgel to sow division and point fingers at diversity as the problem.

So yeah, we've become all that much more individualistic. Whether it's technology, or social media, there’s a convergence of forces encouraging us to just focus on what we care about and not pay any attention to what other people might care about. There's just lots of forces working against the building of community across division or across difference.

---

WHAT ELSE I’M READING

“Parting Prescription for America” by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s

“As I finish my tenure as Surgeon General, this is my parting prescription, my final wish for all of us: Choose community. Community is a powerful source of life satisfaction and life expectancy. Without community, it was hard to feel whole.”

If you haven’t already, check out Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s “Parting Prescription for America.” It is absolutely wonderful.

I hope that someone in the new administration has even a fraction of Murthy’s vision and passion for community. It’s been amazing to see what he has done at the federal level.

Check it out before someone in the new adminstration decides to take it down!

“Why So Many Working Class Americans Feel Left Out” by Daniel Cox and Sam Pressler

By way of our friends at Connective Tissue, Sam and Daniel’s important and insightful piece resides at a powerful intersection of social forces. There’s a direct line between educational/income status, the loss of community connections, and voting behavior amongst the working class. Take a look!

The Real User Interface: Recovering Our Neighborhoods by Seth Kaplan

Seth Kaplan, author of Fragile Neigbhorhoods, continues to kick ass with his collaboration with Jonathan Haidt and the After Babel Substack. The loss of community life is upstream of the loss of the play-based childhood, and Kaplan offers a compelling disgnosis and prescription for change.

“Top Down Democratic Decline vs. Bottom Up Civic Renewal: Eight Working Hypotheses” by Daniel Stid

Daniel Stid’s writing is new to me, but I’m glad I recently he recently moved "The Art of Association” to Substack so that I could discover him. In this recent piece, he clearly articulates the path towards civil renewal. #3 really resonates with me:

“The renewal of our civic culture, if it occurs, will bubble up from the laboratories of American democracy, i.e., the communities where we live. “

Amen, Daniel!

---

DO YOU HAVE A STORY TO SHARE?

Do you have a great example of how a community engagement process helped a community restitch its social fabric, or go from “Us vs Them” to “We.” Or, an example of how a community engagement process went off the rails? I’m collecting stories, and I’d love to talk to you. Please reach out.