Kontakt und kontaktbasierte Konfliktinterventionen

Contact between members of different groups can help to reduce prejudice between groups, discrimination and violence. For this purpose, members of different groups have to meet on the basis of equal status pursuing cooperatively a common goal. In addition to direct physical contact, factors such as imagined contact, the knowledge about vicarious contact of another ingroup member, and contact by using electronic media have shown to be effective. Contact works because it reduces mutual anxieties, increases empathy for the other group, delivers information about the outgroup and reduces ethnocentric views on the ingroup and its norms as well as its behaviour routines. In order to ensure that contact experiences with single members of an outgroup generalize to prejudice about the whole outgroup, group memberships of the interaction partners have to be salient - if needed after a first phase of person-focused interaction. People, especially those with high prejudice, sometimes try to avoid contact. Negative contact increases prejudice, however, it happens less frequently compared to positive contact. Contact reduces prejudice in low-status groups to a lesser extent than in dominant groups. In addition, contact with members of a dominant group can undermine readiness for political mobilization against injustice in the low-status group. Contact can be promising if used as intervention strategy to reduce prejudice and escalation in conflict between groups: The paper presents examples of applications of contact interventions in schools and in housing policy, as a means to improve mutual understandings of the police and of minority groups, as well as after violent conflicts, such as war and civil war. Contact can help; however, it cannot be seen as a substitute for policies focussing on the reduction of injustice.