El impacto de los cambios en la estructura por edades en las

Contact with outgroup members and its role in the development of outgroup attitudes has always attracted researchers’ attention. The idea of utilising contact in the process of improving intergroup relations was first embodied by Allport (1954) in his so-called contact hypothesis, which proposed that direct interactions with outgroup members may have beneficial effects on attitudes towards the outgroups, providing that the groups in contact have equal status, they are engaged in cooperative behaviour aimed at achieving common goals, and the intergroup contact has institutional support. This early hypothesis was further developed by Pettigrew (1998), who in his intergroup contact theory once again acknowledged face-to-face contact with members of an outgroup to be a powerful means of improving intergroup attitudes. As Dixon, Levine, Reicher and Durrheim (2012) point out in their review, to date the contact hypothesis is still the most important research tradition on the reduction of outgroup prejudice.

Previous research in the framework of the contact theory has traditionally operationalised contact as either the quantity or the quality of face-to-face interactions with outgroup members. The quantity usually refers to the number of outgroup friends and the quality is typically understood as the magnitude of contact positivity. As shown in the review of Pettigrew and Tropp (2008), both the quantity and the positivity of contact have been found—cross- sectionally and experimentally—to result in a range of more positive

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intergroup perceptions, including more favourable outgroup attitudes among majority and minority group members. The positive effect of contact on outgroup attitudes is, however, usually stronger among majority than minority members, possibly due to the fact that minority members are more accustomed to meet majority members and in their case intergroup contact is not as beneficial for outgroup perceptions as for the majority group (Tropp & Pettigrew, 2006). Regardless of this majority-minority difference in the strength of prejudice reduction, contact—not only direct but also indirect such as extended and vicarious contact (for a review, see Vezzali, Hewstone, Capozza, Giovannini, & Wölfer, 2014)—remains among the most often utilised tools in interventions aimed at improving intergroup attitudes (see e.g., Dixon et al., 2012).

Compared to positive contact, the interest of social psychologists in

negative intergroup interactions and their effects on intergroup perceptions,

including outgroup attitudes, has been less frequent. Only recently can it be observed that researchers are switching from examining the role of only positive intergroup encounters to investigating the simultaneous role of both positive and negative contact on intergroup relations. However, this qualitative change in the scope of contact research seems to be very much needed and justified. The few studies which have so far examined the effects of negative contact between different social groups have shown that over and above the effects of positive contact, negative contact also has important implications for intergroup relations.

In his recent study on majority group members, Aberson (2015) found that negative intergroup contact predicts affective and cognitive prejudice towards the outgroup more strongly than positive contact reduces these two types of outgroup negativity. This finding is in line with the earlier results obtained by Barlow, Paolini and colleagues (2012), who found that among majority group members negative contact with different ethnic groups is more strongly linked to negative attitudes towards these outgroups than positive contact is to more favourable attitudes. In a similar vein, Graf and colleagues (2014) found positive contact with different national outgroups, although more frequent than negative contact, to be only weakly associated with more positive attitudes towards these outgroups. Instead, less frequent but negative contact predicted negative outgroup attitudes more consistently, especially when contact negativity was linked to the contact person, rather than the circumstances of the contact situation. Although the aforementioned studies were conducted among Westerners, this same detrimental effect of negative contact on outgroup attitudes has also been found among non-Western participants. In their recent study, Techakesari et al. (2015) showed that negative contact predicted prejudice and negative meta-perceptions about the outgroup more consistently than positive contact not only among White Americans but also among Hong Kong Chinese and Buddhist Thai participants in their national intergroup contexts. A possible explanation of the aforementioned findings could be that negative contact increases the salience

Intergroup attitudes

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of the outgroup and accentuates the differences and boundaries between the ingroup and the outgroup (see Paolini, Harwood, & Rubin, 2010). Such clear ingroup-outgroup distinction, according to SIT (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), fosters more negative attitudes towards the outgroup.

Although the results of the presented studies advocate a more prominent role of negative than positive contact, other studies point out the key role of positive contact in shaping intergroup relations in diverse societies. For example, Mähönen and Jasinskaja-Lahti (2015) showed that among Ingrian Finnish repatriates negative contact longitudinally predicted more negative attitudes towards the majority group, and this occurred through stronger perceptions of intergroup threats. However, positive contact predicted more positive attitudes towards the majority and outgroup immigrants, and this effect occurred through the perception of more intergroup gains. Thus, what seems to be especially important in contact research is to study negative and positive contact simultaneously. Accordingly, this study focuses on

both positive and negative contact experienced by minority group members during interactions with members of the national majority group and acknowledges the simultaneous presence of these two types of contact and their effects on intergroup attitudes. Moreover, as presented below, the study takes one step further and shows that the role of contact does not limit itself to predicting attitudes towards only the primary outgroup but it also extends its effects to secondary outgroups.