Colin Tredoux
Biographic Data
| ID | 216016 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Colin Tredoux |
| GIVEN NAMES | Colin |
| FAMILY NAME | Tredoux |
| SIGNATURE | TREDOUX C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cape Town |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9653-786X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 58 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 595 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 57 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Crossing the line’
Informal patterns of spatial division often persist in historically divided societies where segregation has been officially dismantled. This paper presents a theoretical model to explain why, focusing on the desegregation–resegregation dynamic. The Boundary Transgression Model highlights two interconnected pathways - social psychological and human geographic - that shape intergroup relations under conditions of change, fostering the re-emergence …
Estimation of eyewitness error rates in fair and biased lineups
OBJECTIVE: The risk of mistaken identification for innocent suspects in lineups can be estimated by correcting the overall error rate by the number of people in the lineup. We compared this nominal size correction to a new effective size correction, which adjusts the error rate for the number of plausible lineup members. HYPOTHESES: We hypothesized that (a) increasing lineup bias would increase misidentifications of a designated innocent suspect;…
Are South African children on track for early learning? Findings from the South African Thrive By Five Index 2021 Survey
We report on a national South African multistage cluster sampling survey of early development in 5,222 children aged 50-59 months enrolled in preschool programmes. Children were assessed on the Early Learning Outcomes Measure (ELOM 4&5), the ELOM Social-Emotional Rating Scale, and linear growth (height-for-age), in the last quarter of 2021. ELOM 4&5 is standardised for South Africa and measures development in five domains: Gross Motor, and Fine M…
Ironies of proximity
Research on the dynamics of neighbourhood desegregation and diversity has identified a paradox. On the one hand, such processes may engender positive intergroup contact experiences, improving intergroup attitudes and relations. On the other hand, they may have the opposite effect, exacerbating negative intergroup relations and generating new forms of avoidance and exclusion. The present research explored one aspect of this paradox. Building on a …
Social contact, own-group recognition bias and visual attention to faces
The own-group recognition bias (OGRB) has been consistently linked to social contact in theoretical accounts. Indeed, social contact is assumed by most authors to underlie the perceptual expertise of out-groups' faces. However, little is known empirically about how it might impact face-processing strategies. We tested the proposition that social interaction would improve the face recognition performance of another group by modulating visual strat…
Automatic recognition, elimination strategy and familiarity feeling
Cooperating with the outgroup rather than the ingroup
We describe a team game that implements a social dilemma between ingroup cooperation and defection by self-enriching outgroup exchange. We test hypotheses derived from social identity theory about how group status and belief about individual mobility and group mobility affect exchange behavior. We ran 60 experimental team games between rich and poor groups under one of four experiment conditions in a fully crossed design, manipulating the presenc…
Composite communication
When looking for a crime suspect, the police may ask an eyewitness to construct a visual likeness (‘facial composite’) of the perpetrator, to be distributed to the public via newspaper articles, television programmes, or social media. The dissemination of facial composites can have a major impact on police investigations. It often results in a deluge of tips and could potentially influence the memory of other eyewitnesses in the case. In this art…
Adolescents’ responses to the distress of others
Attachment theory provides an informative theoretical description of how prosocial behaviors in response to the distress of others may be socialized. This study aimed to investigate associations between attachment security to mothers, fathers, closest grandparents and peers, and young adolescents’ (a) prosocial responses to others’ distress and (b) global prosocial behaviors, via the mediation of empathic concern. Cross-sectional survey data were…
Parallel lives
Although intergroup contact can reduce prejudice, opportunities to experience such contact are often constrained by systems of segregation. Work on this problem has focused on divisions entrenched within institutions of residence, education, and employment. Our research employed a complementary approach, which treated segregation as the outcome of individuals' movements over time within everyday life spaces. Taking as a case study Catholics' and …
How good are we at detecting deception? A review of current techniques and theories
The task of discerning truth from untruth has long interested psychologists; however, methods for doing so accurately remain elusive. In this article, we provide an overview and evaluation of methods of detecting deception used in the laboratory and the field. We identify and discuss three broad approaches to detecting deception: measurement of non-verbal behaviour, verbal interview methods, and statement evaluation by humans and computers. Part …
Networks of (Dis)connection
Long-standing tensions between Protestant and Catholic communities in Northern Ireland have led to high levels of segregation. This article explores the spaces within which residents of north Belfast move within everyday life and the extent to which these are influenced by segregation. We focus in particular on the role that interconnecting tertiary streets have on patterns of mobility. We adapt Grannis’s (1998) concept to define T-communities fr…
Subjective awareness scale length influences the prevalence, not the presence, of graded conscious states
Center-based early childhood care and education program quality
Divide and Rule, Unite and Resist
Racial segregation encourages members of historically advantaged groups to form negative intergroup attitudes, which then motivate practices of discrimination that sustain inequality and disadvantage. By implication, interventions designed to increase intergroup contact have been proposed as a means of reducing dominant group prejudices and promoting social change. In this article, we highlight another mechanism through which segregation shapes i…
A quasi-experimental comparison of spreadsheet- and classroom-based statistics tutorials
This article reports an evaluation of a set of eight spreadsheet-based tutorials developed for the statistics portion of an undergraduate psychology research methods course. The evaluation involved a quasi-experimental comparison of spreadsheet-based and traditional classroom teaching methods in a course that gave equal teaching time to both solutions, and took the unique approach of investigating both outcomes-based and attitudinal measures in t…
Interventions to reduce prejudice and enhance inclusion and respect for ethnic differences in early childhood
Seeing is Believing’
This experiment investigated the effects of composite construction and viewing on later identification recognition accuracy. A total of 122 participants were exposed to a composite target for five seconds and then randomly assigned to one of three groups: control, view, or construction. Participants in the construction group were required to produce a composite of the original target. Participants in the view group were exposed to a composite cre…
Red, Green, Blue, Red, Argh! A Missing Shift in Processing
The transfer-inappropriate processing shift is one explanation for the verbal overshadowing effect: a phenomenon that prevents accurate face recognition following a verbal description of that same face. Rather than examining a shift from configural to featural processing, this experiment investigated whether a shift from automatic to controlled processing could have similar deleterious effects on facial recognition. Automatic, and controlled, pro…
Historical Trends in South African Race Attitudes
This article presents an historical survey of intergroup attitudes in South Africa, tracing social distance scores back to 1934 and semantic differential scores back to 1975. We compare the attitudes of different race groups towards each other over time by standardizing the scores from different historical periods on a common metric. This enables us to pursue two lines of investigation: (1) to chart the effect that racial classification has had o…
Predicting support for racial transformation policies
Policies and programs designed to challenge the effects of racial discrimination (such as affirmative action) are hotly contested. Factors which have been proposed to explain opposition to these policies include racial prejudice, group threat and self-interest, and perceptions of intergroup justice. We report the results of two random national telephone surveys which tested a theoretically based model of the predictors of policy support in post-a…
“Let Them Eat Harmony”
Research on intergroup prejudice has generally adopted a model of social change that is based around the psychological rehabilitation of members of advantaged groups in order to foster intergroup harmony. Recent studies of prejudice-reduction interventions among members of disadvantaged groups, however, have complicated psychologists’ understanding of the consequences of inducing harmonious relations in historically unequal societies. Interventio…
Understanding the Seating Patterns in a Residence-Dining Hall
Using a combination of observational and questionnaire methods, this longitudinal study investigated interracial contact in a university residence dining hall, focusing on the organization of seating patterns. The results showed that informal division by race was extensive, with indices of interaction (xPy*) and evenness (D) indicating the existence of high levels of racial segregation. Moreover, although they had ample opportunities for regular …
Mediators of the Contact-Prejudice Relation among South African Students on Four University Campuses
Intergroup contact is undoubtedly associated with lower levels of self-reported prejudice. In some situations, however, contact may have little or no association with prejudice. Studies conducted in apartheid South Africa rarely found such an association. Apartheid was overturned in 1994, but there have been few explicit tests of the relationship since then. The present study explored the relation between contact and prejudice in a large (N= 2,59…
The Changing Landscape of Intergroup Relations in South Africa
Apartheid laws and policies served to create a hierarchy of four apparently distinct races in South Africa, which were systematically segregated from each other and provided with unequal access to material resources. The apartheid state was dissolved in 1994, and a new, democratic government installed, under relatively peaceful conditions. This special issue of the journal will examine the effects of this major social and political transformation…
Beyond the Optimal Contact Strategy
The contact hypothesis proposes that interaction between members of different groups reduces intergroup prejudice if--and only if--certain optimal conditions are present. For over 50 years, research using this framework has explored the boundary conditions for ideal contact and has guided interventions to promote desegregation. Although supporting the contact hypothesis in principle, the authors critique some research practices that have come to …
A Paradox of Integration? Interracial Contact, Prejudice Reduction, and Perceptions of Racial Discrimination
A random digit dialing survey (N = 596) investigated the relationship between quantity and quality of interracial contact and Black South Africans’ perceptions of racial discrimination in postapartheid society. Results showed that harmonious contact was associated with lower levels of perceived collective discrimination, an effect that was mediated by racial attitudes and personal experiences of racial discrimination. The implications of the surv…
Challenging the Stubborn Core of Opposition to Equality
A Random Digit Dialing survey (n = 794) examined the interracial contact experiences and racial attitudes of White South Africans. The survey measured racial attitudes not only in terms of individuals' prejudice, but also in terms of their perceptions of group threat, perceived injustice, and support for various government policies designed to rectify the legacy of apartheid. The results indicated that the frequency and quality of interracial con…
Eating together apart
Research on segregation has tended to focus on relations located at a macro‐spatial level of analysis and unfolding in contexts where boundaries to interaction are formally established. This research, by contrast, investigated segregation as a micro‐ecological process by observing patterns of seating in a multi‐ethnic cafeteria. A total of 3114 seating positions were coded over a 2‐week period and the resulting data were analysed using both adapt…
Parallel lives
Although intergroup contact can reduce prejudice, opportunities to experience such contact are often constrained by systems of segregation. Work on this problem has focused on divisions entrenched within institutions of residence, education, and employment. Our research employed a complementary approach, which treated segregation as the outcome of individuals' movements over time within everyday life spaces. Taking as a case study Catholics' and …
Prejudice and Social Contact in South Africa
In this article the relationship between intergroup contact and racial prejudice in formerly segregated schools in Cape Town, South Africa, is investigated. A total of 1 119 black African, coloured, Afrikaans-speaking and English-speaking white learners were surveyed, using three measures of intergroup prejudice, a self-report intergroup contact measure and a racial identification scale. In general, quality of contact with individuals of other ra…
Preserving Spatial and Temporal Dimensions in Observational Data of Segregation
Recent approaches to the study of intergroup contact have emphasised the need for naturalistic studies and the importance of paying attention to the spatiality of contact. In this article it is argued that it is important to preserve both spatiality and temporality when studying inter-group contact in naturalistic settings. This is not easy to do with existing observational methods, and a novel approach is proposed. Photographs are taken of a pub…
Patterns of Racial Segregation in University Residence Dining-Halls
Social psychologists have long been interested in the effects of ‘contact’ between racial groups. The conditions under which this contact can manifest have usually been experimentally manipulated in order to determine optimal combinations. A shortcoming of this approach is that it constructs contact situations that are unnatural and contrived. Some researchers have proposed an approach that examines contact as a natural phenomenon (Dixon & Durrhe…
Mapping the Multiple Contexts of Racial Isolation
This article explores the idea that racial segregation is a process operating across a range of scales of social life. The focus is upon the way segregation unfolds and is (re)produced at what can be termed the `micro-ecological' scale—that is, in the everyday, interpersonal interactions between people in informal settings. To illustrate this argument, a case study is presented of relations in the night-time economy of Long Street, Cape Town. It …
Divide and Rule, Unite and Resist
Racial segregation encourages members of historically advantaged groups to form negative intergroup attitudes, which then motivate practices of discrimination that sustain inequality and disadvantage. By implication, interventions designed to increase intergroup contact have been proposed as a means of reducing dominant group prejudices and promoting social change. In this article, we highlight another mechanism through which segregation shapes i…
Improving Intergroup Relations
Table of Contents. 1. Editor's Introduction: Ulrich Wagner (Philipps-University Marburg), Linda R. Tropp (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Gillian Finchilescu (University of the Witwatersrand), and Colin Tredoux (University of Cape Town). 2. Thomas F. Pettigrew: Building on the Scholar-Activist Tradition in Social Psychology: Frances Cherry (Carleton University). Part I: Exploring the Causes of Prejudice and Discrimination:. 3. From Lewin a…
Mediators of the Contact-Prejudice Relation among South African Students on Four University Campuses
Intergroup contact is undoubtedly associated with lower levels of self-reported prejudice. In some situations, however, contact may have little or no association with prejudice. Studies conducted in apartheid South Africa rarely found such an association. Apartheid was overturned in 1994, but there have been few explicit tests of the relationship since then. The present study explored the relation between contact and prejudice in a large (N= 2,59…
The Changing Landscape of Intergroup Relations in South Africa
Apartheid laws and policies served to create a hierarchy of four apparently distinct races in South Africa, which were systematically segregated from each other and provided with unequal access to material resources. The apartheid state was dissolved in 1994, and a new, democratic government installed, under relatively peaceful conditions. This special issue of the journal will examine the effects of this major social and political transformation…
Predicting support for racial transformation policies
Policies and programs designed to challenge the effects of racial discrimination (such as affirmative action) are hotly contested. Factors which have been proposed to explain opposition to these policies include racial prejudice, group threat and self-interest, and perceptions of intergroup justice. We report the results of two random national telephone surveys which tested a theoretically based model of the predictors of policy support in post-a…
On the Micro-Ecology of Racial Division
This article provides a general background to this special focus section of the journal on ‘racial interaction and isolation in everyday life’. It reviews both the geographic literature on segregation and the psychological literature on the contact hypothesis, and calls for more research on how, when and why racial isolation manifests at a micro-ecological level; that is, the level at which individuals actually encounter one another in situations…
The Spaces between Us
In many contemporary societies, the potential benefits of racial integration are undermined by de facto or informal segregation. The present research focuses on this phenomenon, and its role in (re)producing group boundaries, particularly those realized spatially. A multimethod approach was employed. Naturalistic observational techniques were used to examine the seating patterns of 26 undergraduate tutorial groups across a full academic year. Res…
Historical Trends in South African Race Attitudes
This article presents an historical survey of intergroup attitudes in South Africa, tracing social distance scores back to 1934 and semantic differential scores back to 1975. We compare the attitudes of different race groups towards each other over time by standardizing the scores from different historical periods on a common metric. This enables us to pursue two lines of investigation: (1) to chart the effect that racial classification has had o…
Accounting for Lack of Interracial Mixing Amongst South African University Students
The persistence of informal segregation in post-apartheid South Africa is now well documented. As the articles in this journal issue attest, this segregation is rife in many public spaces, including university campuses. This article explores the reasons to which students attribute the lack of interracial mixing at their institutions. Students from four universities were surveyed using an internet-based questionnaire. The final sample consisted of…
A field study of own-race bias in South Africa and England
In shopping centers in South Africa and England, Black and White people were approached by either a Black or a White confederate. Later they were asked to identify the confederate from both a sequential lineup, where photographs are seen one at a time, and a forced-choice recognition test, where photographs are seen simultaneously. In both countries and with both identification tasks the confederates were better recognized by people of their own …
The Contact Hypothesis and Intergroup Relations 50 Years on
This article introduces the special issue on intergroup contact. We remind readers of the visit to South Africa, 50 years ago, of Gordon Allport and his associate, Thomas Pettigrew, and review work on one of Allport's central contributions to social psychology, the ‘contact hypothesis’. This hypothesis proposes that contact between groups will, under the right conditions, reduce prejudice and promote better intergroup relations. Although there is…
Social Identity Theory and the Authoritarian Personality Theory in South Africa
Social identity theory assumes that individuals and collectives apply identity management strategies in order to cope with threatened social identities. It is argued here that an integration of social identity theory and the authoritarian personality theory may help to investigate identity management strategies for minority and majority groups. It was intended to investigate predictors of identity management strategies applied by students at the …
Understanding the Seating Patterns in a Residence-Dining Hall
Using a combination of observational and questionnaire methods, this longitudinal study investigated interracial contact in a university residence dining hall, focusing on the organization of seating patterns. The results showed that informal division by race was extensive, with indices of interaction (xPy*) and evenness (D) indicating the existence of high levels of racial segregation. Moreover, although they had ample opportunities for regular …
Inherent and Organisational Stress in the Saps
Police work has been identified as a stressful occupation. Considered in the context of the South African (SA) situation, the paucity of research on the topic is cause for concern. This paper reports a preliminary exploration of stress in the South African Police Service (SAPS). Ninety-one SAPS members in the Cape Peninsula completed a questionnaire consisting of (i) Spielberger's 60-item Police Stress Survey (Spielberger, Westbury, Grier & Green…
Social contact, own-group recognition bias and visual attention to faces
The own-group recognition bias (OGRB) has been consistently linked to social contact in theoretical accounts. Indeed, social contact is assumed by most authors to underlie the perceptual expertise of out-groups' faces. However, little is known empirically about how it might impact face-processing strategies. We tested the proposition that social interaction would improve the face recognition performance of another group by modulating visual strat…
Networks of (Dis)connection
Long-standing tensions between Protestant and Catholic communities in Northern Ireland have led to high levels of segregation. This article explores the spaces within which residents of north Belfast move within everyday life and the extent to which these are influenced by segregation. We focus in particular on the role that interconnecting tertiary streets have on patterns of mobility. We adapt Grannis’s (1998) concept to define T-communities fr…
The Death Penalty in the Cape Provincial Division
This article presents the data that we collected in four tables. These are explained in the first section below. The second part of the article \nexamines three issues that emerge from the data. First, we note the disparity in the use of the death penalty by individual judges and argue that, in part at least, this must be attributed to the personal disposition of judges. Then we examine the figures relating to appeal procedures and conclude that …
Contact and the Alteration of Racial Attitudes in South Africa
Two generations of social psychologists have described a remarkably consistent pattern of racial attitudes in South Africa. Whites exhibit determinedly negative attitudes towards other ‘race’ groups (Afrikaans speakers more so than English speakers), and blacks, on the other hand, show a much lower degree of ethnocentrism, especially toward English-speaking whites. This ‘lop-sided colour bar’ is a consistent finding, both historically and across …
Aids Knowledge and Attitudes towards Homosexuals of Black First-Year University Students
Using an anonymous structured questionnaire to obtain baseline data on knowledge and attitudes of first-year black university students about the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and their attitudes towards homosexuals during 1990, 1991, and 1992 (ns = 1902, 2113, and 1558), the following information was obtained. Students' knowledge of AIDS was inadequate and misconceptions about AIDS transmission prevalent as were prejudiced and exclusi…
Lying as a Factor in Research on Sexuality
This study investigated whether lying was a factor in research on sexuality among 1902 black South African first-year students. Consenting students completed structured questionnaires comprising 3 subject areas of biographical/career, sexuality, and political violence, each followed by an attitude scale. Subjects were more comfortable and truthful while completing the biographical/career and sociopolitical violence scales than the sexuality scale
Using the Bender Gestalt in South Africa
In this study the authors investigated the use of the Bender Gestalt test within the South African context by evaluating the applicability of the existing norms (Koppitz) and by exploring how the variables age, sex, educational level, and geographical area affect test performance in Zulu-speaking school children. Zulu-speaking subjects ( N = 882) ranging in age from 6–18 years, completed the test. The test was administered in group form and indep…
Conceptions of legitimacy as a variable mediating the relationship between relative deprivation and militancy
The role of relative deprivation and authoritarianism in predicting militancy and the potential for political protest form the backdrop of this study. The influence of conceptions of regime legitimacy as a variable mediating this relationship was investigated by means of a factorial design, employing a white student sample ( N = 135). Conceptions of legitimacy were manipulated by dividing the sample into left- and right-wing subsamples. The left-…
InterNet
Decalage Effects for Heating and Cooling
This study investigated a horizontal décalage phenomenon in the development of children's knowledge about heating and cooling. Décalage phenomena have posed a problem to orthodox Piagetian theory and have reinforced the objection by some domain-specific theorists to the central Piagetian notion of overarching structures. The aim of this study was to contribute to this debate by empirical observation of décalage phenomena. A total of 270 children …
Early, late and non-participants in sexual intercourse
Inherent and Organisational Stress in the Saps
Police work has been identified as a stressful occupation. Considered in the context of the South African (SA) situation, the paucity of research on the topic is cause for concern. This paper reports a preliminary exploration of stress in the South African Police Service (SAPS). Ninety-one SAPS members in the Cape Peninsula completed a questionnaire consisting of (i) Spielberger's 60-item Police Stress Survey (Spielberger, Westbury, Grier & Green…
A field study of own-race bias in South Africa and England
A field study of own-race bias in South Africa and England
In shopping centers in South Africa and England, Black and White people were approached by either a Black or a White confederate. Later they were asked to identify the confederate from both a sequential lineup, where photographs are seen one at a time, and a forced-choice recognition test, where photographs are seen simultaneously. In both countries and with both identification tasks the confederates were better recognized by people of their own …
Social Identity Theory and the Authoritarian Personality Theory in South Africa
Social identity theory assumes that individuals and collectives apply identity management strategies in order to cope with threatened social identities. It is argued here that an integration of social identity theory and the authoritarian personality theory may help to investigate identity management strategies for minority and majority groups. It was intended to investigate predictors of identity management strategies applied by students at the …
Eating together apart
Research on segregation has tended to focus on relations located at a macro‐spatial level of analysis and unfolding in contexts where boundaries to interaction are formally established. This research, by contrast, investigated segregation as a micro‐ecological process by observing patterns of seating in a multi‐ethnic cafeteria. A total of 3114 seating positions were coded over a 2‐week period and the resulting data were analysed using both adapt…
Preserving Spatial and Temporal Dimensions in Observational Data of Segregation
Recent approaches to the study of intergroup contact have emphasised the need for naturalistic studies and the importance of paying attention to the spatiality of contact. In this article it is argued that it is important to preserve both spatiality and temporality when studying inter-group contact in naturalistic settings. This is not easy to do with existing observational methods, and a novel approach is proposed. Photographs are taken of a pub…
On the Micro-Ecology of Racial Division
This article provides a general background to this special focus section of the journal on ‘racial interaction and isolation in everyday life’. It reviews both the geographic literature on segregation and the psychological literature on the contact hypothesis, and calls for more research on how, when and why racial isolation manifests at a micro-ecological level; that is, the level at which individuals actually encounter one another in situations…
Prejudice and Social Contact in South Africa
In this article the relationship between intergroup contact and racial prejudice in formerly segregated schools in Cape Town, South Africa, is investigated. A total of 1 119 black African, coloured, Afrikaans-speaking and English-speaking white learners were surveyed, using three measures of intergroup prejudice, a self-report intergroup contact measure and a racial identification scale. In general, quality of contact with individuals of other ra…
Patterns of Racial Segregation in University Residence Dining-Halls
Social psychologists have long been interested in the effects of ‘contact’ between racial groups. The conditions under which this contact can manifest have usually been experimentally manipulated in order to determine optimal combinations. A shortcoming of this approach is that it constructs contact situations that are unnatural and contrived. Some researchers have proposed an approach that examines contact as a natural phenomenon (Dixon & Durrhe…
Beyond the Optimal Contact Strategy
The contact hypothesis proposes that interaction between members of different groups reduces intergroup prejudice if--and only if--certain optimal conditions are present. For over 50 years, research using this framework has explored the boundary conditions for ideal contact and has guided interventions to promote desegregation. Although supporting the contact hypothesis in principle, the authors critique some research practices that have come to …
Sequential vs. Simultaneous Lineups
A considerable amount of empirical research has been conducted on ways to improve the eyewitness identification process, with emphasis on the use of lineups. Public policy changes are currently underway with respect to lineup procedures: Sequential lineups are being recommended to police as the best practice. This may be premature because the conditions under which sequential lineups are superior to simultaneous lineups are not well understood gi…
Off-Space and on the Sidelines
Marx and Feltham-King offer an insightful critique of the special focus section of the South African Journal of Psychology (SAJP) (volume 35 number 3 2005) on ‘racial’ contact and isolation in everyday life. They note several methodological limitations of the studies presented and point to some potential misinterpretations of the overall message. In this response, we clarify and defend the rationale of the special focus section and acknowledge it…
Intergroup Contact and Attitudes Toward the Principle and Practice of Racial Equality
Research on racial attitudes indicates that acceptance of the principle of racial equality is frequently offset by opposition to policies designed to eliminate injustice. At the same time, research on the contact hypothesis indicates that positive interaction between groups erodes various kinds of prejudiced attitudes. Integrating these two traditions of research, this study examined whether or not interracial contact reduces the principle-implem…
The Contact Hypothesis and Intergroup Relations 50 Years on
This article introduces the special issue on intergroup contact. We remind readers of the visit to South Africa, 50 years ago, of Gordon Allport and his associate, Thomas Pettigrew, and review work on one of Allport's central contributions to social psychology, the ‘contact hypothesis’. This hypothesis proposes that contact between groups will, under the right conditions, reduce prejudice and promote better intergroup relations. Although there is…
Accounting for Lack of Interracial Mixing Amongst South African University Students
The persistence of informal segregation in post-apartheid South Africa is now well documented. As the articles in this journal issue attest, this segregation is rife in many public spaces, including university campuses. This article explores the reasons to which students attribute the lack of interracial mixing at their institutions. Students from four universities were surveyed using an internet-based questionnaire. The final sample consisted of…
Predicting Eyewitness Identification Accuracy with Mock Witness Measures of Lineup Fairness
After viewing a staged crime under varying levels of encoding optimality, eyewitnesses made identifications from lineups that were either presented to them as a simultaneous line of people, or individually, in sequence. Lineups did not contain the perpetrator of the staged crime, and were purposefully constructed to have varying levels of bias. There was an interaction between encoding optimality and type of lineup, with sequential-presentation l…
Psychology (51 works) · Social Psychology (39 works) · Sociology (28 works) · Political science (22 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (17 works) · Gender Studies (15 works) · Social Psychology (14 works) · Geography (13 works) · Cognitive psychology (12 works) · Law (12 works)