The Influence of Status on the Relationship between Intergroup Contact, Threat, and Prejudice in the Context of a Nation-building Intervention in Malaysia

Abstract

We assessed whether intergroup contact at a nation-building intervention in Malaysia improved participants’ perceptions of threat and outgroup evaluations and whether this process was conceptually moderated by group status in a three-group setting. We found evidence of a strong relationship between post-intervention contact and post-intervention outgroup evaluations in all groups and evidence of indirect effects of post-intervention contact on outgroup evaluations by symbolic threat for the minority groups rating the majority group. We found that in the context of institutional inequalities, integrated threat theory may not be sufficiently complex to uncover the processes that underlie the contact–attitude link for majority groups rating minority groups. Further, we found indirect effects of post-intervention contact on outgroup evaluations via realistic threat for interminority group ratings. Thus, we elucidate some of the different mechanisms that underlie the intergroup perceptions of majority and minority group members.