Contact theory and the concept of prejudice: Metaphysical and moral explorations and an epistemological question

A brief historical exploration of the concept of prejudice

In a reflective paper, Samelson (1978) attempted to outline the historical conditions that led to what he described as a “fairly abrupt reversal in the definition of the ‘race problem’ by psychologists” (p. 265). Prior to the study of intergroup prejudice, “race psychology” laboured to show—mainly through intelligence tests—that Black people were inferior to White people (Samelson, 1978). Although “race psychology” was still fashionable in the 1920s, criticism from outside and within psychology emerged at this time. Soon afterwards, a related issue began to receive the attention of psychologists—“instead of trying to determine the objective mental differences between non-white and white, as well as among the white races, psychologists became interested in the subjective side, the attitudes of the ‘racial’ groups toward each other” (Samelson, 1978, p. 268).

Samelson (1978) went some way in attempting to understand what sparked this change in focus, and in so doing he rejected the view that the change was “a beautiful example of the progress of empirical science; objective data triumph over prejudice and speculation” (p. 270). He was also doubtful that the shift from “race psychology” to prejudice studies could be characterized in the then popular Kuhnian view of “paradigm shifts.” For Samelson, “superimposing Kuhn’s labels … only appears to give an explanation and adds little to our understanding of the actual historical processes and its implications” (p. 270). Samelson argues that “from the very beginning, the problem was not just one of pure or idle scientific curiosity and the search for abstract truth” (p. 270). He thus saw a correspondence between “race psychology” and “political issues of slavery, colonialism, and emancipation” (p. 270). He goes on to identify and outline external factors (e.g., the Immigration Restriction Law of 1924) that led to the change in focus, and how the shift took place within psychology. For our purposes, I will focus here specifically on the scholarly treatment of the concept of prejudice leading up to Allport’s take on the concept.

Sociologists took the lead in investigating “race” relations and prejudice in the American South (e.g., Du Bois, 1901; Ellis, 1915; Thomas, 1904). These early accounts seem to agree that prejudice was an emotive and cognitive preference for individuals and groups similar to oneself; that such preference could be altered through interracial/interethnic contact almost without much difficulty, provided that ingroup favouritism (and outgroup marginalization) was not supported and entrenched socially, politically, religiously, economically, and emotionally. In other words, prejudice was seen as a somewhat inherently human trait, the manifestation and eradication of which is found in the structure of relations and emotions between social groups around the world. An explicitly psychological and experimental take on prejudice began with Thurstone’s (1928) study in which he asked undergraduate students to indicate, on a “scale of nationality preferences,” which nationalities they preferred to associate with. Thurstone felt that such preferences were “saturated with prejudice and bias, with religious affiliations, and with wide differences in knowledge and familiarity” (p. 406). A similar study was conducted by Bogardus (1928) in what can be described as a mixed methods study involving qualitative interviews and a psychometric social distance scale. Bogardus defined racial prejudice as “members of each race possess attitudes, friendly and antipathetic, toward the members of all other races of whom they have ever heard” (p. 14). In a different study, Bogardus (1925) focused on the concept of “social distance,” which he defined as “the grades and degrees of understanding and intimacy which characterize pre-social and social relations generally” (p. 216). The relation in Bogardus’ work between racial prejudice and social distance manifests here. That is, social distance and intimacy are a function of antipathetic and friendly attitudes toward members of other racial groups.

In what can be perceived as a replication of Thurstone’s (1928) study, Guilford (1931) also administered a psychometric scale investigating the “racial preferences of a thousand American university students.” Samelson (1978) points out that Guilford’s study had a secondary purpose—to argue that even though America at the time was trying to curb immigration, that in a democracy the “preferences of the people [American citizens] themselves should have something to say in determining the source of their newest countrymen” (as cited in Samelson, 1978, p. 268). What one sees in these early psychological studies is an inclination toward psychometric scales as measurements of racial prejudices. Even so, there is also a sense that these studies (especially Bogardus’ work) attempted to retain the socio-political dimension of racial prejudice. Soon after this, however, the conception and study of racial prejudice and attitudes in general appears to have increasingly been psychologized, with its socio-political aspects receiving less attention (see Katz & Allport, 1931; Katz & Braly, 1933, 1935). Nonetheless, Samelson (1978) argued that “the social psychology of race prejudice was growing. It became one of the cornerstones of the developing discipline of empirical social psychology, giving some focus to attitude research” (p. 269).

Samelson (1978) also pointed out that “race prejudice research” at this time also came under the influence of psychoanalytic thought through the Frustration-Aggression Theory (Dollard, Miller, Doob, Mowrer, & Sears, 1944) and The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950). In the tradition of the former work, “race prejudice” was understood as the projection of frustration (caused by cultural restrictions and daily life limitations) as hostility toward the outgroup. “Race prejudice is mysterious because no real occasion is required for its expression …. On the contrary there are deflected to the object against which one is prejudiced the hostilities that should be directed toward nearer and dearer persons” (Dollard, 1937, p. 445). The latter work was dedicated to answering the question, “what is there in the psychology of the individual that renders him ‘prejudiced’ or ‘un-prejudiced’” (Horkheimer & Flowerman, 1950, p. vi). The Authoritarian Personality argued for a “close correlation between a number of deep-rooted personality traits, and overt prejudice” (Horkheimer & Flowerman, 1950, p. vi). This meant that prejudice was conceived primarily as residing in individual personality. Importantly though, the social context was still somewhat recognized as salient in the actual expression of prejudice. By this time, prejudice seems to have secured its place, in the minds of social scientists, as the source of intergroup strife. Leading up to the Second World War, in the USA racism was mostly conceived as the “Colour Problem” or the “Negro Problem,” which were cast as and reduced to, issues of prejudice—“race prejudice” more specifically. The Second World War changed this, as it united “the country in the fight against a powerful enemy who proclaimed racial superiority as one of the main sources of his strength” (Samelson, 1978, p. 273). Post Second World War “there existed hundreds of organisations dedicated to the promotion of racial tolerance and intergroup harmony” (p. 273). “Race prejudice” remained the source of intergroup strife, and what now appeared was a research enterprise dedicated to eradicating it. As Samelson (1978) points out, the Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science dedicated an entire issue in its 1946 publication to the topic “Controlling Group Prejudice.” It is this background context, and more that has not been covered here, out of which Gordon Allport’s (1954) text The Nature of Prejudice was conceived. Katz (1991) noted that Allport’s work must be understood as influenced by the “era of the ‘human relations’ approach to intergroup conflict” (p. 126) in which it was “believed that ethnic antagonisms were fed primarily by prejudice” (p. 126). This belief, it seems, has not shifted in the tradition of Contact Theory as will be shown below.

Contact Theory: A theory of prejudice and not of interracial/interethnic relations

It has already been suggested that the basic claim of Allport’s Contact Hypothesis—that prejudice is the source of intergroup strife—remains intact in Contact Theory. In this section, I endeavour to show that this is indeed the case, and in so doing argue that Contact Theory is fundamentally a prejudice and not an interracial relations/interethnic theory. In Contact Theory, the study of prejudice has theoretical primacy; interracial/interethnic contact is used as an intervention strategy to eliminate interracial prejudice, and hence improve conflictual interracial/interethnic relations. In other words, Allport’s Contact Hypothesis and the present formulation of Contact Theory are concerned with prejudice and not (some of) the factors that influence the nature and structure of relations between different social groups. There are serious implications that arise from this distinction which I point out below, but for now I will focus on arguing that Contact Theory is concerned with prejudice.

The above view is supported by the observation that in its history, Contact Theory was not concerned with, for example, the unfolding of interracial/interethnic relations in their natural settings, where such relations are open to multiple causal factors, processes, and structures. This, it seems to me, is as a result of the practice of “explanatory reductionism”—the posing of prejudice as the single causal factor to explain conflictual interracial/interethnic relations. A counter argument may point out that social psychology has never been under the illusion that prejudice alone offers a complete account of interracial/interethnic strife, but that it is merely a piece in the puzzle (see Pettigrew, 1998). This point is easily conceded. However, in practice one has to wonder why is it then that over half a century of research has laboured almost exclusively on prejudice. I have found no research in this field of study that attempts to study factors and structures other than prejudice and those attitudes closely related thereto, such as stereotypes and affect. This is notwithstanding the acknowledgement that other factors exist and influence intergroup relations (see Pettigrew, 1998). Two illustrations will be sufficient, then, to show that Contact Theory is actually a prejudice theory. First, while acknowledging the complexity of human relations, Allport held that

The present volume does not pretend to deal with the science of human relations as a whole. It aims merely to clarify one underlying issue—the nature of prejudice. But this issue is basic, for without knowledge of the roots of hostility we cannot hope to employ our intelligence effectively in controlling its destructiveness. (1954, p. xvii)

Allport went on to conclude further, in a statement that inaugurated the Contact Hypothesis, that

Prejudice (unless deeply rooted in the character structure of the individual) may be reduced by equal status contact between majority and minority groups in the pursuit of common goals. The effect is greatly enhanced if this contact is sanctioned by institutional support (i.e., by law, custom or local atmosphere), and provided it is of a sort that leads to the perception of common interests and a common humanity between members of the two groups. (1954, p. 281)

Here, Allport emphasizes more than anything else the salience of prejudice as the root of hostility in the first instance, and in the second instance he conceives an intervention—interracial/interethnic contact of a special configuration—to reduce prejudice. In both instances, Allport is rearticulating views that we encountered in the previous section. The Contact Hypothesis has been extensively developed and refined since Allport’s time (see Dovidio, Glick, & Rudman, 2005; Pettigrew, 1986, 1998; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006, 2008, 2011). For our purpose, and as a second illustration, we will highlight the meta-analytical test of Contact Theory conducted by Pettigrew and Tropp (2006, 2008). In this work, the authors offer what they call a “contact-prejudice model,” which is shown in Figure 1 below. It is revealing that the model is similar, in its basic idea, to the Contact Hypothesis statement offered by Allport (1954) above. The contact-prejudice model (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2008) is offered as a psychological explanatory mechanism for the relation between intergroup contact and prejudice.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Contact-prejudice mediation model (from Pettigrew & Tropp, 2008, p. 928). Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This model is concerned with when (situational specifications) and how (psychological processes) intergroup contact leads to effects that ultimately reduce prejudice. Allport’s conditions and two additional factors (intimate contact and accentuated group membership) moderate the contact-prejudice relationship, thus attending to when interracial/interethnic contact leads to positive outcomes (Pettigrew, Tropp, Wagner, & Christ, 2011). On the issue of how contact reduces prejudice, it turns out that knowledge of the “other” plays a minor role, thus giving emotional processes premium of place. Under optimal situational specifications, interracial/interethnic contact reduces anxiety and related negative emotions (e.g., fear, anger, threat). In the absence of these negative emotions, prejudice diminishes, and positive emotions such as empathy and perspective-taking in favour of the outgroup will increase (see Pettigrew & Tropp, 2008; Pettigrew et al., 2011). In all this, we can see that Contact Theory begins and ends with prejudice. If indeed Contact Theory is primarily a prejudice theory with little to say about interracial/interethnic relations, what implications arise therefrom? Possibly, the theory is then useful to someone who readily accepts its foundational assumption that prejudice is the most important source of interracial/interethnic tensions and conflict. It is also useful to someone who is not bothered by the fact that the theory draws its ardent support mainly from experimental and survey research (see Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006, p. 755). This is one of the critiques leveled by Dixon, Durrheim, and Tredoux (2005) that the theory and the research supporting it create a utopian and abstract world in which prejudice can be reduced and positive contact maximized.

Taken together, the implication is that one ought to confidently use Contact Theory if one is willing to accept its foundation assumption about prejudice, and also be willing to accept that the claims of the theory largely come from experimental studies rather than the natural world of interracial/interethnic relations. Having established that Contact Theory is a prejudice theory, we can now explore how Allport ontologically grappled with and conceived of the concept of prejudice. As stated previously, such an exploration is important because there are philosophical issues with prejudice as conceived by Allport that remain unresolved to date.

Prejudice: A metaphysical theory ³

Allport’s point of departure on prejudice can be thought of as his metaphysical theory of prejudice. Incidentally, it is also where the conceptual problems with prejudice in this tradition of work begin. In an early paper Allport (1946) commented, “our failure to achieve sufficient human solidarity … is largely due to a primary weakness in human nature. This weakness is usually referred to as group prejudice” (Allport, 1946, p. vii). In a paper he delivered at the 12th Hoernlé Memorial Lecture in South Africa, Allport argued that

Prejudice, I hold, is an almost universal psychological syndrome marked by two, and only two, essential features. First is the affective disposition that makes us lean towards or away from an object … The second ingredient is more crucial: it is the basing of love or hate on beliefs that are wholly or partially erroneous … I am, as you can see, committed to answer the charge that we are all creatures of prejudice, that nothing can be done about it, and that prejudice is sometimes a good thing. (1956, pp. 2–3)

Allport was not unique in making what can be described as metaphysical statements on the human mind when considering the nature of prejudice. For instance, Hazlitt, 120 years earlier, makes an ontological statement about human beings when arguing that the “largest part of our judgments is promoted by habit and passion” and we consent—“whether conscious or unconscious—to our passions because human beings are creatures of habit” (cited in Webster, Saucier, & Harris, 2010, p. 302). Allport’s (1954) definition of prejudice fixes on ethnic prejudice as “an antipathy based on a faulty and inflexible generalisation. It may be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group as a whole, or toward an individual because he is a member of that group” (p. 9). Thus the point here is not to fault Allport for having made ontological statements, but rather to show that he does make such statements and to try and understand what the implications of this are for Contact Theory. For a long time, much emphasis was placed on the “faulty” or irrational aspect of this definition, which in recent years has been criticized (Reicher, 2007) and reviewed (e.g., Brown, 2010; Eagly & Diekman, 2005). Yet, as the 1956 construct of prejudice shows, post The Nature of Prejudice, Allport’s definition of prejudice changed, emphasizing both the negative and positive aspects of the concept. ⁴

In Allport’s metaphysics, the human mind is a prejudiced mind, the tendency of which is to personify evil and thus lead to the failure of human solidarity towards a co-operative life. Furthermore, the prejudiced mind is a weakness in the very nature of human beings and about which nothing can be done. Furthermore, there are instances in which prejudice can be a “good weakness,” so to speak. It is not immediately clear how and under what circumstances prejudice would be a good thing, or when human solidarity and co-operation would not be ideal. Part of this difficulty has to do with the use of the term human(ity), which immediately conjures images of a homogeneous human species co-operating towards the same or similar ends. Or, at least, we think that human beings ought to do so. However, the fact of social divisions and the sometimes destructive ways in which we construe our interests complicates the image of humanity in solidarity. Recent examples, such as the Rwandan genocide, American and South African apartheid, and the Holocaust, suffice to make this point. Following Allport, these tragedies represent extreme forms of the failure of human co-operation towards common goals as a product of hate prejudice. Yet, since according to Allport we cannot be anything other than prejudiced, it seems that prejudice can be a good thing when it is the founding of love on beliefs that are wholly or partially erroneous—let us call this love prejudice. Contact Theory claims that its findings generalize beyond the specific research context (see Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006, 2008) to outgroup members who were not involved in the original research context. This must be because research participants display positive attitudes towards new outgroup members based on the “belief, wholly or partially erroneous,” that these new outgroup members are similar to the ones they encountered in the research context. This is, of course, adherence to Allport’s metaphysical construct of love prejudice.

Viewed in this way, we begin to see that Allport and contact researchers are concerned with and are writing against what we might call hate prejudice, and not prejudice in itself. This supports my argument that Contact Theory is a prejudice theory, and we can thus add that it is a theory that seeks to eliminate hate prejudice, fostering love prejudice in its place. It is in this sense that Dixon, Levine, Reicher, and Durrheim (2012) are correct in arguing that this tradition of work “has become an interdisciplinary rallying call: … how can we get people to like each other” (p. 3). We can then conclude that Contact Theory, in the sense in which it has been explored here, is not so much a social psychology theory than it is a metaphysical theory of prejudice. It is concerned with the reduction of hate prejudice and the promotion of love prejudice between different social groups.

Having demonstrated Allport’s changing conceptualization of prejudice, it now seems that the field’s fixation with negative antipathy is partly due to a limited reading of Allport’s work on prejudice. Another influence on this “one-sided reading” of Allport might be the tendency of the social sciences to focus on the negative and ugly side of human relations. This in itself may point to the task which the social sciences appear to have set themselves: to change the social world for the better. However, when we recognize that Allport also thought that prejudice could be a good thing, this places a challenge to researchers inspired by his work—it is not enough to focus only on reducing hate prejudice, love prejudice must be actively promoted as well. Theory and research should also be invested on how and when love prejudice can be promoted. This is important since the absence of hate prejudice does not necessarily result in the presence of love prejudice. Some may argue that love prejudice in today’s understanding may be nothing more than superficially positive attitudes which largely serve to maintain paternalistic and oppressive relations (e.g., Eagly & Mladinic, 1994; Glick & Fiske, 1996; Jackman, 1994). Yet, if all positive attitudes between social groups are perceived in this light, what would be the point of reducing prejudice, if both hate and love prejudice essentially amount to the same outcomes?

Prejudice: A moral theory

Allport, however, offers another dimension of prejudice when positing that “prejudice is a common enough pattern of mental existence, [that] it is not inevitable, and [that] it is invariably a thing of evil” (1956, p. 4). This amounts to the same metaphysical assertion above, except that now prejudice does not exert itself with an unwavering finality. Here again, we must assume that Allport is referring to hate prejudice, which he sees as an obstacle to human solidarity. This opens the possibility for a slightly different interpretation of his metaphysical theory of prejudice. It can be said instead that the human mind is prejudiced, however the manifestation of hate prejudice is not inevitable, although it is a general tendency. By positing prejudice as a thing of evil and doing so in light of what follows below, Allport is in effect making another proposition—prejudice as immorality. We are now dealing with Allport’s moral theory of prejudice for which he draws on what he calls “deductive theories of value,” and argues that

Philosophers ordinarily employ the deductive mode [of reasoning]. They ask in effect what ethical goal, if consistently followed would … result in the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible numbers of human beings. All ethical inquiry seeks rules which if followed would be fecund for the maximization of human values. (1956, p. 4)

Allport continues by pointing out that such reasoning led “Kant to conclude that man may never treat another human being as a means to an end. It led Hoernlé to conclude that ‘… the liberal spirit …’ is the most conducive to safeguarding and promoting quality in human life” (Allport, 1956, p. 4). It is not hard to see here that Allport, by employing the words “would result in the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible numbers of human beings,” invokes utilitarianism and its household names—Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). Bentham refused to accept the standard legal views of his time, which he saw as “mere tradition, and ‘all arbitrary principles,’ such as natural rights … he found in the ‘principle of utility’—that the end of legislation was the greatest happiness of all people—a sounder basis for law and morality” (Edel, Flower, & O’Connor, 1989, p. 299). Consequently, in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham wrote,

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do …. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. (as cited in Edel et al., 1989, p. 303)

In other words, this is Bentham’s view of human nature and thus of utilitarianism. As for “utility,” Bentham held that:

By utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness, (all this in the present case comes to the same thing) or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered. (as cited in Edel et al., 1989, p. 304)

For the purpose of the present discussion, let us take the human mind to be the “object” and hate prejudice its “property,” and consider this together with the fact that Allport conceives hate prejudice to be “a thing of evil.” We can see that hate prejudice is not a “utility” for the human mind and thus for human beings. Given that Bentham does not differentiate between happiness and pleasure, we can say that hate prejudice hinders not only the “greatest possible happiness” but also the greatest possible “benefit, advantage, pleasure, or good” for the “greatest possible numbers of human beings.”

Such a simplistic insertion of Allport’s thoughts into utilitarianism (notwithstanding his appeal thereto) is, however, misleading since it leaves concealed all the work that Allport would have had to do to show that prejudice is indeed “a thing of evil,” and thus not a utility to humanity. It is important to remember that Allport’s theory of prejudice at this point only gives us a metaphysical or logical relation between the concept of prejudice and the observation of real conflicts between social groups in the world. The processes and factors that stand between these two entities that would allow us to confidently accept Allport’s theory is yet to be furnished by Allport. ⁵ However, even at this metaphysical level, Allport would have to show that prejudice violates a moral code, and in so doing would have to spell out that moral code. ⁶ His The Nature of Prejudice does not address this task. Rather, it presupposes that prejudice violates a moral code, and proceeds to investigate the factors (social, cultural, cognitive, psychological, developmental, religious, and legal) that aggravate and mitigate its manifestation.

There is yet another issue that rejects a simplistic unity between Allportian moral thought and utilitarianism. A close examination of the two reveals that they are two distinct “aspects or dimensions of morality” (Bond, 1996, p. 136). Utilitarianism, on the one hand, can be conceived as “concerned with the moral requirement to do certain things and not do others … the deontic aspect of morality” (p. 136). Banner (1968) says the same thing when he writes, “an individual acts properly and wisely, according to Bentham, only when he acts in a way that is productive of pleasure and free of pain, and he is prompted to act in this way only through the fact or expectation of pleasure or pain” (p. 117). Lastly, Stuart Mill confirms utilitarianism to be deontic in posture when he writes, “the creed which accepts the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness” (cited in Edel et al., 1989, p. 419).

While utilitarianism is concerned with judgements on actions that result in one of two ends (pleasure or pain), Allport’s prejudice is a state of ontological being and a psychological syndrome. To the extent that Allport (1954) speaks of a “prejudice personality” and a “tolerant personality,” ⁷ he seems to think of prejudice as a personality or character disposition. ⁸ Insofar as this is true, Allport, when saying that prejudice is “a thing of evil,” is making a moral judgement about the character of persons. Allport, therefore, leans towards “aretaic morality,” which is “concerned with the qualities of character that are admirable or deplorable, strong or weak … the qualities of character in respect of which a man or woman is thought to be praiseworthy … or despised” (Bond, 1996, p. 137). This ethical philosophy tradition begins with Plato (c. 430–347 BC) and Aristotle (384–322 BC) right through to the 18th century when Kant broke away from the tradition in his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals in 1788 (Bond, 1996).

Aretaic morality may ask, “What kind of person am I to be (or try to be) and admire others for being, and what kind of person should I and others not be? What qualities of character are moral virtues and what qualities are vices?” (Bond, 1996, p. 139). Deontic morality in contrast, as we have seen, is concerned with a moral code or law. To be fair, let us briefly consider Kant’s moral thought which Allport also invokes. Kant, in the second book of his trilogy of Critiques (Kant, 1787) addresses ethical issues. He argues that

what is right or wrong in a particular choice can be determined by eliciting the maxim or proposed principle of an action and asking whether it can be consistently willed in universal legislation. That involves regarding every person as an end, not as a means only, and mankind as a community of ends. (Edel et al., 1989, p. 326)

The “principle of an action” referred to here is expressed by Kant in the following way: “There is therefore but one categorical imperative, namely this: Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (as cited in Edel et al., 1989, p. 341).

In this, it can be seen that while both utilitarianism and Kant’s ethical philosophy are deontic, they differ in their emphasis. The former is primarily concerned with the ends or outcomes of actions, while the latter is concerned that the actions themselves be moral. In other words, for utilitarianism, moral action is that which maximizes pleasure for the greatest number of people (without spelling out the means to that end), while Kant’s philosophy asserts that actions (or means) be moral at all times. Thus, it can be seen that whether Allport appeals to Kant or utilitarianism, he knocks on the wrong door, so to speak, because his morality is of a different kind.

All of the above has serious implications for Contact Theory. First, how is Contact Theory to “exorcise” persons whose characters make them lean toward hate prejudice instead of love prejudice? The standard answer may be “interracial/interethnic contact,” the powers of which are supposedly outlined by Pettigrew and Tropp’s (2008) contact-prejudice model. However, this answer has been shown to have a number of serious problems: (a) it is individualistic (see Dixon et al., 2005), (b) intergroup contact may benefit the dominant group (Reicher, 2007), (c) it may discourage subordinate social groups from taking action against the status quo (Dixon et al., 2010), (d) it constructs a contact/non-contact dualism that simplifies social formation (Erasmus, 2010), and (e) there are firm doubts that its individualistic interventions transfer to the meso- and macro-levels as Contact Theory claims (Dixon et al., 2012).

Second, based on the above exploration, Allport has not instituted a social scientific study into prejudice. He has, as I have argued, given us metaphysical and moral theories of prejudice. This, I believe, Allport deserves credit for, because it is a good place to start a social scientific investigation into what has proved to be a lasting multifaceted problem—interracial/interethnic conflict. Although I have argued that Contact Theory is not, strictly speaking, a theory of interracial/interethnic relations, I do believe that Allport had intended it to be so, and probably would have developed it in that direction had he lived long enough. I draw some support for my hunch from the extensive and wide-ranging exploration that Allport offers in his The Nature of Prejudice. In that text, Allport leaves almost no stone unturned in his quest to not only understand the nature of prejudice, but also to seek its elimination which, as he saw it, would give way to human solidarity. The book reads like a manifesto for the study of prejudice, with each part thereof being a broad field of study in its own right. One has to wonder, then, when Allportians will move beyond what now appears to be a psychological compulsion—to experimentally ⁹ prove that appropriately designed interracial/interethnic contact does indeed lead to a reduction in prejudice, and begin to explore the many facets of prejudice suggested by Allport. Surely, after half a century since Allport laid the foundations of such work, it is not enough to simply acknowledge the complexities of the real world in relation to interracial/interethnic conflict (see Pettigrew, 1998) while continuing the practice of experimental and survey research. It is in this regard that Erasmus (2010, p. 387) has been brave and correct to charge that Contact Theory is “too timid for ‘race’ and racism” and, one might add, “in the world outside the laboratory.”

Prejudice: A work of artificialism

While Allport must be credited for his metaphysical and moral work on the concept of prejudice, the following question must still be asked: how did Allport come to the conclusion that it was prejudice more than any other factor that was the source of interracial/interethnic tensions, and the obstacle to human solidarity? At the beginning of The Nature of Prejudice, Allport offers examples from various parts of the world of human relations characterized by antagonism. Take the case of South Africa (amongst others from Poland, Germany, the USA, China, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and the West Indies): “In South Africa, the English, it is said, are against the Afrikaner; both are against the Jews; all three are opposed to the Indians; while all four conspire against the native black” (1954, p. 3). At the end of his survey of world interracial/interethnic hostilities, Allport concluded that “no corner of the world is free from group scorn. Being fettered to our own respective cultures, we … are bundles of prejudice” (1954, p. 4).

This last sentence expresses all the weight of Allport’s metaphysical and moral prejudice theories explored above. However, when such a statement appears as a conclusion to the premises preceding it, as is the case here, epistemological questions must be raised. In other words, the issue is with the ease with which Allport seems to conclude that the cause of what he observes is prejudice. The Nature of Prejudice begins with a chapter titled “What is the problem?” in which Allport gives examples of interracial/interethnic conflict. From there he moves to define prejudice and the bulk of the book proceeds to investigate the nature of prejudice. The epistemological question is this: in a possible catalogue of complex and relational causal factors of interracial/interethnic strife, how did Allport come to conclude that prejudice was the primary causal factor? The question is important, since I have found no evidence that Allport investigates it, even in his earlier work. For example, in an earlier study Allport and Kramer (1946/2010) presumed prejudice to be an active property and only sought to discover its roots: “If ethnic and religious prejudices are not inborn—and there seems to be almost unanimous agreement among psychologists that they are not …. The present study takes certain steps toward discovering the roots of prejudice” (p. 9). Leaving aside that this statement reflects a drastic shift in Allport’s view of prejudice (that his views on prejudice were in flux is already illustrated above), Allport and Kramer had already reached a verdict, and all that remained was to prove that the verdict was correct. Epistemologically, in Allport’s work, prejudice as a causal factor of interracial/interethnic conflict must be viewed as a priori and reductionist. Such a practice is a work of artificialism. That is, the

Illusory representation of the genesis of social facts according to which the social scientist can understand and explain these facts merely through “his own private reflection” rests, in the last analysis, on the presupposition of innate wisdom which, being rooted in the sense of familiarity, is also the basis of the spontaneous philosophy of knowledge of the social world. (Bourdieu, Chamboredon, & Passeron, 1991, p. 15)

If on the present view Allport is charged with committing artificialism his successors are equally charged with failing to correct the mistake. Consequently, the entire tradition of work is contaminated by a failure to break with prejudice as a common sense opinion and to establish a scientific discourse on the structures and mechanisms that operate on interracial/interethnic relations. This is not to deny that prejudice may be a causal factor, but presently we do not know that it is, and with which other factors it collaborates outside laboratory settings. This, in other words, is a failure at “epistemological vigilance” (Bourdieu et al., 1991, p. 13). One of the primary functions of “epistemological vigilance” is a radical doubt of ordinary language and everyday notions, or what Durkheim (1950) called “prenotions.” The need to break with prenotions deposited in everyday language has nothing to do with the “misapprehension that scientificity is characterized above all by the use of complex technical terminologies, and by the distance between research and the problems of practice” (Krais, 1991, p. viii). To the contrary, what is at stake is “challenging the ‘truths’ of common-sense” and “the principle on which common-sense is based” (Bourdieu et al., 1991, p. 93). The utility of such an exercise is to distinguish between everyday opinion and scientific discourse. Consequently, and because of the original Allportian artificialism and the lack of epistemological vigilance in Contact Theory research, it would not be wrong to suspect that prejudice may be an incorrect representation and/or causal factor of estranged interracial/interethnic relations. Durkheim says the same thing when positing that

At the moment when a new order of phenomena becomes the object of a science they are already formed in the mind, not only through sense perceptions, but also by some kind of crudely formed concepts … These notions or concepts—however they are designated—are of course not the legitimate surrogates for things. The products of common-sense, their main purpose is to attune our actions to the surrounding world; they are formed by and for experience. Now a representation can effectively perform this function even if it is theoretically false. (cited in Bourdieu et al., 1991, p. 93)

That this is a serious problem for Contact Theory should be clear at this point. The entire research enterprise and theory rests on a prenotion that is yet to meet empirical validation. It seems to me that this epistemological error can be corrected by returning to the basics and asking: what are the factors, social and psychological, that influence the persistence of interracial/interethnic conflict? In other words, prejudice must be returned to the catalogue of possible factors influencing conflictual interracial/interethnic relations, and its selection must be left to empirical enquiry and not to educated conviction or belief, as has been the case hitherto.

Conclusion

This article is concerned with the place and role of the concept of prejudice in Contact Theory. The aim has been to raise a number of questions which, in my view, are necessary to ask of any theory, and especially of Contact Theory, given its prominence in social psychology and the claims that the theory makes about its contribution in the world. The raising of these questions and their exploration has nothing of the intention to devalue Contact Theory or its contribution in the ongoing attempts, by some social scientists, to change the world. The aim has been threefold. First, it was to understand what Contact Theory is actually about, aside from the accepted view of the theory. We came to the conclusion that Contact Theory is primarily concerned with the eradication of prejudice, and only secondarily concerned with applying its interventions to the area of interracial/interethnic relations. Second, the paper intended to investigate the ways in which Allport conceived and worked with the concept of prejudice. This exploration revealed Allport’s metaphysical and moral conceptions of prejudice. In the former case, Contact Theory appeared to be a metaphysical theory concerned with the eradication of hate prejudice and a preference for love prejudice. In the latter case, the theory leant towards utilitarianism, but came short in this regard since its focus is on the qualities of character (aretaic morality) and not judgements on actions that result in either pain or pleasure (deontic morality). Whether conceived as a metaphysical or moral theory, Contact Theory’s intervention strategy (interracial/interethnic contact of a special type) in the world has been repeatedly criticized, such that one is left with firm doubts and almost no confidence in the strategy. Third and last, the paper sought to question the epistemological status of prejudice in Contact Theory. Our exploration showed that the concept has the status of a “prenotion” derived from observation of interracial/interethnic conflicts and assumes the status of a quasi-scientific concept insofar as it is believed by psychologists to be the source of interracial/interracial conflict. Perhaps after decades of prejudice conviction the time has finally come to question this belief.