The CEE paradox: prejudice without contact

• Last week: anti-Semitism without Jews. The Birthplace villager’s fear and shame, fifty years after the Jewish population vanished.
• This week: anti-Muslim prejudice with almost no Muslims. Same shape, different target group.
• The two patterns are the signature of CEE prejudice and the hardest case for the discipline’s main tool — the contact hypothesis.

Overview of today’s lecture

• Why information alone is not enough
• The contact hypothesis and Allport’s four conditions
• Indirect contact: extended, vicarious, imagined, parasocial
• Decategorisation, recategorisation, mutual differentiation
• Perspective-taking and empathy induction
• Pickel & Öztürk (2018): Islamophobia Without Muslims?
• Contemporary evidence and the political environment

The question

• Last week: prejudice is cognitively, affectively, and institutionally deep.
• If social psychology has accurately diagnosed prejudice, it should also have something to say about reducing it.
• Devising interventions has been one of the principal motivations for research on prejudice and intergroup relations over the last seven decades.
• The record is mixed. Some interventions reliably work; others are neutral or counterproductive; a few popular interventions actively backfire.

Why information alone is not enough

• Prejudice feels ubiquitous enough that we sometimes ask whether it is inevitable.
• When people are presented with an example or two that refutes their existing stereotype, most do not change the general belief.
• In one experiment, participants shown disconfirming evidence strengthened their prejudices: being challenged forced them to produce additional arguments for the prejudice, entrenching it.
• Implication: “education” as a prejudice-reduction strategy is much weaker than early twentieth-century social activists believed. The emotional and identity-based components of prejudice are not reachable through factual correction alone.

Allport (1954)

• The contact hypothesis: social interaction between members of different groups will reduce prejudice.
• Much empirical support from laboratory and field studies over 70 years.
• Documented in very different settings:
  • young people’s attitudes toward the elderly
  • healthy people’s attitudes toward the mentally ill
  • non-disabled children’s attitudes toward disabled peers
  • heterosexual people’s attitudes toward LGBTQ+ communities
  • inter-ethnic and inter-religious relations
• The hypothesis is one of the most robust findings in social psychology.

Barriers to contact

• The classical contact hypothesis requires each person to directly experience intergroup contact. But what if no such opportunity exists?
• Many people live in homogeneous areas with little exposure to people who are different from them.
  • Rural Slovakia (very few Muslims)
  • Small-town Poland (almost no Jewish residents)
  • Monocultural villages across CEE
• For these populations, direct contact is impossible — yet they often hold the strongest prejudices. What then?

Indirect contact

• Extended contact: knowing that an in-group member has out-group friends is sufficient to reduce prejudice.
• Parasocial contact: emotional connection to out-group characters or celebrities through repeated media exposure.
• Vicarious contact: witnessing intergroup contact through news or entertainment vignettes.
• Imagined contact: deliberate mental simulation of positive interactions, useful pre-contact.
• All four mechanisms operate through three channels:
  • informational (the out-group is safer than the stereotype suggests)
  • normative (in-group members doing this → it is acceptable)
  • anxiety-reducing (simulation displaces apprehension about real interactions)
• Particularly valuable where direct contact is rare — most CEE societies’ relationship with Muslim populations.

The anxiety problem

• Intergroup interactions tend to be characterised by mistrust and anxiety.
• These feelings are a core reason people avoid interacting with people from other groups.
• The discomfort runs deep: people show physiological threat patterns (elevated heart rate, cortisol) during interaction with people who have stigmatised identities.
• Counter-finding: people’s expectations of intergroup interaction are typically worse than the interactions actually turn out to be. This gap between expectation and reality is an opportunity for intervention.

When contact backfires

• The biggest problem with the classical contact hypothesis: sometimes contact makes things worse.
• In situations of intense intergroup violence, mere contact does not reduce prejudice and may increase it.
• But even in violent contexts, high-quality contact (cross-group friendship, sustained cooperation) still predicts less prejudice and greater willingness to reconcile.
• Contact quality matters more than contact quantity.

Equal status

• Allport specified four conditions: equal status, common goals, cooperation, institutional support. Without them, contact may reinforce rather than disturb hierarchy.
• Intergroup interactions must be structured so groups have equal status during the contact.
• Historical problem: contact between high-status and low-status groups typically takes place in conditions that confirm the existing hierarchy.
  • Majority employer interviewing minority applicant
  • Majority landlord screening minority tenant
  • Teacher–pupil interactions in segregated schools
• Without equal status, contact disconfirms nothing. The negative stereotype persists because its preconditions persist.

Common goals and cooperation

• Cooperation toward a common goal increases the likelihood of overcoming prejudice.
• Sherif’s “Robbers Cave” experiment: intergroup conflict dissolved only when both groups had to cooperate to solve a problem (a broken water supply) neither could solve alone.
• Difficulty in CEE contexts: creating willingness to cooperate with the outgroup is especially hard in contexts of enduring intergroup conflict, where both parties are suspicious of the other’s motives for cooperation.

Institutional support and social norms

• Contact works best when supported by law, custom, and authority.
• Without institutional backing, contact can generate more anxiety and less tolerance.
• The amount of prejudice a person expresses is strongly predicted by the perceived level of prejudice of other people in that context — especially in-group members.
• Social norms also shape willingness to interact with out-group members, which determines whether contact happens at all.

Decategorisation

• Decategorisation (Brewer): reduce the salience of group boundaries during contact through
  • differentiation: making distinctions between individual out-group members
  • personalisation: stressing the uniqueness of each out-group member
• Repeated individual-level information should reduce the usefulness of the category and generalise to prejudice reduction in future interactions.
• Limit: treating each out-group member as “an exception” may not generalise back to the group as a whole — “I have a Roma friend, but Roma in general are…”

Recategorisation

• Recategorisation (Gaertner & Dovidio): keep the salience of categorisation, but redraw the boundary to include the out-group in a larger “we”.
  • Two groups (“us” and “them”) → one inclusive category (“we”)
• Laboratory support is strong.
• Real-world limits:
  • Majority groups may be unwilling to “dilute” their identity when they have greater status
  • Minority groups may resist recategorisation when the new category is perceived as dominated by the majority
  • Example: Czech-Roma “we are all Czech citizens” framing has been resisted by both sides at different moments for exactly these reasons

Mutual differentiation

• Mutual differentiation: rather than reducing category salience, emphasise the two groups’ distinct but complementary contributions to a shared task.
• Each group contributes something the other needs; interdependence becomes positive rather than zero-sum.
• Example: German-Polish cross-border cooperation projects where German technical skills and Polish creative skills are each named as contributions to joint outcomes.
• The mutual-differentiation model preserves group identity while reframing the relationship.

Perspective-taking and empathy induction

• Interventions that promote perspective-taking use role-playing and presentation of information from the out-group’s point of view.
• Walking through a day in the life of a discriminated-against individual shifts attitudes more than statistical presentation of aggregate inequalities.
• Empathy is the affective bridge; perspective-taking is the cognitive vehicle.
• Limit: perspective-taking can also produce personal distress (rather than empathic concern), which motivates avoidance rather than help (cf. Batson, Lecture 9).

Pickel & Öztürk (2018)

• Pickel, G. & Öztürk, C. (2018). Islamophobia Without Muslims? The “Contact Hypothesis” as an Explanation for Anti-Muslim Attitudes — Eastern European Societies in a Comparative Perspective. Journal of Nationalism, Memory & Language Politics, 12(2), 162–191.
• Examines the contact hypothesis as an explanation for anti-Muslim attitudes across Europe, placing CEE countries in the Western European context.
• Situates the investigation in the 2015 refugee crisis and the role played by political elites and media in stoking Islamophobia.
• The perception of Islam and Muslims as an aggressive menace to Western societies gained importance after 9/11 and intensified after 2015.

The puzzle and the concept

• Islamophobia — negative attitudes toward individuals based on their perceived Muslim background. The ascribed identity drives the prejudice; even non-practising Muslims face discrimination.
• The puzzle: Islamophobia seems more widespread in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe — even though Muslim communities are virtually nonexistent in most CEE societies.
• Hypothesis: more prevalent in CEE because of a mixture of more pronounced ethnocentric nationalism and fewer contacts with Muslims.
• The societies with the least actual contact have the most prejudice.

Key patterns (ESS 2014 data)

• Czechia, Hungary, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland cluster at the top-left: very few Muslims, very high opposition.
• France, Belgium, UK, Netherlands cluster at the bottom-right: many more Muslims, much less opposition.

Three families of explanation

Pickel & Öztürk test the contact mechanism against two families of alternative explanation:

• Contact (H1–H3): individual contact with other ethnicities reduces Muslim-ban support; smaller actual Muslim presence and lower contact at the country level predict higher support.
• Identity (H4–H5, H8): strong national identification, religiosity, and ethnocentric worldviews predict higher support.
• Threat (H6–H7, H9): perceived realistic threat (physical, material), symbolic threat (cultural values), and collective deprivation predict higher support.

Research design

• Data: European Social Survey (ESS) 2014.
• 18 EU states + Switzerland, Norway, Israel.
• CEE coverage: Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Slovenia, Poland (six countries).
• Dependent variable: binary measure of support for a “Muslim ban” (allow no Muslims to come and live in the country).
• Multilevel modelling: individual and country-level predictors simultaneously.

Results: individual level

• Empirical evidence for contact hypothesis:
  • Except for Hungary, a clear pattern — respondents who maintain contact with migrants, make friends with people from other ethnicities, and perceive these contacts as pleasant are less inclined to support a Muslim ban.
• Much less empirical support for the hypothesis that identification with an in-group (religion or nation) is a fundamental precondition of anti-Muslim prejudice.
• Islamophobia rests on quite similar social-psychological underpinnings across European societies.
• A mixture of threat perceptions and ethnocentrism is what drives anxiety toward Muslims.
• Fear of terrorism + notion of sharp cultural differences → both realistic and symbolic threat perception.

Results: societal level

• At the societal level, contacts with migrants dominate as an explanation of Islamophobic attitudes.
• The effect of threat perceptions and ethnocentrism diminishes when contact with migrants is included.
• The authors conclude that the absence of Muslim communities in Eastern Europe leads to:
  • fewer contacts
  • fewer friendships with immigrants
  • more sceptical perceptions of any intergroup contacts that do occur
• Less contact is the core driver of “Islamophobia without Muslims” in CEE.

The societal-level contact pattern

• Strong negative correlation: countries with more migrant contact have less Muslim-ban support.
• CEE outliers: Hungary and Czechia at the high end of the prejudice axis.

Contact as antivenom

• Conclusion: there are good reasons to consider contacts with migrants as an antivenom to Islamophobic attitudes.
• Individuals who stay in contact with out-groups, make cross-ethnic friendships, and perceive these contacts positively are less likely to feel prejudice toward Muslims.
• But with Muslim communities nearly non-existent in CEE, most citizens have no opportunity to adjust their negative stereotypes through real-life experience.
• Terrorist attacks and media framings of Islam as an “unintegratable religion” shape the image of all Muslims; right-wing populists since 2015 have positioned themselves as “defenders of Christian identity”.
• The political consequence: anti-Muslim prejudice is maintained by media and elite discourse in the absence of the lived experience that would challenge it.

The contact hypothesis under recent evidence

• 2015–16: peak refugee crisis; CEE public opinion hardens; Hungary and Poland construct fences; Visegrád-4 refuses EU quota system.
• 2016–20: Islamophobic attitudes remain elevated in CEE but stop rising; Western attitudes gradually soften as contact extends. Pew 2019: Hungary down from 72% to 58%, Italy from 69% to 55% — consistent with the contact mechanism.
• 2022: Ukrainian refugees in CEE produce positive attitudinal shift under intensive contact — proof of concept that the mechanism is active, given the right framing and target population.
• Paluck, Green et al. (2021) meta-analysis: contact-based interventions remain among the most effective; short one-off “training” sessions typically do not produce durable change; sustained, structured contact with institutional support remains the gold standard.
• The Allport framework has aged well; the weaknesses are in implementation, not theory.

What works, what doesn’t

The CEE challenge

• The populations most prejudiced against out-groups (Muslims, Jews, Roma, LGBTQ+) are often those with least direct contact with them.
• “Islamophobia without Muslims” and “anti-Semitism without Jews” are the signature patterns — and they are hardest to address precisely because contact cannot be organised with people who are not there.
• Indirect contact (extended, vicarious, imagined), institutional norms, and narrative framing are the main tools available for these cases.
• Contemporary CEE media and political environments often push in the opposite direction, using prejudice as an electoral resource.

Questions for discussion

• If contact is the main tool for reducing prejudice but the most prejudiced populations have no out-group present to contact, is the social-psychological prescription structurally inadequate for CEE contexts?
• Pickel & Öztürk wrote before the 2022 Ukrainian refugee influx. That episode shows that contact can produce rapid attitudinal change under the right framing. What conditions would generalise the Ukrainian case to other out-groups?
• Right-wing populism has made Islamophobia, anti-Roma prejudice, and anti-LGBTQ+ hostility electorally profitable in parts of CEE. Can prejudice-reduction interventions succeed against a political environment that rewards prejudice?