Who defines equality for whom? The interplay of intergroup contact and inequality

Inequalities persist around the globe, fueling intergroup conflict, polarization and radicalization. At the same time, more people than ever migrate across or within borders, therefore opportunities abound for people to meet one another and establish relationships across group boundaries. My doctoral dissertation articulates the interplay of inequality and diversity and investigates how inequality is related to intergroup contact in real-life settings. To this end, I conducted five studies using multiple methods in various intergroup contexts in Belgium and beyond. I take a cultural psychology approach of intergroup contact and posit that contact situations reflect current and historical structures of inequality. People tend to experience and enact culturally appropriate ways of relating to outgroup members, therefore contact often reproduces inequality. Furthermore, majority and minority experiences of contact are anchored in their group positions within structures of inequality. Therefore they tend to experience contact differently. At the same time, contact situations offer opportunities to go beyond culturally sanctioned ways of relating to outgroup members and hence to attenuate or challenge inequality within the contact situation. In this way, I question whether sustained intergroup contact may potentially erode or subvert structural inequalities in the wider society. Throughout my dissertation, I engage with the relationship between intergroup contact and inequality in both directions. On the one hand, I investigate how cultural values and institutional practices afford different personal experiences of intergroup contact (from macro-to micro-level). On the other hand, I ask when and how contact experiences can create opportunities for collectively redefining unequal intergroup relations as unfair (from micro to macro-level). Bridging intergroup contact research with cultural psychology, my threefold research aim is to examine (1) how cultural values and ideologies of inequality shape intergroup contact and prejudice from the top down, (2) how minority group experiences of intergroup contact and unequal treatment jointly affect intergroup relations; and (3) whether and when minority and majority members converge on shared perceptions of unequal treatment over time through intergroup contact. My research adds to existing research and theory on the social and cultural psychology of intergroup relations by developing a multi-level and dynamic approach towards the interplay between intergroup contact and equality. To address my first aim, I ask both whether more egalitarian cultures enable more effective intergroup contact - e.g.., more prejudice reduction with more frequent contact - and vice versa: whether contact is less effective in more hierarchical cultures. Study 1 revisited Pettigrew and Tropp's (2006) meta-analysis of contact studies in 36 countries and tested the role of culture-level equality values and ideologies over and above situational equal status (Kende, Phalet, Van den Noortgate, Karan,& Fischer, 2017). As expected, effect sizes varied across cultures so that contact more effectively reduced prejudice in more egalitarian cultures and contact was less effective in more hierarchical cultures. My second aim foregrounds a minority group perspective on intergroup contact and equality. Previous findings show that minorities perceive more inequality than majorities and also that intergroup contact can be costly for minorities when the unequal context induces identity threat. Taking a social identity approach, I argue that contact can be costly for minorities in unequal intergroup contexts, because minority members experience identity threat when their minority in-groups are devalued. Therefore, I expect that intergroup contact can threaten minority identities in the presence of unequal treatment. Study 2 was a multi-level analysis of Turkish and Moroccan origin minority youth sampled from schools in the Belgian CILS surveys. We assessed inequality in the intergroup context as minority peer perceptions of unequal treatment in the class context; and we also took into account relative minority presence in class. The findings revealed that in more unequal intergroup contexts minority youth was more weakly nationally identified; and they experienced more conflict between their national and ethnic identities (Kende, Phalet, Baysu & Fleischmann). Study 3 was a multi-level analysis of the same minority samples in the Belgian CILS surveys to test the association of combined intergroup contact and unequal treatment with the dual national and ethnic identifications of minority youth. We found that more positive experiences of intergroup contact and fewer negative experiences of unequal treatment were both related to stronger national identification. Yet, contact in more unequal class contexts enhanced majority group belonging (i.e., stronger national identification) at the cost of minority group distancing (i.e. weaker ethnic identification) (Kende, Baysu, Van Laar & Phalet). My last research aim bridges minority and majority group perspectives on inequality through intergroup contact. Studies 4 and 5 examined whether and when minority and majority youth shared their friends' perceptions of unequal treatment through friendly contact. To address this question, we used questionnaires and sociometric data (class networks) from both minority and majority youth samples in both waves 1 and 2 of the Belgian CILS surveys. Through cross-sectional (study 4) and longitudinal (study 5) multilevel modelling and social network analysis we investigated whether and when minority and majority youth shared the perceptions of unequal treatment by their minority of majority friends (Kende, Gagliolo, Phalet, & Van Laar).status: publishe