The current increasing mobility between countries has highlighted the urgent issue of the relationship between host majority groups and ethnic minorities of migrant people in Western societies. Research has consistently shown that positive face-to-face contact between majority and minority group members is one of the most effective strategies to reduce intergroup discrimination. However, contact is not always positive. Intergroup encounters may be marked by perceived threat and hostility, actually leading to increased intergroup discrimination. With this regard, research to tackle the effects of negative contact and its interaction with positive contact is still needed.
We focused on the relationships between majority group and migrant people in diverse settings, because social integration and the quest for equality represent fundamental challenges for contemporary Western societies in which not just discrimination toward migrants still persist, but it even increased powered by the rise of xenophobic and nationalistic attitudes in the last decade. In this social climate, the need to understand, and attenuate, social biases surrounding how we think about, and behave towards, other ethnic groups is urgently needed to promote equality, equity, and inclusion. Moreover, if before the Covid-19 pandemic, these social issues represented crucial disputes of contemporary societies, it is now even more the case that we must address social integration and intergroup equality to promote intergroup cooperation and harmony.
This project provided a novel contribution: (a) on the consequences of the interaction between positive and negative contact on intergroup discrimination and social integration, considering the perspectives of not only majority groups in Europe countries, but also currently salient minority groups of immigrants such as African people in Italy and Asians in UK. The impact of different valence contact was tested in the short-term (experimental and diary studies) and long-terms (longitudinal study) on unintended pervasive behaviours, such as linguistic bias, integrating Supervisor’s and Researcher’s expertise. The Researcher also gained (b) new expertise in social neuroscience by collaborating with Prof. K. Watkins’s lab group in Oxford, to test the physiological reactions to intergroup contact. Evidence of the project were presented at international scientific conferences and one public talk. A first impactful publication in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology is also available.
