What is it about?
This research looked at what happens in people's minds when someone from a different group offers to help them, and whether people's general prejudice toward that group changes how the offer gets read. Across three experiments with 586 people, native Italian teenagers and Kosovan Albanian adults, participants reported how they felt about the outgroup as a whole, then imagined being in a difficult situation and receiving spontaneous, unprompted help from a stranger described as either an ingroup or an outgroup member. The more prejudiced someone was toward the outgroup in general, the less genuine they judged that specific helper's motives to be, the worse they expected the interaction to go, and the less willing they were to accept the help. In one experiment, simply reading a short, fabricated news report that described the outgroup negatively had the same effect, even on people who had never met anyone from that group. By contrast, people with little prejudice toward the outgroup showed almost no such bias. The pattern held up across different countries, age groups, and ways of measuring prejudice.
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Why is it important?
Programmes that bring people from different groups together, including aid efforts, mentoring schemes, or simple neighbourly assistance, are often assumed to build trust almost automatically. This research shows that this depends heavily on something the programme itself may not control: how people already feel about the other group as a whole. The same act of help can be read as generous or as suspicious depending on the recipient's existing prejudice toward the helper's group, not on anything the helper actually does. For people who already hold negative views of that group, even a kind, unsolicited gesture can be reinterpreted as self-serving, which then makes them less willing to accept it and less likely to benefit from the contact at all. This matters for anyone designing interventions meant to ease tension between divided communities, whether in schools with growing ethnic diversity or in regions still recovering from conflict. It suggests that addressing prejudice toward the group beforehand, or carefully managing how that group is portrayed in public information, may be a necessary first step before cross-group help can do the trust-building work it is meant to do.
Perspectives
I kept noticing that research on prosocial behaviour between groups almost always focused on the helper's side, asking what makes someone want to help an outgroup member. I wanted to flip that question and ask what happens in the mind of the person receiving the help instead. We asked native Italian and Kosovan Albanian participants how they felt about the outgroup as a whole, then had them imagine receiving spontaneous help from either an ingroup or an outgroup member. The more prejudice someone already held toward that group, the less they trusted the specific person described as helping them. That finding changed how I think about designing contact-based interventions. A kind act on its own is not always enough. The attitudes people already carry toward a group can quietly decide whether one member's kindness is even recognised as such.
Dr Islam Borinca
National University of Ireland Maynooth
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Outgroup prejudice and perceptions of prosocial intergroup behaviors, European Journal of Social Psychology, February 2021, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.2712.
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