4 ms·
>But if all your friends are from all walks of life, you will naturally not be prejudiced. I'd be careful jumping to the conclusion you did based on this premi
by Kranar 4y ago
>But if all your friends are from all walks of life, you will naturally not be prejudiced.
I'd be careful jumping to the conclusion you did based on this premise because there are a lot of subtleties here. More generally this is known as the contact hypothesis (and related to the diversity exposure hypothesis) and there isn't that much evidence to justify the idea that exposure to multiple walks of life reduces prejudice and on the contrary there is evidence that the opposite is true.
While there is substantial evidence that people who do have friends from all walks of life are less prejudiced as you point out, that's mostly due to self-selection. People less prejudiced have less issue with befriending people from all walks of life, so we should not be surprised that they do so. However, concluding that all people need is to be exposed to diverse groups of people will reduce prejudice is unsupported by research and in fact to the extent that research exists on this, it actually points to the opposite conclusion. For example in situations where people are required to work or interact among different cultures, studies show unfortunately that those people have more negative attitudes towards that community than the general population. This phenomenon is known as negative intergroup contact:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1368430218761568 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/136843021876156...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4457726/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4457726/
- thrashh 4y agoThose studies are regarding people experiencing that effect later in life, no? I’m not really expecting to fix older people. I’m an old dog now relatively and I don’t learn new tricks as well I’m talking about people growing up together
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]