As the United States has become more diverse, opportunities for interactions between people from different racial and ethnic groups have increased. But interracial interactions can be challenging and lead to future avoidance of interracial contact.
What makes interracial interactions so challenging, and what strategies could foster more positive interracial interactions?
One reason interracial interactions are so challenging is the increased likelihood of experiencing social identity threat—the fear of being devalued for one’s social group membership. A Black person’s awareness, for example, that White individuals may view them through the lens of negative cultural stereotypes contributes to fewer positive interactions and the avoidance of interactions in the future. Strategies that reduce social identity threat are crucial in promoting positive interracial contact.
Two lines of research help disentangle the problem. First is the finding that social identity threat is reduced when Black people anticipate an interaction with a White partner who has a racially diverse (vs. mostly White) network of friends. In this encounter, Black participants expect to be perceived less stereotypically and expect the interaction itself to be less challenging. However, White people’s friendship networks remain relatively racially homogeneous. This is where the second line of research comes into the picture. Approaching interracial interactions as an opportunity to learn more about another culture can lessen social identity threat and lead to more positive interactions. Adopting this “learning goal” can enable one to focus less on the fear of confirming negative stereotypes and more on the opportunity to learn about others.
Dorainne Green, Daryl Wout, and Mary Murphy bridge these two bodies of work in an article published in Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychologyopens in new window. They examine whether a learning goal reduced Black people’s experience of social identity threat and led to more positive interactions with White partners who had mostly White friends.
In two experiments, Black participants anticipated an interaction with a White partner who had either a racially diverse or homogeneously White friendship network. Prior to the interaction, Green and her colleagues prompted Black participants to approach the interaction as an opportunity to have an enjoyable intercultural exchange (i.e., to adopt a learning goal) or to avoid negative stereotypes such as appearing incompetent during the interaction (i.e., a performance goal).
Results showed that Black participants with a learning goal, as compared to those with a performance goal, expected to be perceived more positively by their interaction partner; they also anticipated a more positive interaction with a White partner who had a homogeneously White network of friends. The follow-up analyses suggested that participants had more positive experiences in this challenging situation because adopting a learning goal reduced identity threat concerns.
These studies add to the growing evidence that the adoption of learning (vs. performance) goals prior to challenging social interactions promotes positive interactions. The adoption of learning goals is an effective strategy in mitigating identity threat for Black individuals, which opens the door to positive interracial contact, even in the context of difficult interactions.
Note: This article is in the Social Psychology and Social Processes topic area. View more articles in the Social Psychology and Social Processes topic area.