Moving Beyond Prejudice Reduction: Pathways to Positive Intergroup Relations

This edited volume moves beyond social psychology’s traditional focus on prejudice reduction, to explore novel approaches to improving relations and fostering empathy between members of socially dominant "ingroups" and oppressed/victimized "outgroups."

The contributors to this volume explore these issues across three theoretical and conceptual dimensions: reconceptualizing how we think about intergroup attitudes, examining motivations and expectations across group boundaries, and promoting closeness and inclusion in cross-group relationships. The book’s final grouping of chapters applies these concepts to forgiveness, reparation, and reconciliation among different ethnopolitical groups in postconflict societies.

Linda R. Tropp, PhD, is an associate professor of psychology and director of the Psychology of Peace and Violence Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research concerns how members of different groups approach and experience contact with one another, and how group differences in status affect cross-group relations.
 
She received the Allport Intergroup Relations Prize from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, the Erikson Early Career Award for distinguished research contributions from the International Society of Political Psychology, and the McKeachie Early Career Teaching Award from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology.
 
Dr. Tropp is a Fellow of APA, the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.
 
She has been a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley; the Kurt Lewin Institute; the Marburg Center for Conflict Studies; and the International Graduate College on Conflict and Cooperation, where she taught seminars and workshops on prejudice reduction and intervention.
 
She has collaborated with organizations in the United States to present social science evidence in Supreme Court cases on racial desegregation, worked on state initiatives designed to improve interracial relations in schools, and partnered with varied nongovernmental organizations to evaluate applied programs designed to reduce racial and ethnic conflict.
 
She was coeditor of Improving Intergroup Relations (2008) and a 2006 special issue of the Journal of Social Issues on integrating intergroup research and practice.
 
Robyn K. Mallett, PhD, is an assistant professor of psychology at Loyola University Chicago. She completed her bachelor's degree at the University of Alaska Anchorage; her PhD in social psychology at the Pennsylvania State University, State College; and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
 
Her research investigates pathways to positive intergroup relations by examining the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components of intergroup contact — specifically, how the accuracy of intergroup expectations can be improved to increase the likelihood of positive future contact, how targets of discrimination can proactively protect themselves from the negative consequences of discrimination, and how emotions motivate majority group members to act on behalf of minority group members.
 
Dr. Mallett's investigation of the intergroup forecasting error was funded by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation.