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Abstract
Many democratic theorists suggest that harmonious relationship between groups are critical for democracy; however, far less is known about how everyday experiences promote or impede such intergroup harmony. In this dissertation, I explore a common, but overlooked, form of intergroup contact – casual, brief experiences with outgroup strangers. I propose a theory of how the ease of communication determines how these kinds of social encounters influence political support for outgroups and empirically test that theory with three separate experiments. Each creates outgroup experiences across racial or ethnic lines and experimentally manipulates the difficulty of communicating with the outgroup member. The first design, a lab-based study, indicates that majority-group members respond to easy-to-understand outgroup members with lower support.
Using a field experiment, the second study confirms these patterns and adds an additional paradox: more similar outgroup members encourage these kinds of interactions, but those same kinds of outgroup members are most likely to undermine outgroup support as the interactions unfold. The final experiment indicates that standing propensities to avoid outgroups do not moderate the effect of the ease of communicating and that different contexts may be more or less prone to the backlash observed in the prior two chapters. Across all three experiments, I fail to observe any instances where these interactions promote outgroup support; these kinds of social interactions are much more likely to backfire than they are to ameliorate group differences.
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