Premium
The Impact of Crossgroup Friendships in South Africa: Affective Mediators and Multigroup Comparisons
Author(s) -
Swart Hermann,
Hewstone Miles,
Christ Oliver,
Voci Alberto
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
journal of social issues
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.618
H-Index - 122
eISSN - 1540-4560
pISSN - 0022-4537
DOI - 10.1111/j.1540-4560.2010.01647.x
Subject(s) - outgroup , psychology , empathy , prejudice (legal term) , anxiety , context (archaeology) , social psychology , developmental psychology , clinical psychology , paleontology , psychiatry , biology
Two cross‐sectional survey studies among majority‐status White and minority‐status Coloured high school students in South Africa explored the effects of crossgroup friendships on prejudice, and the affective processes (intergroup anxiety in Study 1, and intergroup anxiety and affective empathy in Study 2) underlying these effects with respect to two target groups for each sample. Crossgroup friendships were negatively associated with negative action tendencies, and positively associated with positive outgroup attitudes and greater perceived outgroup variability for both samples, irrespective of the target group. The importance of intergroup anxiety and affective empathy as mediators of these effects was also confirmed. Multigroup comparisons showed significant differences in the structural models across the two samples in both studies, and confirmed prior findings in the contact literature that contact effects are stronger for majority than minority groups. These findings are the first of their kind within the South African context.