Come together: Longitudinal comparisons of Pettigrew’s Reformulated Intergroup Contact Model and the Common Ingroup Identity Model in Anglo-French and Mexican-American contexts.

Both Anglo-French and Mexican-American relations are embedded in histories of conflict. Within

these intergroup contexts, two longitudinal field studies of contact tested Pettigrew’s (1998)

reformulated model of the intergroup contact theory and Gaertner and Dovidio’s (2000) Common

Ingroup Identity Model (CIIM). In Pettigrew’s model, intergroup friendship is accorded a special role

and the contact-bias relation is mediated by changing behaviour, ingroup reappraisal, generating

affective ties, and learning about the outgroup. Pettigrew’s integration of the three central models of

contact generalization into a time-sequence holds that contact first elicits decategorization, then

salient categorization, and finally recategorization. In the CIIM, these three levels of categorization—

plus a fourth, dual identity—are conceptualized to be mediators in the contact-bias relation. Results

point to the crucial importance of intergroup friendship and underline the mediating roles of learning

about the outgroup, behaviour modification, and generating affective ties, but not ingroup reappraisal

in Pettigrew’s model. As for the CIIM, in Study 1 interpersonal and intergroup levels were most

central, while in Study 2 the dual identity and superordinate group levels were most effective. The

implications of the findings are discussed with reference to the likely stability of these effects in

different intergroup contexts.