False Information Contact Generates Cognitive Prejudice

The contact hypothesis (Allport, 1954) has generated immense literature about reducing intergroup prejudice and expanding human cognition (e.g., Gordon, Crisp, Meleady, & Earle, 2018; Tropp & Pettigrew, 2005). In spite of its success, however, the research has only focused on face-to-face or the indirect interaction between groups (that is, awareness or observation of an ingroup member having a relationship with an outgroup member; see Brown & Paterson, 2016), but overlooked another type of interpersonal or intergroup contact conducted through various communication media before, during or besides the direct or indirect contact (Sun, 2011). In the current information age, most ingroup perceivers have learned something about various alleged outgroups, including their behaviors, physical characteristics, histories, cultures, cognitions, worldviews and other attributes. The information may range from being relatively accurate, incomplete, filtered, distorted to purely false.

To understand the meaning of information contact, it is necessary to separate it from mere information exposure, which denotes unilateral exposure to some reports about an outgroup and its characteristics. Information contact, on the other hand, involves assimilating transmitted bilateral information regarding the ingroup’s perceptions of an outgroup and how and why the outgroup evaluates, validates or invalidate the ingroup’s opinions, judgments and assumptions (Sun, 2011). False information contact, which refers to reports or messages that ignore or misrepresent the reality about the others’ perspectives and viewpoints, is likely to generate or sustain cognitive prejudice, including various inaccuracies in categorizing, evaluating, and explaining social entities (Sun, 1993, 2011). For instance, the distorted cognitions include the assumption that if the perceiver views the self’s judgments and explanations about the others as accurate or valid, the others or the outgroup member will embrace the validity, oblivious to the others’ competence to invalidate the perceiver’ cognitions (Sun, 2009).

Let’s look at an example regarding false information contact. This author recently engaged in a content analysis of some publications discussing prejudice against Chinese workers constructing America’s first Transcontinental Railroad and other infrastructures in the 19th century. The analyzed sample includes relevant discussions of two sociology textbooks and ten randomly selected scholarly or news articles with the key words from ProQuest Database (published from 1979 to the recent). The results show that only the ingroup’ viewpoints were presented (e.g., describing the outgroup as “dangerous, uncivilized, filth, and invaders,” etc.), but lack information about the victims’ perspective and their judgments about the ingroup. Yes, the workers’ stories and voices were mostly ignored at that time. However, unawareness of the relevant documentations does not imply they did not exist in the history. Several efforts have been made to fill the gap, one of them involves a project by concerned scholars at Stanford who have created a university website collecting and documenting information about the railway workers (see:http://web.stanford.edu/group/chineserailroad/cgi-bin/wordpress/).

Although the analyzed publications have labelled the ingroup’s discriminative attitudes and behavior as “racism,” “injustice” or “prejudice,’ the moral condemnations appear unable to compensate for, or to disguise the lack of information about how the victim group invalidated the perpetrators’ perspective and judgments.

For one reason, without accurate information about the victims’ viewpoints, readers who lack previous knowledge about the victims are most likely to evaluate and define the victims as a faceless and nameless object of evaluation from the ingroup’s perspective, believing that they got what they deserved, as predicted by the just world hypothesis. For another reason, in order to apply a justice principle to an interpersonal or intergroup situation, people need to be informed that both the ingroup and outgroup are in a psychologically equitable and exchange relation. Although the society had assigned a low status to the victim outgroup with little political power, the low status could not deprive them of the psychological and cultural power to invalidate falsely constructed assumptions projected onto them or to appreciate and accept positive intentions.

Creating and sustaining authentic information contact is necessary for reducing cognitive prejudice, also because both the alleged ingroup and outgroup may suffer the same type of cultural illiteracy about each other, which cannot be overcome with just good motivation or moral beliefs. For example, in the global contexts of the 18th and 19th centuries, just as Westerners had various misperceptions about China, China also possessed biased publications about encountered Europeans, viewing them as “ignorant,” “coarse,” and “foreign devils”, (Rodell, 1991).

In short, recognizing false information contact plays an important role in understanding cognitive prejudice and its reduction. Moral judgments of prejudice instances alone are insufficient to create accurate knowledge about intergroup reality.