How Inter-Group Contact Can Change Policy Views: The Case of College Sport

• In Event: More Than Leisure and Play: Race and Gender Politics in American Sport

Abstract

Can inter-personal contact across groups change policy views? While a vast literature explores the conditions under which inter-personal contact can reduce prejudice, little work studies whether it also can alter opinions about political issues. We argue that individuals from dominant groups can come to hold views favored by subordinate groups when a) inter-personal contact occurs under conditions of equality (e.g., Allport’s conditions) and b) individuals trust policy-making institutions. This latter condition allays fears that policies will completely undermine the interests of the dominant group. We test our hypotheses in the context of interactions among college student athletes using both observational and experimental data to show contact can change policy views in the presence of institutional trust. The results expand prior work on inter-personal contact to look directly at public policy and also accentuate how institutions shape the outcome of interactions.

Our interest lies in the impact of contact in situations where there is inter-group segregation – that is, that members of different groups are separated by geography, institutions, or norms that curtail interactions. There are enormous literatures on inter-personal contact, inter-personal discussions, and descriptive representation. Yet, much of that work faces a methodological challenge. Specifically, segregation – or the flip side, contact – is endogenous with attitudes. For example, those with more positive attitudes towards an out-group (e.g., whites towards Blacks) may have acquired those attitudes because of contact with the out-group (e.g., whites interact with Blacks) or they may interact with the group because of their positive attitudes (e.g., whites choose to interact with Blacks because they already hold favorable views).

The ideal situation is where segregation is exogenous and contact is driven by levers separate from inter-group attitudes. The domain of college sports largely meets these requirements when it comes to racial and gender groups. Sports teams are nearly entirely de jure sex segregated and de facto racially segregated, there are therefore limited opportunities for cross-racial and cross-gender interactions within the context of college sports. This makes college athletics a uniquely useful context to study contact, avoiding homophily concerns.

Our interest is not in inter-group attitudes but policy attitudes. We thus need a domain where group identities are closely linked to policies to assess whether contact with members of a groups beneficiaries leads to increased support for those policies. Again, college sports is an excellent fit. There are a number of policies in place to ensure and expand gender equity – ranging from Title IX (the federal sex equity policy requiring non-discrimination in education and athletics), to policies to expand women’s opportunities in coaching and administration, to policies enabling sex integrated teams. Women student-athletes are the main beneficiaries. Alternatively, policies that expand student-athlete benefits – ranging from pay-for-play, to guaranteed long term medical coverage, to scholarships that allow former athletes to return to school –particularly benefit African-Americans.

Our research design includes an observational data collection of a representative sample of NCAA student athletes. In the survey, we measured policy opinions, self-reported inter-personal contact with other demographic groups, and trust in the university. We find that when an out-group member (e.g., a white male) has increased contact with members of a group who benefits from a policy (e.g., women with regard to Title IX), then that out-group member becomes more supportive of the policy. That relationship, however, is strongly moderated by trust – as predicted. We find the same dynamics on policies that tend to benefit African-Americans (e.g., pay-for-play).

We then conducted a second study on a distinct representative sample of student-athletes. We did this to allay critiques of our primary argument that contact may not be entirely exogenous. Thus, we used the “imagined contact” paradigm and experimentally manipulated both the nature of the contact and trust in the university / the NCAA. The experimental findings cohere with the observational data: inter-group contact with a beneficiary group increases support for a policy but only under conditions of high institutional trust.

The literature on inter-group relations is vast, yet very little of it looks expressly at policy attitudes. We seek to fill that void by exploring the conditions under which inter-personal contact affects policy views. We show that contact alone is not sufficient – one must also trust the policy-making institutions. The results have implications for policy design and understanding group relations. They also make clear that college sports offers a valuable laboratory for studying social and political relations.

Authors

• James N. Druckman, Northwestern University

• Elizabeth A. Sharrow, University of Massachusetts Amherst