Group conflict and intergroup contact

Grady, Christopher D.

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Description

Title

Group conflict and intergroup contact

Author(s)

Grady, Christopher D.

Issue Date

2020-07-14

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

• Kuklinski, James H
• Bowers, Jake

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

• Kuklinski, James H
• Bowers, Jake

Committee Member(s)

• Wong, Cara
• Rhodes, Justin

Department of Study

Political Science

Discipline

Political Science

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

Group conflict, intergroup contact, Nigeria, field experiment, lab experiment

Abstract

This dissertation contains three papers. The first paper studies the effects of a peacebuilding intervention randomly assigned to conflicting farming and pastoral communities in Nigeria, where thousands die each year in farmer-pastoralist violence. Members of conflicting farming and pastoral groups worked together to build infrastructure projects beneficial to both communities, and that collaboration increased voluntary intergroup contact, intergroup trust, and feelings of security for the participants and for nonparticipants living in the same villages as the participants. The second paper uses a lab experiment to test a specific mechanism through which contact might work. Subjects vicariously experienced intergroup contact that either achieved or failed to achieve a joint goal. It finds that contact only improves attitudes towards the outgroup when it achieves a goal and that contact only improves attitudes of the majority group towards the minority group, not of the minority towards the majority group. The third paper bridges perspectives on group conflict in political economy and political psychology. The political economy literature focuses on bargaining; the political psychology literature focuses on group identities. This paper demonstrates that these two perspectives can work together by applying the group identity perspective to the bargaining perspective, showing how group identities and related psychological and cognitive biases complicate bargaining.

Graduation Semester

2020-08

Type of Resource

Thesis

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/108481

Copyright and License Information

2020 by Christopher D. Grady. All rights reserved.

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