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Cultural Contact
Program Description
The Cultural Contact program was initiated in 1992 in an effort to bring social science to bear more effectively on improving the quality of contact among the many racial and ethnic groups that make up American society. The United States has increasingly become a multi-ethnic, multi-racial society, due in part to increased immigration, as well as the civil rights revolution, which guaranteed access for all groups to the principal institutions of American society. America's cities have become a mosaic of diverse groups competing for jobs, promotions, school places, neighborhoods, and political influence. Many of America's new immigrants seek to maintain some measure of their own ethnic identity, casting doubt on the validity of the old assimilationist model in which groups of different racial and national origin gradually become homogenized into American culture. Unless ways are found to foster positive inter-group attitudes, group conflict can undermine the principles of tolerance and social acceptance that are essential to the successful functioning of democracy. Social science has an important role to play in examining the impact of cultural differences and in fostering a climate of mutual tolerance and understanding.
Among its early efforts, the program funded investigations of group contact in work places and on college campuses, examining the effectiveness of diversity training and affirmative action programs. In other research supported by the Foundation, Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson designed studies demonstrating that stereotype threat -- the fear of reinforcing negative stereotypes of one's group by failing -- inhibits the academic performance of minority students. This work is leading to the development of interventions that empower minority students to overcome the ill effects of stereotype threat by, for instance, teaching young people to view intelligence as a quality that can be expanded with hard work.
This initial phase of the Cultural Contact program culminated in the 2001 publication of Cultural Divides: Understanding and Overcoming Group Conflict by a working group of social psychologists under the leadership of Dale Miller and Deborah Prentice of Princeton University. Cultural Divides shows how social psychological research can shed light on problems of group conflict and misunderstanding that affect the functioning of our increasingly multicultural society.
Between 1998 and 2002, the Foundation established three working groups within the Cultural Contact program, marking a shift in focus from inter-group contact and conflict to how institutions are responding to increasing ethnic and cultural diversity. The Social Identity working group, which completed its work in 2006, was led by Kay Deaux (CUNY), Jacquelynne Eccles (University of Michigan), and Diane Ruble (NYU), and studied the link between social identity and academic achievement for minority and immigrant youth in American schools. Navigating the Future: Social Identity, Coping, and Life Tasks, an edited volume resulting from the group's work published in 2005, examines how young people conceptualize and draw on their social identity at times of transition, conflict, and stress. Contesting Stereotypes and Creating Identities: Social Categories, Social Identities, and Educational Participation, another jointly-authored volume which was published in 2007 , explores how schools perpetuate low expectations for minority youth, how these stereotypes hinder students’ academic success, and the ways that minority students attempt to empower themselves by redefining their identities.
The Law and Culture working group, led by Martha Minow of Harvard, Richard Schweder of the University of Chicago, and Hazel Markus of Stanford, examined the ways in which Western legal systems presuppose and codify the values of the cultural mainstream, and how minority groups react when they are forced to comply with norms of the dominant culture. In 2002, the group published Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multi-Cultural Challenge to Liberal Democracies, a provocative volume outlining legal and social clashes that demonstrate the limits of cultural tolerance in America. A second book, entitled Just Schools (forthcoming, 2008), discusses two distinct approaches to recognizing diversity in schools: the first emphasizes equal access for minority students to mainstream economic and political life, while the second calls for preserving minority students’ attachments to their ethnic communities and traditions.
The Law and Legitimacy working group, organized by Tom Tyler (NYU), Jeffrey Fagan (Columbia), Tracey Meares (University of Chicago), and Christopher Winship (Harvard) researched the ways in which different methods of policing can influence the climate of trust between minority communities and the police. The Law and Legitimacy group held a conference in 2005 comparing efforts by courts and the police in the U.S. and other countries to establish their legitimacy in the eyes of the public. The Foundation published a major comparative volume entitled Legitimacy and Criminal Justice: International Perspectives (2007), elucidating the working group’s research presented at the conference.
Current Activities
Building on past investigations of the criminal justice system and schools, recently initiated Cultural Contact projects look at a new set of institutions – the U.S. health care system – and its adaptation to diversity. Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good of Harvard University received support from the Foundation to study "culturally specific" clinics, which specialize in caring for members of a particular ethnic group. Through observations of clinics and interviews with patients and practitioners, Good and her research team will study whether ethnically specific health care institutions do a better job than “generic” clinics in providing care for underserved communities.
The Cultural Contact program has also initiated a major study of the “immigrant health paradox.” Newly arrived immigrants are generally healthier than their native-born counterparts, but they lose this advantage over time. Previous research has indicated that selection effects are too small to explain this pattern, so Alicia Fernandez (UCSF) and Elizabeth Jacobs (Rush Medical College) will consider three alternative explanations: the loss of protective cultural practices as immigrants adapt to American ways, changes in immigrants’ self-perceived social status, and cultural barriers to effective treatment that immigrants encounter in American medical institutions. Fernandez and Jacobs lead a multi-disciplinary team of social scientists and clinical researchers, who are studying Mexican immigrants with diabetes in San Francisco and Chicago, as well as native-born African American and Caucasian control groups. By comparing how various socioeconomic, psychological, and cultural factors affect the treatment outcomes of immigrant patients, the investigators aim to shed light on the mechanisms responsible for the observed “paradox.”
For information on applying for a research award in the Cultural Contact program, please see our How to Apply section.
Recent Visiting Scholars
2008 - 2009
Phillip Atiba Goff, University of California, Los Angeles
2007 - 2008
Tamara Buckley, Hunter College
Erica Gabrielle Foldy, New York University
Susan Turner Meiklejohn, Hunter College, CUNY
2006 - 2007
Peter Skerry, Boston College
Ilan Meyer, Columbia University
Arthur Whaley, University of Texas
2005 - 2006
Charles Clotfelter, Duke University
Karolyn Tyson, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
2004 - 2005
Joshua Aronson, New York University
Ingrid Banks, University of California, Santa Barbara
Mignon Moore, Columbia University
2003 - 2004
Nancy DiTomaso, Rutgers University
Karyn Lacy, Emory University
Richard E. Nisbett, University of Michigan
2002 - 2003
Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Harvard University
J. Nicole Shelton, Princeton University
2001 - 2002
Louise Lamphere, University of New Mexico
Shana Levin, Claremont McKenna College
Paul Rozin, University of Pennsylvania
Jim Sidanius, Harvard University
Colette van Laar, Leiden University, the Netherlands