Cultural Contact

In the past half century, the dismantling of legalized segregation and the new wave of immigration from Asian, Caribbean, and Latin American countries have brought many diverse ethnic and racial groups in the United States into increased daily contact in such institutional settings as schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods. The pluralist ideals on which this nation was founded—such as civil rights, freedom of expression, and equal protection under the law—assume that we can all live together despite our differences, but intergroup contact has often led to misunderstanding and conflict. In 1992, the Foundation’s Cultural Contact program was initiated based on the simple yet ambitious notion that social science might more effectively engage with the task of making American pluralism work in practice as well as in principle.

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. In other early research supported by the Foundation, Claude Steele of Stanford University and Joshua Aronson of New York University 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. The Foundation also financed the implementation and testing of prototype intervention programs to alleviate conflict between racial and ethnic groups in the South, the Midwest, and Los Angeles. In 2001, Russell Sage published Cultural Divides: Understanding and Overcoming Group Conflict, edited by Deborah Prentice and Dale Miller of Princeton University, which illustrates the range of themes explored in this initial phase of the program on the social psychology of group contact. The book examines how social identity comes to be rooted in groups, and how cultural boundaries impair our ability to resolve disputes. The contributors look at the diverse norms of conflict resolution employed by European, Asian, African, and Mexican ethnic groups in the United States, and suggest that any strategy for ameliorating group conflict and promoting intergroup harmony must embrace cultural pluralism and acknowledge diversity. 

Between 1998 and 2002, the Foundation shifted its focus from intergroup contact and conflict to an examination of how American institutions are responding to increased ethnic and cultural diversity. To this end, the Foundation established three working groups—each concentrated on diversity and group interaction in a specific institutional setting: the American legal, educational, and criminal justice systems—as well as a set of major studies on cultural contact in the U.S. healthcare system.

The Law and Culture working group, initiated in 1998, and led by Martha Minow (Harvard University), Richard Schweder (University of Chicago), and Hazel Markus (Stanford University), examined tensions between Western values embodied in American law and the cultural norms of minority groups. The group analyzed legal cases and social clashes throughout the twentieth century that illustrate tensions between minority and mainstream cultures with regard to child-rearing, education, and religious worship. Such cases—including the 1923 prosecution of a private school teacher for teaching German to a nine-year-old child, and the 1993 Florida ordinance prohibiting the killing of animals for sacrificial purposes by practitioners of the Santeria religion—demonstrate the shifting limits of cultural tolerance in the American system. These and other findings were presented in the 2002 RSF book, Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multi-Cultural Challenge to Liberal Democracies, a provocative volume which explores how liberal democracies around the world respond socially and legally to differences in the cultural and religious practices—such as polygamy, the veiling of women, and female circumcision—of their minority groups.

In 2002 a second working group was established to study the effects of social identity on academic achievement among minority and immigrant youth in American schools. The Social Identity working group, led by Kay Deaux (CUNY), Jacquelynne Eccles (University of Michigan), and Diane Ruble (NYU), examined how social identities originate and develop—particularly as a result of family dynamics—and whether schools and other institutions can learn anything from the way families forge bonds among their members. Some of the group’s findings were summarized in the RSF book, Navigating the Future: Social Identity, Coping, and Life Tasks (2005), which analyzes how young people from racial and ethnic minority groups negotiate conflicts between their sense of identity and the implicit expectations about their behavior and level of accomplishment held by the prevailing culture. The book shows that individuals with strong, positive connections to their ethnic group exhibit greater well-being and are better able to cope with the negative impact of discrimination.

A third working group on Law and Legitimacy, launched in 2002, and led by Tom Tyler (New York University), Jeffrey Fagan (Columbia University), Tracey Meares (University of Chicago), and Christopher Winship (Harvard University), researched how different methods of policing can influence relations between minority communities and the police. In 2007, the Foundation published the first of several books documenting the results of this work. Legitimacy and Criminal Justice: International Perspectives compares efforts by courts and police in the United States and a diverse set of countries around the world to establish their legitimacy in the eyes of the public. The book investigates relations between courts, the police, and communities, examining whether structural differences in these countries’ legal systems—such as France’s color-blind republican model, which permits no ethnicity-based policies, or the systematic lack of police responsiveness in shanty-towns in Brazil—translate into different levels of perceived legitimacy by citizens.

In 2005, the Cultural Contact program’s focus on U.S. institutions was expanded to include research on the American healthcare system in order to better understand how attentive the U.S. health system is to cultural diversity and whether different racial and ethnic groups are treated equally. In the first project funded under this new initiative, Harvard anthropologist Mary-Jo Delvecchio-Good directed a large study of “culturally specific” health care clinics—clinics where more than 50 percent of the patients are from one ethnic group. Good and her research team conducted ethnographies of ten such clinics in the Boston area to discern if and how culture makes a difference in the delivery of health care. Papers based on the research team’s findings were published in 2011 as an RSF edited volume, Shattering Culture: American Medicine Responds to Cultural Diversity.

In another large study, Alicia Fernandez (University of California) and Elizabeth Jacobs (Rush Medical College) investigated the so-called "immigrant health paradox"—the fact that the health of newly arrived immigrants, on average stronger than comparable native-born Americans, decreases and even reverses for immigrants who have lived in America for a long time. Fernandez and Jacobs conducted a survey of Mexican-American immigrants, African Americans and Caucasians with diabetes in San Francisco and Chicago, two cities with large Mexican immigrant populations. Participants were asked about their experiences with the health care system and about structural factors affecting their access to care, such as legal status, lack of insurance, and community support networks. This ambitious study of the immigrant health paradox will shed important insights on the integration of immigrants into American society, as well as on growing disparities in the U.S. health care system.

Current Activities

In its latest phase, the Cultural Contact program has initiated two new working groups, each with a practical emphasis on understanding and addressing the consequences of increasing diversity in the United States. The Racial Bias in Policing Working Group advances the program’s study of the interaction between law enforcement and minority groups with a specific effort to understand and reduce racial bias in law enforcement agencies. The second new working group blends the strengths and objectives of RSF’s Cultural Contact and Immigration programs to examine the effects of immigration on intergroup relations—especially as today’s immigrants increasingly settle in communities with no recent history of receiving and assimilating large numbers of new arrivals. These nontraditional “gateways” are the new testing grounds for American pluralism – whether and how they can accommodate cultural differences remains an open question.

Racial Bias in Policing

As we begin the second decade of the twenty-first century, racial profiling and other abuses of police authority persist in American society. Examples of excess in the exercise of police authority—such as the nationally reported cases involving Rodney King in Los Angeles and Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo in New York City—continue to touch a raw nerve in American civic life and lend credence to the assumption that racial bias may lead to unequal treatment in the criminal justice system. Under what circumstances might race influence police officers’ decision-making? Does racial bias help explain the disparate use of force by police in dealing with minorities, especially young black men? And how do we prevent racial discrimination in the exercise of police authority? These are the motivating questions of the Racial Bias in Policing Working Group, led by Phillip Goff (University of California, Los Angeles), Kay Deaux (City University of New York), John F. Dividio (Yale University), James Sidarius (Harvard University), and Samuel R. Sommers (Tufts University). The working group seeks to integrate experimental and survey research with administrative data from metropolitan police forces nationwide to shed light on why, how, and when race influences police decisions and how law enforcement might change its officer recruitment, hiring, and training procedures to reduce racial bias. The working group has secured unprecedented access to police force personnel data, as well as permission to recruit police officers as study participants in exchange for sharing its research findings with participating departments. The working group is currently developing a series of pilot studies. For example in San Jose, California, Phillip Goff (UCLA), Jack Glaser (University of California, Berkeley), and Kimberly Kahn (University of California, Los Angeles) are using twenty years of arrest data to compare discretionary police stops (e.g., public disruption, disturbing the peace) and non-discretionary stops (e.g., battery) by race and ethnicity of the officer and the suspect. The next stage of their research will involve developing social psychological measures for police officers and pairing those scores with individual officers’ suspect stops and use-of-force history.

Cultural Contact and Immigration

The program’s previous working groups have been primarily concerned with cultural contact in American institutions, but the newest working group will take a different approach by looking at the settings—whether they are cities, small towns, or rural areas—in which such contact takes place. The Cultural Contact and Immigration Working Group will research the evolving character of immigrant life in cities outside of customary gateways such as New York, Miami, or Los Angeles. This joint program initiative reflects two realities: the surge, since the 1980s, of immigrants settling in non-traditional gateways and the current recession, which has led to mass unemployment and widespread economic uncertainty. Immigration and recession are independent yet critically related issues in American social and political life—especially as the foreign-born have traditionally been attracted to the promise of plentiful work and inexpensive housing a healthy economy typically provides. The American government and populace have become increasing agitated over the need for immigration reform, and immigration issues have been aggressively politicized, particularly at state and local levels. But what explains the growing anxiety over immigration? Are the underlying causes of anti-immigrant sentiment economic, political, cultural, or some combination? What role does the perceived race or ethnicity of immigrants play in attitudes toward immigration and immigration policy? And what role may cultural contact, education, and government policy play in promoting tolerance and integration?

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The Cultural Contact and Immigration Working Group will examine these and other questions from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Comprising some twenty social scientists, including sociologists, political scientists, social psychologists, and a social geographer, the group will undertake research that analyzes the cultural frictions and ethnic and racial realignments that result from the rapid growth and dispersion of the foreign-born population in the United States. Proposed projects and questions to be investigated may include: how pro- and anti-immigrant arguments are framed and mobilized; the effects of immigrant concentration on immigrant mobility; the role of experience, emotion, and cognition in attitudes towards immigrants; and the role of institutions in immigrant integration. The working group will employ a range of methodologies, including field experiments, surveys, ethnographies, and focus groups in an attempt to better understand how immigrants are being welcomed – or not – in new locales across the nation, and what their reception may augur for the state of American pluralism. All information on applying for a research award in the Cultural Contact program can be found on our How to Apply page. 

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