ON THE NATURE OF PREJUDICE

82 Gaertner and Dovidioconditions. While team membership may indeed facilitate the beneficialeffects of contact, our model also suggests that unifying perceptions maybe a consequence of cooperative, self-revealing interactions. Indeed, wepropose that the perception of common ingroup identity is psychologicallyinstrumental to bringing outgroup members closer to the self, therebyincreasing positive orientations toward them.In terms of developing a common, more inclusive ingroup identity,Allport did not fully anticipate the importance of majority–minority groupdistinctions and preferences for full assimilation or multicultural acculturationstrategies. Whereas majority group members (e.g., White students inthe United States or Dutch citizens in the Netherlands) value an assimilationmodel, members of minority groups (e.g., Black and Latino collegestudents in the United States or immigrants in the Netherlands) prefer adual identity (an integration-pluralistic model; see Berry, 1984; Dovidio,Gaertner, & Kafati, 2000; van Oudenhoven, Prins, & Buunk, 1998). Thus,interventions designed to improve the intergroup attitudes of one groupmay not be effective, and may be counterproductive, for improving theattitudes of the other group. Current research thus emphasizes the importanceof the reciprocal group responses for understanding and addressingintergroup relations more so than Allport did in The Nature of Prejudice.Allport was correct in identifying many of the key elements, but psychologistshave made significant progress in integrating these into morecomprehensive and dynamic models of intergroup relations.Future DirectionsResearch on the role of social categorization is, on the one hand, a maturearea of inquiry, while on the other hand, its application to understandingthe dynamics of how intergroup contact can reduce intergroup bias is arelatively recent development in the field. Although substantial researchon the Contact Hypothesis has been conducted over the past 50 years (seePettigrew & Tropp, ch. 16 this volume), the concerted focus on thecognitive representation of groups as moderators and mediators of theeffect of contact represents a more recent development. This perspective,however, has significant potential for promoting integration of diverse,and previously separate, perspectives on intergroup relations. Thus, we seethe pursuit of integration as the direction and promise of future research inthis area. The emphases of these efforts we believe will occur in at leastthree ways: (a) exploring the complementarity of different category-based