Contact, conflict, or opportunity? Out-group exposure creates tie opportunity, not tolerance

2026-05-27

AI Summary

This study investigates how increasing social diversity influences individuals’ out-group preferences—whether by reducing bias, reinforcing in-group favoritism, or merely altering the structural opportunities for intergroup interaction. Leveraging friendship and rejection nomination data from nearly 5,000 students across 228 classrooms, the authors innovatively employ the Wallenius noncentral hypergeometric distribution within a multilevel modeling framework to disentangle genuine social preferences from structural constraints on cross-group ties. Findings indicate that preferences based on race and socioeconomic status remain largely unaffected by classroom composition, whereas higher proportions of out-group members by gender paradoxically intensify same-gender preferences, consistent with conflict theory. These results challenge the universality of contact theory, suggesting that diversity primarily expands opportunities for interaction without substantially reshaping underlying social preferences.

Abstract

Three theories offer competing predictions about how people respond to growing diversity in their social environment. Contact theory suggests more exposure to out-groups reduces prejudice; conflict theory predicts a stronger in-group preference; structural opportunity theory argues that shifts in behaviour only reflect changes in the opportunity structure rather than in underlying preference. We test these predictions using friendship and rejection nominations from nearly 5,000 students in 228 classrooms, across gender, ethnicity, and socio-economic status. We estimate individual preference using a multilevel model based on the Wallenius hypergeometric distribution, which accounts for the finite, asymmetric pool of potential ties. Results show that for ethnicity and socio-economic status, preferences are largely unaffected by classroom composition. For gender, however, same-gender preference strengthens as the out-group increases, supporting conflict theory. This means greater diversity does not necessarily change the intrinsic preference of students toward out-group peers, but creates more opportunities for cross-group interactions.

Problem

• out-group exposure
• prejudice
• contact theory
• conflict theory
• structural opportunity theory

Innovation

• Wallenius hypergeometric distribution
• multilevel modeling
• out-group preference
• structural opportunity
• social network nomination