Countries like Uganda receive tens of thousands of refugees each year as a result of regional conflicts. In these contexts, host and refugee communities are brought into contact and must collaborate to pursue shared goals, often with the support of international aid programs designed to reduce prejudice and foster intergroup contact and cooperation. However, when evaluating an NGO-run farmer group program aimed at increasing interaction between Ugandan nationals and refugees, I find that even Ugandan nationals who have more positive attitudes towards the \textit{wider outgroup} (refugees) can still hold prejudiced beliefs about an \textit{outgroup individual's} work effort that are difficult to change. Existing theories fall short of explaining why some host populations express acceptance of refugees as a whole, while simultaneously holding prejudiced views toward individuals. Combining qualitative fieldwork, survey data, and vignette experiments that mimic real-world work scenarios, I propose a new explanation for why so many intergroup contact interventions appear to fail or yield mixed results -- prejudice comes in two sub-types, outgroup animus and prejudicial heuristics, and mismeasurement or mistargeting of these subtypes can lead to intervention designs that derail intergroup contact even in ideal settings. Through vignette experiments, I show how prejudicial heuristics undermine cooperation by influencing refugees and Ugandan nationals to adopt divergent cooperative strategies, creating frustration and reinforcing mistrust. These findings suggest that interventions aimed at increasing intergroup contact should more carefully consider how preexisting prejudice can undermine cooperation in already challenging settings.
Please find the link to the paper here.
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