History
Most research on the contact hypothesis resulted from World War II. Due to a shortage of combat troops, General Dwight D. Eisenhower allowed Black soldiers assigned in Europe at that time the option to volunteer for combat duty. The Army was concerned with the troop morale involving White soldiers who would possibly share the battlefield or be integrated into platoons with the Black soldiers. The results of a survey at that time were very polarized. Sixty-two percent of segregated units involving White soldiers said they would dislike the idea of serving in semi-integrated units. White soldiers who were currently serving within semi-integrated units reported only 7% dissatisfaction. This supports the notion that intergroup contact, under the right conditions, can reduce prejudice. Other studies have claimed that contact hypothesis is a very simple and optimistic and that contact would most likely gravitate toward hostility rather than friendship if two competitive parties were involved. If groups with a negative outlook were brought together, it would lead to increases of negative attitudes rather than positive.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The true theater of history is therefore the temperate zone.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)