Contact Hypothesis

We all experience having a conflict with someone, and we all experience not liking someone even before knowing the person. There is a saying, translated roughly from Malay, "not know, therefore, not love" that implies we hardly love something that we do not have any knowledge about. Sometimes in usual cases too, we do not like the things we do not have any knowledge about. Actually, this is true and has been validated by a psychologist, Gordon Allport, who asserted that prejudice can easily be elevated by simply knowing something about that someone. He called this theory as Contact Hypothesis, where interpersonal contact can produce knowledge that can be a good cure on prejudice.

This simple way of curbing prejudice can be useful not just in management setting, but we can benefit from it in our everyday life too. You sometimes always find yourself not favoring someone just "because the way he looks." This is normal because we are equipped with a preset stigma in our cognition that sometimes we do not realize we have. These stigma "guide" us on what to feel when we see something that could or could not resemble something in our preset stigma. When this happens, when you do not like someone without any apparent reason, try to know that person, and you will more likely grow to actually like him or her.

Contact Hypothesis does not just work on prejudice and unreasonable disliking, it can also work on conflicts between two people or groups who have actually known each other. Sometimes, when we have a conflict with someone, do you notice that you are actually angrier when you do not contact the person? A woman who hates her neighbor always seems to be bitching out behind her neighbor's back, but we never see them both to actually bitch in front of each other. Two classmates who clearly dislike each other never seem to talk or meet eye-to-eye, but they appear to have a heightened issue everytime they bump into each other but do not have a contact.

These kind of conflicts are fueled by "absence." The more absent the person with whom we have a conflict in our life, the more unresolved the issue becomes. In this situation, try to make the first move by saying hi or make a brief chat, providing you both want to make a brief chat. You'll find yourself, just like above, being less angry and lore likely to resolve the issue.

Contact Hypothesis, according to Gordon Allport, is not without its conditions:
1) Both sides have equal relationships.
2) Both sides have a common goal to achieve.
3) There is actually potential for both sides to form a relation.
4) Both are under a common supported authority.

But then, psychology has a lot of exceptional cases, even if you do not fulfill any of these conditions, try to make an interpersonal contact with someone you have an issue with. With luck, you can sleep at night like a baby.