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Editors' introduction: Walter Stephan's interest in intergroup relations grew from his early involvement in intercultural relations. He spent substantial time in Latin America as well as Vietnam during his college years. These experiences influenced his choice to study social psychology at the University of Minnesota. His first foray into intergroup relations came with his move to Austin, Texas, in 1971. A Court mandate ordered schools to be desegregated, and Stephan examined the effects of school desegregation there on students' self-esteem and intergroup attitudes. His field research on the effects of desegregation as well as classroom interventions to improve intergroup relations was complemented by his laboratory research on intergroup biases, intergroup threat, intergroup anxiety, and empathy. Stephan brings this lifetime of involvement in both basic and applied research, and deep concern for effective practice and humanistic philosophy, to his commentary. He opens the commentaries with an elucidation of the difficulties in, and benefits of, the central thrust of this volume: the researcher-practitioner collaboration. He paints portraits of practitioners, researchers, and practitioner-researchers, and classifies articles in this issue accordingly. He notes the difficulties among the various parties interested in improving intergroup relations, spanning from simple lack of knowledge to lack of contact to lack of meaningful ways to interact. However, potential benefits of collaboration are abundant for all parties, and Stephan proposes a number of ways in which such partnerships could be actualized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two studies examined people's beliefs about the relative disconfirmability of out-group and in-group stereotypes. In Study 1 (n = 56), Hispanics and White non-Hispanics judged the in-group and out-group stereotypes in terms of the ease with which they could be disconfirmed. The results indicated that strongly, ethnically identified participants believed the out-group stereotype to be more difficult to disconfirm than the in-group stereotype. The second study with 73 White participants examined their beliefs about the disconfirmability of the White and African American stereotypes. The results indicated that participants higher in prejudice believed the African American stereotype is more difficult to disconfirm than the White stereotype to a greater degree than participants lower in prejudice. The results suggest that disconfirmability beliefs comprise a distinct construct that may contribute to the difficulty of changing out-group stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research indicates that information-based intergroup relations programs are only moderately successful (McGregor, 1993; Stephan & Stephan, 1984). In order to explore a means of increasing the effectiveness of techniques used to change attitudes toward outgroups, the current study examined the effects of giving Anglo American students information about everyday incidents of discrimination against African Americans either with or without empathy-inducing instructions. The results indicate that reading about discrimination against African Americans or inducing empathy reduces in-group--out-group bias in attitudes toward African Americans vs. Anglo Americans. The implications of these findings for models of the effects of empathy on intergroup relations are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consistent with the proposal that people rely on implicit causal theories that relate different types of attributions to behaviors that differ in valence, 3 studies showed that in addition to predicting more positive than negative behavior in the target, participants produced an attribution-prediction bias. This bias indicated that persons with a dispositional orientation predicted more negative and less positive behavior from the target than persons with a situational orientation. The authors produced these findings in Studies 1 and 2 by manipulating the perceived characteristic motives of a target (dispositional, situational). In Study 3 the authors used a cultural operationalization of attributional orientations by examining the responses of Western students (dispositionalists) and East Asian students (situationalists). Finally, in support of the underlying mechanism, Study 4 showed that activating dispositional or situational knowledge facilitated the encoding of negative and positive behaviors, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]