3. Discuss the relevant factors which we need to take into consideration when we wish to build social harmony in society.

Key Points:

• Prejudice and conflict are significant social ills that produce enormous human suffering.
• Prejudice can be attacked by public-service propaganda and educational campaigns.

• There is now extensive evidence for the contact hypothesis, which states that contact between members of different groups, under appropriate conditions, can improve intergroup relations.

• Contact appears to work best by reducing ‘intergroup anxiety’ about meeting members of the other group and by promoting positive intergroup orientations, such as empathy and perspective taking.
• Recent work supports the idea that clear group affiliations should be maintained in contact situations, and that participating members should be seen as being (at least to some extent) typical of their groups.

• A further limitation is that optimal intergroup contact may be hard to bring about on a large scale.
• By reducing intergroup anxiety, both direct and extended forms of contact contribute towards more positive views of the outgroup.
• Prejudice depends on ingroup–outgroup categorizations.

• Decategorization and recategorization.
• A more successful strategy may be a combination of a super-ordinate identity and distinctive sub-group identities, so that each group preserves its distinctive sub-group identity within a common, super-ordinate identity.
• Multiculturalism and cultural pluralism.