The relationship of personal control, power and anxiety to the contact -bias relationship

An experiment (involving college students) and a longitudinal survey (involving college students and university employees) examined the role of perceived personal control as a mediator in the contact-bias relationship and as a mediator of asymmetrical social power on intergroup outcomes. Personal control is defined as an individual's perception of situational control (control over the environment) and self-control (control over emotions, thoughts and behaviors). Social power asymmetry is an inequality in two groups' relative influence over one another's outcomes.;The experiment was designed to influence a group of White students' perceptions of personal control prior to an anticipated encounter with Black individuals. Increased control was expected to decrease intergroup anxiety and increase participant's desire to approach the outgroup, positive outgroup feelings, and common ingroup identity. These outcomes would resemble the effects of favorable intergroup contact and would support the hypothesis that favorable contact improves intergroup relations partly by increasing perceptions of personal control.;Personal control is hypothesized to be a separate construct from social power, and therefore may predict different outcomes. Further, some effects of higher social power (e.g., lower anxiety) may occur partly by increasing perceived personal control. To investigate this, social power was manipulated, as well. Experimental control manipulations were not effective, however, so a series of internal path analyses were conducted disregarding experimental conditions.;Structural equation modeling was used to examine data from the longitudinal survey (given twice over a range of three weeks to five months) that tested the direction of effects over time between perceived personal control, anxiety, and one-group feelings after controlling for previous favorable intergroup contact and asymmetrical power.;The internal analyses and the longitudinal survey showed a strong, direct path between favorable outgroup contact and control perceptions. Also, as expected, personal control increased common ingroup identity and decreased anxiety. These causal changes were not reciprocal. The survey also indicated that favorable contact, perceived control, common ingroup identity, and anxiety explained 59% and 62%, respectively, of the variance in desire to approach and favorable feelings toward the outgroup.