The intergroup perspective on cross-group friendship

Cross-group friendship has long been considered a powerful component of positive intergroup relations, largely because cross-group friendship was assumed to be an “optimal” type of intergroup contact (Allport, 1954). While we recognize that cross-group friendship cannot exist in the absence of intergroup contact, we argue that cross-group friendship is something greater than extremely good contact. Cross-group friendship is the manifestation of intergroup cooperation at the individual level of scale. Describing our asymptotic model of intergroup contact (MacInnis & Page-Gould, 2015), we discuss how intergroup contact can improve or worsen prejudice. When contact involves repeated intergroup interactions with the same outgroup member, then a cross-group friendship has the potential to emerge. Drawing on complexity theory, we suggest that cross-group friendships are complex adaptive systems that emerge from repeated intergroup interactions with the same outgroup member. Cross-group friendships exhibit many features of complex adaptive systems, such as being chaotic, dynamic, and self-organizing. We organize our research on cross-group friendship into early, intermediate, and established stages of cross-group friendship development to explore this idea. We conclude that cross-group friendships are complex manifestations of intergroup relations at the individual level.