Receptivity to dating and marriage across the religious divide in Northern Ireland: The role of intergroup contact
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Intergroup contact has long been recognized as an important factor in promoting positive intergroup attitudes. However, in operationalizing intergroup attitudes, previous studies have rarely investigated attitudes toward one of the most intimate forms of contact, romantic relationships. In this study ( N = 176), we expand the intergroup contact literature to examine the association between intergroup contact and, arguably, a litmus test of intergroup attitudes: receptivity to intergroup romance. We do so in Northern Ireland, a context that is historically and presently characterized by sectarian division and tension between Catholics and Protestants. Our findings reveal that intergroup contact is positively associated with receptivity to both dating and marrying an outgroup member. These associations are mediated by ingroup norms toward outgroup romances. General outgroup attitudes were also found to be positively associated with contact but, in contrast to romantic attitudes, this association was shown, for the first time, to be simultaneously mediated by ingroup norms, anxiety, empathy, and trust. In addition, strength of ingroup identification played a moderating role, with a stronger positive relationship between contact and both romantic and general outgroup attitudes among higher identifiers. The findings highlight the importance of examining attitudes toward intergroup romantic relationships, as well as understanding the different mediating and moderating mechanisms which may account for how contact influences general attitudes and romantic attitudes. In the wake of the UK vote to leave the European Union, they also serve as an important reminder of how intergroup contact can be effective in promoting peace in Northern Ireland.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".