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Robbers Cave Experiment
Definition
The Robbers Cave experiment demonstrated that an attempt to simply bring hostile groups together is not enough to reduce intergroup prejudice. Rather, this experiment confirmed that groups must cooperate and have common goals to truly build peace. Thus, although contact is vital to reducing tensions between groups, interdependence is essential for establishing lasting intergroup harmony. This experiment is a classic in social psychology and is important because it has implications for reducing conflict between real social groups. In addition, this study has implications for a number of prominent social psychological theories, including realistic conflict theory and social identity theory.
Background
The purpose of this study was to create conflict and hostility between groups, and then employ interventions designed to reduce it. Researchers accomplished this goal by sending ...
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- Personality Judgments, Accuracy of
- Person-Positivity Heuristic
- Positive–Negative Asymmetry
- Primacy Effect, Attribution
- Primacy Effect, Memory
- Priming
- Projection
- Prototypes
- Recency Effect
- Responsibility Attribution
- Risk Appraisal
- Salience
- Satisficing
- Schemas
- Scripts
- Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
- Self-Reference Effect
- Self-Serving Bias
- Self-Verification Theory
- Shifting Standards
- Similarity-Attraction Effect
- Social Categorization
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- Social Cognitive Neuroscience
- Social Comparison
- Social Impact Theory
- Social Projection
- Spontaneous Trait Inferences
- Spreading of Alternatives
- Subliminal Perception
- Subtyping
- Symbolic Interactionism
- Theory of Mind
- Thin Slices of Behavior
- Three-Dimensional Model of Attribution
- Transactive Memory
- Value Pluralism Model
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