Contact, cooperation and communication are the three aspects used by social psychologists when attempting to improve intergroup relations. An intergroup relation is any perception or behaviour that allows members to be aware that they are part of a distinct group or social party. The strategy contact, which is said to be the most effective is used to reduce bias between individuals in specific groups, this can be shown in the Tropp and Pettigrew (2005) study. Cooperation is used to improve relations between people in the same or different social groups and has been investigated in the 1984 study by Brewer and Miller. Communication is predominantly used to help parties resolve their issues and discrepancies using language, bargaining and mediation from a third party which also prevents bias. This technique has been used in the Thompson and Hrebec 1996 study. Arguably, contact and communication seem to be the best strategies to use to improve intergroup relations because they involve aspects such as peace-making to promote cohesion within the social group and using direct action in order to bring together out and in groups. furthermore, communication can be used most effectively if there is conflict within the social group between two or more people or two or more separate groups which cooperation may not be able to completely carry out as there may be conflict, thereby making it the preferred method.
Contact is the method of putting two conflicting individuals together in order to make an attempt at forming and agreement or bond between the people in question, this can be through direct, extended or indirect contact. Social psychologist Allport is consistently credited for his methods of promoting contact in his book the 'nature of prejudice' whereby he stated that intergroup contact could reduce bias, this statement alongside other discoveries point towards a similar conclusion. A prime example of contact being used to prevent and decrease conflict between conflicting groups is shown in the 2005 desegregation studies conducted by Tropp and Pettigrew, this study highlights the key points of intergroup contact making an attempt to diminish intergroup anxiety, promote empathetic views and amplify knowledge about the outgroup. Tropp and Pettigrew used 515 different studies from between the years 1940 and 2000, 52% of these being contact between different racial groups and the remaining cases being contact between people of different ages, sexual orientation, disability or mental illness. The studies chosen were only used if they were empirical studies that had intergroup contact as an independent variable, involved contacts of members from defined groups and had to involve actual interaction between the members in these groups. Results of this study have shown that intergroup contact can reduce intergroup prejudice and relationships between contact and prejudice is usually weaker amongst minorities compared to the majority. Further research by the two have also suggested that the bonds formed between contact and prejudice are not products of participant selection or bias and are genuine reflections that prove that contact can reduce prejudice, especially within the tests that did not allow the participant to avoid intergroup contact. Studies by Olaizola, Diaz and Ochoa show support for the contact theory and further prove that contact does in fact have an impact on unifying people of different groups through their experiment concerning medium and high socio-economic Spanish adolescents and immigrants, both male and female in a school. Results of this experiment showed that blatant and subtle prejudice scores were considerably lower after they were exposed to being in contact with the immigrants over a period of time in comparison to the students who were not involved in any intergroup relations. In addition to this study, it is shown that intergroup contact can have a positive indirect effect on others. In studies from Italy, Germany, Northern Ireland and the United States ( Paolini, Hewstone, Cairns, & Voci, 2004; Pettigrew, Wagner, Christ, & Stellmacher, 2007; Wright, Aron, & Brody, 2008; Wright, Aron, McLaughlin-Volpe, & Ropp, 1997) it has been presented that having an in-group friend who has a friend from an out-group can diminish any prejudice towards them as it helps to make it a normal concept and can help change social norms and attitudes between interacting with people separate from your usual group. These interactions are especially important for people who may live in a more rural or segregated area of these countries stated above. On the other hand, critics such as Forbes, a Canadian political scientist (1997,2004) have argued that intergroup contact is helpful and does lower prejudice but only at on an individual basis, he states that it fails to take into account group conflict. However, this critique has been discarded due to the perspective that if prejudice is clearly diminished or lessened due to an act of intergroup contact then the group aspect is involved in that sense. Due to these points, we can see that contact is an effective strategy when improving intergroup relations.
Communication is used to improve intergroup relations when one or more party is in conflict. Methods such as bargaining, mediation and attribution can be used to help resolve these issues and seek a mutual agreement between the parties involved. Bargaining is defined in Webster's dictionary as "an agreement between parties settling what each shall give and receive in a transaction between them"; one prime example of bargaining being used is the meeting between Barack Obama and Raul Castro. Obama bargained and mediated to create peace with Castro in order to form a repore and strengthen relations between America and Cuba and allowed more trade deals and prosperity for both parties. This meeting shows that communication can be used effectively in order to promote cohesion between two parties who have different values and beliefs. An article written by by Johan Myndhardt (2013)details problems about relations in South Africa also shows how effective communication can be at a larger scale, he notes that relations between different ethnicities living within South Africa were strained for a long period of time due to the apartheid. Following up to this, the Maccrone (1949) study which focused on the attitudes between different ethnicities who lived in South Africa is a prime example of why intergroup communication holds value, the study involving Afrikaans and English speaking White students, Indian and Black students was carried out to see how each group sees each other and how they identify with each other. Both parties stated that the opposite ethnicity was a distant outgroup, with the Afrikaans speaking students stating that the Black and Indian students were the most distant out group from them. Communication would improve intergroup relations in this situation between these differing parties as they could find a common ground between each other so they are all part of the in-group instead of separating into in-groups and out-groups and improving attitudes towards each other. In other situations communication may not be as effective as stated previously for example in the workplace when a colleague does not necessarily like their boss or if conflict between two people has escalated. If this occurs mediation may be used whereby a third party is introduced to attempt to resolve conflict and often the mediator is someone who is trusted by both sides (carnevale and choi 2000) in order to remove bias.