This July 4th, celebrate our country and try some intergroup contact

When school segregation was abolished by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the central legal reasoning was black students’ equal treatment under the law. But there was another very important motivation for racially integrating schools, and it's relevant to our current politically polarized environment: intergroup contact.

The contact hypothesis holds that being around outgroup members (that is, people who are different from us) makes it easier for us to accept them and get along with them. Simply being exposed to an outgroup should reduce prejudice and conflict. Advocates of racially integrated schools believed that contact between blacks and whites could reduce interracial violence and lead to more racial equality.

Here are some of the more obvious ways intergroup contact works:

• People fear the unknown, and view it negatively. Contact lets groups learn about each other, reducing fear and negative perceptions

• Getting to know other people makes it easier to understand them and therefore see things from their perspective, which promotes cooperation

But there are two additional explanations that might surprise you:

• We tend to oversimplify our perceptions of people, especially negative ones. But when you actually interact with people, those oversimplifications don't hold up. We're forced to confront other people's complexities and nuance. Very few people are as bad in real life as we have imagined them to be.

• We learn about our attitudes from our behavior. That's confusing, because we usually assume our attitudes cause our behavior, but our behaviors can cause our attitudes, too. And we tend to assume that we like things we approach, and dislike things we avoid. So when we spend time around outgroups, we tend to believe that we like them.

Intergroup contact with the other political party

Intergroup contact applies to any human groups, not just racial ones. We split ourselves into any number of groups, based on whatever identity is most active in our minds in a given moment: sports team, religion, industry, gender, ethnicity, sexual preference. Even Stanley cup, Jeep, and Harley ownership.

While the U.S. has gained ground in terms of expectations for racial equality since 1954 and Brown v. Board, we’re losing ground in terms of political polarization. Polarizations leads us to spend less time with people of the opposite political party, and even develop separate Democratic and Republican shared realities.

This is reducing intergroup contact, and it's a problem. We are rarely physically together. And bumping into each other and rubbing elbows is what smooths off the jagged edges of our preconceived ideas of what “the other side” is like. For example, this data from Pew Research shows members of both parties increasingly ascribing negative traits to the other party:

Here's what you should take away from all this: the contact hypothesis works through our amazing capacity for social cognition, which evolved for us to interact in person, not through screens. That means we need to spend time with the people we least want to if we are going to get along.

People are complicated and multifaceted. They have depth and contradictions and charms and talents that you’ll never know about unless you spend time with them. We don’t have to agree with each other on everything. We also don’t have to cancel and distance ourselves from the people we disagree with. (That won’t change them, anyway.)

So this July 4th, I’m going to celebrate our nation's founding with my small-town neighbors whose politics are very different from my own. We’re going to watch fireworks and let the kids eat too much junk and listen to Stars and Stripes Forever and the 1812 Overture. And we’re all going to benefit from the civilizing effects of intergroup contact.

Happy 4th, America!