“Direct” and “Indirect” Contact Methods Likely Work in Similar Ways, so They Should Both Be Effective

In a previous article, we argued that efforts to improve the political environment should reach Americans as media consumers, in addition to seeking public participation. Reaching Americans as media consumers uses media like film, TV, and social media to change what Americans see and hear about fellow Americans across the political spectrum. Participant-based efforts include dialogues and community-based activities that require active involvement.

In this article, we show that the mechanisms underlying each type of approach are quite similar. The categories of mechanisms we cover are emotional, cognitive, relational, and repetitive. We use the terms from the academic literature, “direct” and “indirect” contact, which are fairly similar to participant and media consumer approaches, respectively.

Thus, there is no deep reason that one should be preferred more than another in terms of quality. This said, there are differences in terms of ability to scale (benefitting media consumer / indirect contact approaches) and “stickiness” of a given event (benefitting participation / direct contact approaches, though media repetition can outweigh this issue in many cases). Additionally, these categories should be thought of as part of a continuum, including options that fall in between these poles like attending an event and listening to speakers with somewhat different political beliefs.

In the academic literature, participant and media consumer approaches generally align with “direct” and “indirect” contact, respectively.

If you have been in spaces to improve the political environment by changing how Americans think and feel about each other, you have likely heard the terms “contact theory” or the “contact hypothesis.” The takeaway from these is relatively straightforward: interpersonal interactions across a divide, especially under certain conditions, tend to reduce prejudice and lead to benefits like warmer feelings between the groups. In the literature, these are often called “direct” contact approaches.

This is fairly similar to our framing of “participant” approaches. However, a default understanding of direct contact, the term we will use going forward, is mostly about dialogue and interpersonal interaction, without necessarily trying to achieve some tangible outcome together (e.g., cleaning up a park in a neighborhood). Our definition of participant approaches includes both more dialogue-oriented and action-oriented activities.

A variant of contact theory involves work on “indirect contact,” which we also previously wrote about in The Fulcrum. Indirect contact involves seeing others in a better light and in relationship with each other. It includes parasocial contact (positive one-sided relationships with a character) and vicarious contact (seeing people across some divide, acting in constructive ways with each other).

Much like the relationship between direct contact and participant approaches, indirect contact is similar to—but not exactly the same—as our definition of efforts to target Americans as media consumers. Our definition of media consumer approaches includes all indirect contact efforts, but it also includes approaches that have an impact without any form of “contact” with another person (e.g., sharing data that can help correct misperceptions of each other).

Since the academic literature has mostly discussed direct contact and indirect contact, this article will generally stick with these terms, recognizing their general—but not perfect—alignment with our preferred terms of participant and media consumer approaches.

The literature has explored why direct contact works, and we will try to extend this to indirect contact approaches.

Substantial academic work has gone into understanding why direct contact works. This academic research shows a variety of emotional, cognitive, relational, and repetitive reasons for effectiveness. In this article, we will highlight these findings, starting with definitions for improvements for each.

• Emotional: These factors address overly negative feelings toward another group, even when there is not a clear rationale for these feelings.
• Cognitive: These factors address overly negative thoughts about another group, sometimes based on factual errors in terms of understanding them.
• Relational / social norms: These factors address excessive hesitancy about interacting with those in another group, beyond the emotional or cognitive categories mentioned above.
• Mere exposure / repetition: Somewhat different from the other factors, this involves the finding that repetitive “mere exposure” alone can induce greater liking.

These categories go beyond shorthand answers for why contact theory works, such as one “sees the common humanity” of the other side. While there is some truth to a statement like that, researchers have gone much deeper.

Since there has been less academic research on indirect contact overall, there has also been less research on its mechanisms. We will argue that the mechanisms for indirect contact seem quite similar, at least from a theoretical basis.

Therefore, at least in terms of underlying mechanisms, we do not believe there should be a major reason to choose one approach over another. Likely, they both should be used, and other factors (e.g., scale, funding, exact target audience) should help choose how much to focus on each.

How direct contact improves emotions toward other groups, and how indirect contact should be similar

Early theories—and perhaps common intuition—suggest that improving views of one another is primarily a matter of knowledge correction. The assumption is that if people simply learn accurate information about the other group, their attitudes will shift. However, contemporary research shows that while knowledge plays a role, it is most effective in tandem with more emotional mechanisms. At least two key mechanisms are anxiety reduction and empathy building.

• Anxiety reduction: People often experience apprehension or fear when engaging with members of an outgroup, particularly when that group has been framed as threatening or fundamentally opposed to their values. Intergroup contact, when structured positively, helps alleviate this anxiety by creating safe, cooperative environments where individuals can interact. This holds true in both direct and mediated forms of contact—whether through face-to-face discussion or repeated exposure to positive media representations of the outgroup.
• Empathy building: Beyond reducing fear, contact theory operates by increasing empathy. Direct interactions help individuals recognize the shared human experiences of outgroup members, making it harder to rely on simplistic stereotypes.

Indirect contact should also help to reduce anxiety and build empathy.

When people are portrayed via indirect contact in a better light, anxiety about interacting with them should tend to decline. One way to think of this involves using More Like US’s CAST (Complex, Admire, Similar, Together) framework for those in the arts for how to better portray those across the political spectrum. The connection with anxiety is quite easily seen when imagining interacting with a person mostly aligning with CAST, and also how anxiety-inducing it is to interact with those seen in a light opposite to CAST (stereotypical, inferior, totally different, and worthy of avoidance).

To unpack this point using CAST, it should be a relatively low-anxiety situation to interact with someone, seen as fully human with a lot of complexity, capable of actions worthy of respect or even Admiration, who shares some similarities, and has some track record of successful cross-ideological togetherness (e.g., friendship, collaboration). On the other hand, it seems likely to cause a great deal of anxiety to imagine interacting with someone seen as stereotypically and completely different and cognitively and/or morally inferior, without any track record of successful cross-ideological interaction.

And regarding indirect contact’s ability to build empathy, parasocial relationships—one-sided connections formed with media figures—can allow individuals to feel as if they “know” someone from the outgroup, thereby increasing emotional investment in their well-being and perspective.

Direct contact also works via cognitive mechanisms, as do some indirect misperception corrections.

Another crucial mechanism for correcting misperceptions about outgroups is the enhancement of knowledge about that group. Without increased knowledge, individuals rely on preconceptions that can be “false, stereotypic, or logically flawed.”

When individuals engage in direct intergroup contact, they often gain insights into the complexities and diversities of the outgroup, challenging oversimplified stereotypes. Such stereotypes can involve factual errors of those in the other group.

Similarly, indirect contact often relies—at least in part—on correcting these factual errors. For instance, some of the top-performing interventions in the Strengthening Democracy Challenge involved using survey data to correct overly negative misperceptions of members of the other party, including their surprisingly low willingness to break democratic norms or infrequent extreme positions on immigration and dehumanization of those in the other party. These interventions are indirect by definition since they were accessed via a computer without any interaction with another person. These misperceptions are sometimes called “perception gaps,” and More Like US focuses strongly on correcting them throughout our resources.

Direct contact importantly develops relationships, and indirect contact can facilitate relationships and social norms.

Ideally, direct contact across the political spectrum will blossom into a relational component, building some friendships or collaboration. Friendships appear to have emotional, attitudinal, and policy implications.

A 2016 Pew Research Center study found that “having friendships that cross party lines is associated with feelings about the opposing party, especially among Republicans.” Additionally, in the original More in Common Perception Gap study, Democrats with more formal education were more likely to say that “almost all” of their friends had the same political views, and the researchers provided this as an explanation for the finding that perception gaps among Democrats increased with additional formal education. Finally, in the early 2000s, around the time when Massachusetts became the first state to allow same-sex marriage, Pew Research also found that having a gay friend, colleague, or family member almost doubled the likelihood of supporting same-sex marriage.

Indirect contact, particularly the variant of vicarious contact, normalizes relationships across divides. When people see a successful relationship, it becomes easier to imagine it in one’s own life. Some classic examples of this include the TV show Will and Grace, which helped normalize friendships between straight and gay Americans, and the movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, which at least helped reduce taboos surrounding white and Black romantic relationships.

Indirect contact can also more easily change social norms at scale, a position we argued in a previous article in The Fulcrum. These social norms can encourage interaction. As More in Common found in its recent report from March, The Connection Opportunity, community norms were the strongest predictors of interest in connecting, across all differences studied.

Finally, direct contact—especially via relationships—allows for the benefit of repetition, and indirect contact is designed for repetition.

The last factor is something of a quirk of human psychology—the mere exposure effect, which finds that the more people are exposed to at least a neutral stimulus, the more they tend to like it. This was mentioned as a possible mechanism for the impact of contact theory / hypothesis in one of the most well-cited reviews.

Direct contact can harness the benefits of the mere exposure effect if it leads to some kind of friendship or collaboration. These involve repeated interactions, which are central to any successful relationship.

People have opportunities to be exposed to indirect contact repeatedly. It can be packaged in many forms (e.g., TV, film, song, social media), and a given type of content can be repeated many times (e.g., across numerous episodes of a show, in many different social media posts). These all provide opportunities to lead to the benefits of the mere exposure effect.

Repetition also helps to address one of the most common criticisms of indirect contact approaches: that the effect of a given intervention can decay relatively quickly. As anyone who works with messaging knows, repetition is key; whether or not it is precisely accurate, the “rule of seven” in concept in marketing is that “a potential customer should encounter a brand’s marketing messages at least seven times before making a purchase decision.” Somewhat similarly, how people think about those in another group is unlikely to change for good after a single message, and change will nearly always require repeated messages in various forms. Part of the power of repeated messaging comes from the mere exposure effect.

Since direct and indirect contact means both can use emotional, cognitive, relational, and repetitive mechanisms, the choice to use each comes from other factors.

This article argues that the underlying mechanisms driving benefits from direct and indirect contact are similar, so one type is not obviously better than the other in terms of effectiveness.

Therefore, the choice to use direct vs. indirect means should often come from other factors. Direct contact allows for personal practice that can build confidence for future interactions. A single direct contact event may be more emotionally impactful (not to mention simply longer in duration), so it is likely “stickier” in terms of the longevity of its impact. Meanwhile, indirect contact generally allows for greater scale, often at a lower cost per person impacted.

Because we at More Like US focus on scale in a country of >340 million people, we tend to emphasize indirect contact—and more broadly, efforts to impact Americans as media consumers. This is entirely about the desire for scale, not because More Like US sees direct contact as ineffective. Additionally, More Like US offers simple, repeatable messaging guidance about how to have more successful conversations across the political spectrum, using the framing of being SVL (pronounced like “civil,” and referring to sharing Stories, relating to their Values, and Listening during political conversations). Thus, an indirect means of conveying a message can hopefully lead to more successful direct conversations.

Conclusion: Let’s use both direct and indirect contact methods, which both activate similar mechanisms

Given the strong theoretical and empirical foundations outlined above, there is ample reason to pursue both direct and indirect contact methods. Both approaches activate similar underlying mechanisms—emotional, cognitive, relational, and repetitive—making them comparably effective. These shared mechanisms underscore the complementary value of each method.

The emotional power and "stickiness" of direct, participant-based interactions create deep, lasting impacts through firsthand experiences. Meanwhile, indirect, media-driven contact methods enable far-reaching scale, repeatedly exposing large audiences to positive, nuanced portrayals of others across political divides.

This complementary relationship suggests a strategic balance rather than a stark choice between methods. Direct approaches foster personal confidence and emotional connection, addressing potential suspicion or reluctance toward mediated messages. Indirect approaches efficiently address widespread misconceptions and normalize constructive interactions, providing the necessary repetition for sustained attitude change.

Ultimately, leveraging both direct and indirect contact strategies will provide the most robust solution to improving political relationships in America. A combined approach, grounded in shared psychological processes, offers the flexibility, depth, and scale required to meaningfully shift attitudes, build empathy, and strengthen social bonds across divides. By embracing both pathways, we can better foster a healthier, more connected society.

James Coan is the co-founder and executive director of More Like US. Coan can be contacted at James@morelikeus.org

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