Does intergroup contact affect political attitudes and behaviours? - A longitudinal mediation analysis using the Estudio Longitudinal Social de Chile

Intergroup contact has been known to affect attitudes towards the contacted outgroup (primary transfer effect), non-contacted outgroups (secondary transfer effect) and to affect humans open and liberal thinking, which in turn affects a variety of human experiences, cognitions and behaviours outside the intergroup dimension (cognitive liberalisation hypothesis or tertiary transfer effect). One suggested tertiary transfer effect describes intergroup contact affecting political attitudes and behaviours. We explored this notion with a multiverse approach combining different indicators of intergroup contact, intergroup ideologies and political attitudes and behaviours using the Estudio Longitudinal Social de Chile (ELSOC), a representative large-scale longitudinal survey, and random intercept cross-lagged panel models as advanced analytical methods to test the causal effect and mediating mechanisms. We found numerous robust cross-sectional associations between intergroup contact, intergroup ideologies and political attitudes and behaviours as well as consistent differential effects of some indicators of intergroup contact and political attitudes and behaviours, but no longitudinal evidence in favour of the causal chain proposed by the cognitive liberalisation hypothesis. We contextualise our findings in the existing literature as well as the emerging research on tertiary transfer effects and give indications for future research to investigate the causal processes proposed by the cognitive liberalisation hypothesis.