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The contact hypothesis proposes that regular interaction between members of different groups tends to improve intergroup relations, providing it occurs under certain 'optimal' conditions. For over 60 years, this hypothesis has stood as social psychology's main theoretical framework for understanding how to reduce racial conflict and discrimination.  Several commentators have argued, however, that the contact hypothesis has a limitation that compromises its ability either to explain or to facilitate social change. By taking shifts in personal prejudice as its primary outcome measure, it arguably overlooks the broader socio-political consequences of desegregation for how different communities relate to one another.

The present research aims to extend the social psychology of contact beyond the confines of the so-called 'prejudice problematic'. It focuses not only on how contact affects racial attitudes or stereotypes, but also on how it affects wider perceptions of inequality, injustice and restitution. What, if any, impact does contact have on how members of historically advantaged and disadvantaged groups evaluate existing forms of distributive (in)justice or respond to policies designed to redress inequality?

This issue has a particular resonance in South Africa, a society that is currently implementing government programs of both racial desegregation and political restitution. The present study forms one strand of a larger attitude survey that is examining South Africans' attitudes towards political transformation in the post apartheid era.

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