out at McDonalds. These forms of entertainment are exciting and engaging, and it could be that these forms of cultural consumption are more engaging and powerful than personal contact with Americans. This power of American media and the superficial contact of tourism is clearly more impactful than what individual Americans could ever be, and fortunately for the United States, these forms of contact seem to be quite more successful at increasing opinions of Americans than their individual citizens. Although this could explain the difference between general cultural and personal contact, it does not explain why personal contact has a negative effect on favorability. For this, we can look into the original four conditions of contact theory (Allport, 1954) to see if Mexican and American personal interaction violates one of these conditions. It could be that personal interactions between these two groups could violate the essential condition of “equal status between groups” as formulated by Allport (1954). Just to name some of the general socioeconomic differences, Americans have higher incomes, life expectancies, and overall life satisfaction than Mexicans (OECD Better Life Index, 2016). Personal contact could bring these unequal characteristics to more salient levels than general cultural contact because of the more direct and in-person realizations of these differences. General cultural contact gives no immediate figure to whom one can attribute the intergroup differences, and therefore general cultural contact could cause a glamorization of Americans instead of a direct jealously towards a friend. This leads to the most impactful conclusion of these results: American friends perhaps do not live up to the perceptions of American culture as portrayed in the media. When Mexicans make American friends, Americans cannot be as likeable as the actors in the movies. This could potentially lead Mexicans to see through the glamour and unreal expectations they were perhaps expecting. This disconnect between expected and real only means that making American friends will decrease Mexicans’ favorability towards them.
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