Using intergroup contact theory (ICT), which posits that contact experiences with members of outgroups relate to attitudes toward those outgroups as a whole, the current study examines how positive and negative experiences with members of law enforcement predict general attitudes toward law enforcement. It specifically examines how attitudes toward individual members of law enforcement from contact experiences generalize to law enforcement as a whole, and how this generalization process is more or less effective when members of law enforcement are seen as more or less representative of law enforcement as a group (i.e., when law enforcement group membership is salient). I predicted that positive contact experiences with members of law enforcement would relate to positive attitudes toward those individuals, which in turn would predict positive attitudes toward law enforcement in general. However, this process should be more effective when the individuals from those experiences are seen as typical and representative of law enforcement. A similar process should occur for negative contact experiences, except that negative experiences would predict less favorable attitudes. To assess these relationships, I collected data from an online sample of Americans (N = 505) through Amazon Cloud Research. The primary predictions were mostly supported. While the relationship between contact experiences with members of law enforcement and attitudes toward those individuals was inconsistent across analyses, attitudes toward individual members of law enforcement strongly related to general attitudes toward law enforcement, and this depended on the degree to which those individuals were seen as typical and representative of law enforcement. This was true for positive and negative contact. These findings make theoretical contributions to ICT by examining negative contact in conjunction with group salience and have important implications for how law enforcement should interact with members of their communities
