Friendships and outgroup attitudes among ethnic minority youth: The mediating role of ethnic and host society identification

•Examined how ethnic ingroup and host society orientation relates to outgroup attitudes.•Longitudinal study among ethnic minority youth in Dutch middle schools.•Outgroup friendships is indirectly related to improved outgroup attitudes through host society identification.•Ingroup friendships and ingroup identification was not related to students’ outgroup attitudes.•A bidirectional relation between host society identification and outgroup friendships.

This study investigates among ethnic minority adolescents how friendships with ethnic minority and majority group peers are related to their attitudes towards the majority outgroup.Friendships with majority group peers are proposed to be indirectly related to outgroup attitudes through host society identification. Friendships with ethnic ingroup peers are proposed to be indirectly related to outgroup attitudes through ethnic ingroup identification.Hypotheses were tested longitudinally among ethnic minority adolescents (n = 244) who recently entered middle schools in the Netherlands. Lagged structural equation models showed that friendships with majority group peers were related to stronger identification with the host society which was in turn related to improved attitudes toward the majority outgroup. Ingroup friendships and ingroup identification was not related to outgroup attitudes. Additional analyses indicated that the relation between host society identification and majority group friendships was bidirectional.