The actions of advantaged group activists (sometimes called "allies") are admirable, and they likely make meaningful contributions to the movements they support. However, a nuanced understanding of the role of advantaged group allies must also consider the potential challenges of their participation. Both in their everyday lives and during their activist work, advantaged group allies are especially likely to have direct contact with disadvantaged group members. This article considers when such contact may harm rather than help resistance movements by disadvantaged groups. We also suggest that to avoid these undermining effects, advantaged group allies must effectively communicate support for social change, understand the implications of their own privilege, offer autonomy-oriented support, and resist the urge to increase their own feelings of inclusion by co-opting relevant marginalized social identities. "I mean nothing against any sincere whites when I say that as members of black organizations, generally whites' very presence subtly renders the black organization automatically less effective. Even the best white members will slow down the Negroes' discovery of

Guided by the early findings of social scientists, practitioners have long advocated for greater contact between groups to reduce prejudice and increase social cohesion. Recent work, however, suggests that intergroup contact can undermine support for social change towards greater equality, especially among disadvantaged group members. Using a large and heterogeneous dataset (12,997 individuals from 69 countries), we demonstrate that intergroup contact and support for social change towards greater equality are positively associated among members of advantaged groups (ethnic majorities and cis-heterosexuals) but negatively associated among disadvantaged groups (ethnic minorities and sexual and gender minorities). Specification curve analysis revealed important variation in the size-and at times, direction-of correlations, depending on how contact and support for social change were measured. This allowed us to identify one type of support for change-willingness to work in solidaritythat is positively associated with intergroup contact among both advantaged and disadvantaged group members.

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This paper describes an emerging body of work on intergroup prosociality, drawing together parallel literatures and highlighting some of the themes of the recent research.A broad distinction between benevolence and activism serves as the foundation to explore forms of intergroup prosociality, such as charitable giving, displays of empathy and affirmation (positive and supportive contact), allyship, and solidarity. Gaps and implications for future research are discussed. For example, we propose that it may be useful to distinguish allyship, defined as advocacy for others motivated by the values and norms of the ingroup for its own ends, from solidarity, defined as advocacy on behalf of others from the perspective of a shared, inclusive group.We propose that articulating the similarities between these various forms of intergroup prosociality, and testing the differences, will be a useful direction of future research.

Positive cross-group contact can undermine disadvantaged group members' collective action engagement. However, we hypothesized that positive cross-group contact in which an advantaged group member explicitly communicates opposition to inequality between groups ("supportive contact") would not undermine collective action and would be empowering for disadvantaged group members. Study 1 focused on cross-group contact between international students and domestic students at an Australian university. Study 2 focused on immigrants to Canada, and provided an opportunity for a cross-group contact with a Canadian-born individual. The results revealed that supportive contact heightened collective action engagement relative to a number of comparison conditions involving other forms of positive cross-group contact. Increased perceptions of injustice emerged as the key mediator of the relationship between supportive contact and increased collective action engagement.