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As U.S. campuses grow more diverse, university policy choices determine whether cross-group encounters produce connection or division. Drawing on decades of intergroup contact research, this paper highlights randomized roommate assignments as a scalable institutional policy to increase meaningful cross-group contact. We show that intergroup contact decreases prejudice, increases belonging, and boosts cognitive benefits to both students in the roommate pair (e.g., creativity, perspective-taking) only when structured under conditions of equal status, shared goals, and institutional support. Using empirical evidence and case examples, we recommend concrete policy choices to maximize benefits and mitigate harms: match students based on shared interests, implement living–learning communities, provide facilitated intergroup dialogue and intercultural training for students and resident advisors, maintain clear roommate reassignment pathways, and sustain public commitments to multicultural inclusion. When accompanied by such supports, randomized roommate policies can reduce intergroup bias, strengthen student retention and belonging, and foster a campus culture of equity. Thoughtful implementation, not contact alone, determines whether diversity becomes a catalyst of inclusion or a source of strain. 

An often-underacknowledged component of racial ethnic identity development concerns youth's multiple social identities, which affect how and when youth receive racial ethnic socialization (RES) from parents and caregivers. Here, we review how a child's or adolescent's gender, immigration status, skin tone, and socioeconomic status can influence the RES they receive. Additionally, we use the social psychology model of social complexity theory to demonstrate how these social identities may present themselves in distinct ways within a single individual (whether identities are intersected, compartmentalized, etc.) using a developmental lens. Understanding how a person's multiple social identities can hold differential salience allows us to more accurately measure RES by considering the factors that may influence its presentation and prevalence. Examples and implications for how multiple identities may converge and influence RES are discussed. 

The past generation has seen a dramatic rise in multiracial populations and a consequent increase in exposure to individuals who challenge monolithic racial categories. We examine and compare two potential outcomes of the multiracial population growth that may impact people’s racial categorization experience: (a) exposure to racially ambiguous faces that visually challenge the existing categories, and (b) a category that conceptually challenges existing categories (including “biracial” as an option in addition to the monolithic “Black” and “White” categories). Across four studies ( N = 1,810), we found that multiple exposures to faces that are racially ambiguous directly lower essentialist views of race. Moreover, we found that when people consider a category that blurs the line between racial categories (i.e., “biracial”), they become less certain in their racial categorization, which is associated with less race essentialism, as well. Importantly, we found that these two effects happen independently from one another and represent two distinct cognitive processes.