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Social influence effects on automatic racial prejudice.

Although most research on the control of automatic prejudice has focused on the efficacy of deliberate attempts to suppress or correct for stereotyping, the reported experiments tested the hypothesis that automatic racial prejudice is subject to common social influence. In experiments involving actual interethnic contact, both tacit and expressed social influence reduced the expression of automatic prejudice, as assessed by two different measures of automatic attitudes. Moreover, the automatic social tuning effect depended on participant ethnicity. European Americans (but not Asian Americans) exhibited less automatic prejudice in the presence of a Black experimenter than a White experimenter (Experiments 2 and 4), although both groups exhibited reduced automatic prejudice when instructed to avoid prejudice (Experiment 3). Results are consistent with shared reality theory, which postulates that social regulation is central to social cognition.

Automatism↗

What does the implicit association test measure? A test of the convergent and discriminant validity of prejudice-related IATs.

Drawing on recent criticism of the Implicit Association Test (IAT), the present study tested the convergent and discriminant validity of two prejudice-related IATs to corresponding explicit prejudice measures in a German student sample (N = 61). Confirming convergent validity, (a) an IAT designed to assess negative associations related to Turkish people was significantly related to the explicit endorsement of prejudiced beliefs about Turkish people, and (b) an IAT designed to assess negative associations related to East Asians was significantly related to explicit prejudice against East Asians. Moreover, confirming discriminant validity, (c) the Asian IAT was unrelated to the explicit endorsement of prejudiced beliefs about Turkish people, and (d) the Turkish IAT was unrelated to explicit prejudice against Asian people. These results further corroborate the assumption that the IAT is a valid method to assess the strength of evaluative associations in the domain of prejudice and stereotypes.

Adult↗

Implicit prejudice and stereotyping: how automatic are they? Introduction to the special section.

This special issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cogniition addresses issues of the measurement and the malleability of implicit prejudice and stereotypes. The findings raise fundamental questions about the assumptions underlying the assessment of implicit prejudice, particularly with regard to the widely used Implicit Association Test and the assumption of extant models of prejudice and stereotyping that implicit biases are automatically and invariantly activated when perceivers come in contact with members of stigmatized groups. Several of the articles show that contextual manipulations produce reductions in implicit manifestations of prejudice and stereotyping. The articles in this issue, in challenging conventional wisdom, are thought provoking and should be generative in the field's ongoing efforts to understand the role of implicit (and explicit) processes involved in prejudice and stereotyping.

Attitude↗

Does social dominance generate prejudice? Integrating individual and contextual determinants of intergroup cognitions.

Social dominance orientation (SDO) has been proposed as an important variable in the explanation of prejudice. We distinguish between three conceptualizations of SDO: SDO as a personality trait (personality model), SDO as a moderator of the effects of situational variables (Person x Situation model), and SDO as a mediator of the effect of social position on prejudice (group socialization model [GSM]). Four studies (N = 1.657) looking at the relations between social positions, SDO, and prejudice in a natural setting and in a laboratory setting provide strong support for the GSM. In contrast to previous correlational findings, there is evidence of a cause (dominant social position), an effect (prejudice increases), and a mediator (SDO). These results suggest new perspectives on the integration of individual and contextual determinants of prejudice.

Adult↗

Ambiguity in social categorization: The role of prejudice and facial affect in race categorization.

Two studies tested the hypothesis that perceivers' prejudice and targets' facial expressions bias race categorization in stereotypic directions. Specifically, we hypothesized that racial prejudice would be more strongly associated with a tendency to categorize hostile (but not happy) racially ambiguous faces as African American. We obtained support for this hypothesis using both a speeded dichotomous categorization task (Studies 1 and 2) and a rating-scale task (Study 2). Implicit prejudice (but not explicit prejudice) was related to increased sensitivity to the targets' facial expressions, regardless of whether prejudice was measured after (Study 1) or before (Study 2) the race categorizations were made.

Affect↗

Relationships between intergroup contact and prejudice among minority and majority status groups.

Considerable research has shown that greater intergroup contact corresponds with lower intergroup prejudice, yet little is known regarding how the relationships between contact and prejudice may vary for members of minority and majority status groups. The present research examined differences in contact-prejudice relationships among members of minority and majority status groups, using data from a larger meta-analytic study of the effects of intergroup contact. Results indicate that the relationships between contact and prejudice tend to be weaker among members of minority status groups than among members of majority status groups. Moreover, establishing Allport's (1954) proposed conditions for optimal intergroup contact significantly predicts stronger contact-prejudice relationships among members of majority status groups, but not among members of minority status groups. Implications of these findings for future research on contact between minority and majority status groups are discussed.

Humans↗

Perspective and prejudice: antecedents and mediating mechanisms.

The present work investigated mechanisms by which Whites' prejudice toward Blacks can be reduced (Study 1) and explored how creating a common ingroup identity can reduce prejudice by promoting these processes (Study 2). In Study 1, White participants who viewed a videotape depicting examples of racial discrimination and who imagined the victim's feelings showed greater decreases in prejudice toward Blacks than did those in the objective and no instruction conditions. Among the potential mediating affective and cognitive variables examined, reductions in prejudice were mediated primarily by feelings associated with perceived injustice. In Study 2, an intervention designed to increase perceptions of a common group identity before viewing the videotape, reading that a terrorist threat was directed at all Americans versus directed just at White Americans, also reduced prejudice toward Blacks through increases in feelings of injustice.

Adolescent↗

The development of prejudice towards gays and lesbians by adolescents.

The authors studied the development of gay and lesbian prejudice in white, suburban adolescents in grades 7, 9, and 11. Results parallel several major findings with adults: males were more prejudiced than females; this difference was greater towards gay males than lesbians; and same-sex prejudice was greater than opposite-sex prejudice. For males and females prejudice increased between grades 7 and 9, but from grades 9 to 11 it decreased for females and increased for males. These differences were explained by the increased vulnerability of males to defensive reactions in response to the prospect of intimate relationships. None of the personality measures were significantly correlated with prejudice.

Adolescent↗

Irrational categorization, natural intolerance and reasonable discrimination: lay representations of prejudice and racism.

This paper explores how the constructs of 'prejudice' and 'racism' were used and understood by respondents in an interview study concerning the settlement of Albanian refugees in Greece. Analysis indicated the existence of multiple, potentially contradictory, common sense understandings of prejudice and racism, analogous to some accounts of the prejudice construct in academic social psychology. However, notwithstanding the fact that respondents displayed multiple understandings of racism or prejudice in theory, these abstract formulations were rarely employed to account for actual instances of discrimination. Specific discriminatory acts against Albanian people were framed instead as matters of fear and risk. By virtue of being cast within a problematic of in/security rather than within the discursive frame of prejudice, particular hostile actions against the Albanian refugees could be glossed as reasonable and understandable.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

Psychophysiological assessment of prejudice: past research, current status, and future directions.

Many early studies of prejudice adopted psychophysiological measures as a way to circumvent the limitations of self-report instruments. Despite serious methodological weaknesses, that literature consistently points to the value of physiological probes as nonreactive indexes of affective responses to target stimuli. Possible reasons for the virtual abandonment of psychophysiological approaches in the study of prejudice over the last 15 years are outlined, and their reintroduction is advocated on methodological and conceptual grounds. Theoretical perspectives and empirical research in a closely related area, the psychophysiology of emotion, are reviewed and the implications of this literature for the study of prejudice are discussed. Several psychophysiological approaches have been found valuable for assessing the valence and intensity of emotional responses. The availability of these tools, together with the shifting theoretical zeitgeist, make prejudice research ready for a return to psychophysiological methodologies. A multi-method prejudice assessment model is proposed and its theoretical and heuristic advantages are discussed.

Journal Article↗

Antihypertensive therapy: pride and prejudice.

CLINICAL TRIALS: Investigators of hypertension can be proud of the indisputable successes achieved by antihypertensive therapy and of the correct methodology (randomized controlled trials) by which those successes have been proved. However, hypertension experts should not allow pride to turn into prejudice. Numerous aspects of antihypertensive treatment remain to be clarified. Indeed, that all goals of antihypertensive treatment have been achieved is clear prejudice. Although randomized trials have been essential for establishing the benefits of antihypertensive therapy, claiming that randomized trials are the only valid methodology for providing treatment benefits is another instance in which pride might turn into prejudice. Indeed, there is a large gap between trials and practice, and trials may both overestimate and underestimate the benefits of treatment. Furthermore, event-based trials are not the only valid type of trials, as is often claimed. If the goals of treatment are both to prevent events and avoid or reduce organ damage, then we need both event-based and organ damage-based types of trials. MEASUREMENTS OF SUCCESS: Assessment of the absolute risk and, consequently, calculation of the absolute benefit to be expected from treatment have appropriately been emphasized in recent guidelines for the management of hypertension as instruments to evaluate cost-effectiveness of treatment. However, there is reason for caution against an indiscriminate worship of this concept, because earlier treatment of milder, uncomplicated hypertension is an effective measure by which to prevent development of more severe and complicated hypertension, the treatment of which may be less successful, if success is measured by the residual mortality and morbidity of even well treated patients. BLOOD PRESSURE MEASUREMENTS: Finally, we are still ignorant of the best way to measure blood pressure in order to decide upon initiation and success of treatment. Supporters both of clinic blood pressure measurements and of home or ambulatory blood pressure monitoring have their own prejudices; the problem can only be solved by further research. As in Jane Austen's novel, before the happy end both pride and prejudice must be conquered.

Antihypertensive Agents↗

Prejudice, social distance, and familiarity with mental illness.

In this study, the paths between two prejudicial attitudes (authoritarianism and benevolence) and a proxy measure of behavioral discrimination (social distance) were examined in a sample drawn from the general public. Moreover, the effects of two person variables (familiarity with mental illness and ethnicity) on prejudice were examined in the path analysis. One hundred fifty-one research participants completed measures of prejudice toward, social distance from, and familiarity with mental illness. Goodness-of-fit indexes from path analyses supported our hypotheses. Social distance is influenced by both kinds of prejudice: authoritarianism (the belief that persons with mental illness cannot care for themselves, so a paternalistic health system must do so) and benevolence (the belief that persons with mental illness are innocent and childlike). These forms of prejudice, in turn, are influenced by the believers' familiarity with mental illness and their ethnicity. We also discuss how these findings might contribute to a fuller understanding of mental illness stigma.

Adult↗

Expecting to be the target of prejudice: implications for interethnic interactions.

Two studies investigated the implications of ethnic minorities' prejudice expectations for their affective and behavioral outcomes during interethnic interactions. In both studies, the more ethnic minorities expected Whites to be prejudiced, the more negative experiences they had during interethnic interactions. This finding held true for chronic prejudice expectations in a diary study of college roommates (Study 1) and for situationally induced prejudice expectations in a laboratory interaction (Study 2). In Study 2, the authors extended this work to examine the relationship between ethnic minorities' prejudice expectancies and their White partners' psychological experience during interethnic interactions. Consistent with predictions, the more ethnic minorities expected Whites to be prejudiced, the more their White partners had positive experiences during interethnic interactions. These divergent experiences of ethnic minorities and Whites have important implications for the psychological success of interactions between members of these groups.

Affect↗

Reducing automatically activated racial prejudice through implicit evaluative conditioning.

The authors report a set of experiments that use an implicit evaluative conditioning procedure to reduce automatically activated racial prejudice in White participants in a short period and with relatively few trials. Experiment 1 demonstrated that participants were unaware of the repeated conditioned stimulus-unconditioned stimulus (CS-US) pairings of Black-good and White-bad. In Experiment 2, the procedure was found to be effective in reducing prejudice as indicated by an evaluative priming measure of automatically activated racial attitudes. In Experiment 3, this reduction in prejudice was found to persist throughout a 2-day separation between the conditioning procedure and the administration of the dependent measure. The implications of the present findings for the persistence of automatically activated racial prejudice are discussed.

Attitude↗

Are essentialist beliefs associated with prejudice?

Gordon Allport (1954) proposed that belief in group essences is one aspect of the prejudiced personality, alongside a rigid, dichotomous and ambiguity-intolerant cognitive style. We examined whether essentialist beliefs-beliefs that a social category has a fixed, inherent, identity-defining nature-are indeed associated in this fashion with prejudice towards black people, women and gay men. Allport's claim, which is mirrored by many contemporary social theorists, received partial support but had to be qualified in important respects. Essence-related beliefs were associated strongly with anti-gay attitudes but only weakly with sexism and racism, and they did not reflect a cognitive style that was consistent across stigmatized categories. When associations with prejudice were obtained, only a few specific beliefs were involved, and some anti-essentialist beliefs were associated with anti-gay attitudes. Nevertheless, the powerful association that essence-related beliefs had with anti-gay attitudes was independent of established prejudice-related traits, indicating that they have a significant role to play in the psychology of prejudice.

Adult↗

Prejudice as stress: conceptual and measurement problems.

In the field of social sciences, there has been a renewed interest in studying prejudice and discrimination as stressors and assessing their impact on various health outcomes. This raises a need for theoretically based and psychometrically sound measures of prejudice. As researchers approach this task, there are several conceptual issues that need to be addressed. The author describes 3 such issues related to (1) individual versus structural measures of the impact of prejudice, (2) objective versus subjective assessments of stress, and (3) measures of major events versus everyday discrimination. How researchers approach the problem of measurement depends on the specific study aims, but they must consider these conceptual issues and understand the advantages and limitations of various approaches to the study of prejudice as stress.

Classification↗

The development of children's prejudice against the aged.

Children's prejudice against the aged was studied in terms of their responses to an attitude scale and measures of their social interaction with aged compared to nonaged confederates. Participants were 144 middle-class children, four, six, and eight years of age. Findings from the attitude scale indicated significant levels of ageist prejudice among six- and eight-year-olds but not in four-year-olds. Eight-year-olds had significantly higher prejudice scores than six-year-olds. There were six measures of participant interaction with aged compared to nonaged confederates: proxemic distance, productivity, eye-contact initiation, number of words spoken, number of conversation initiations, and number of verbal appeals. On all of these measures except productivity, participants in each age group showed significant levels of ageist prejudice. Ancillary findings indicated that, in general, participants were more prejudiced against women than against men. Attitude scores correlated significantly with some of the behavioral measures but not with all of them.

Aged↗

Self-evaluation of unintended biases and prejudices.

A scale for measuring self-assessment of factors, which might lead to unintended biases and prejudices, was tested with 39 professionals working with adolescents on probation. The scale has 10 items (e.g., "Would feel comfortable providing clinical services to [e.g., African Americans]." Each item was rated on a 3-point scale so as summated scores increase across items the probability of unintended biases and prejudices against five culturally diverse groups (African American, American Indian, Asian, Hispanic, and White) would also increase. The coefficient alpha was .87. Participants' mean unintended bias and prejudices across items were always lower toward clients from their own racial or ethnic group. For example, Hispanic and White participants tended to be more prompt to display these attitudes against African Americans, relative to African-American participants. White participants, however, reported lower scores leading to unintended biases in the case of White clients, relative to African-American and Hispanic participants. Overall, participants' mean unintended bias and prejudices against American Indian and Asian clients tended to be higher with these groups, relative to clients from the African-American, Hispanic, and White communities. Results are discussed in terms of further development of the scale in the design of cross-cultural training in various working environments with culturally diverse clients.

Adolescent↗