The social psychology of perceived prejudice and discrimination.

Most research on prejudice has followed a unidirectional orientation of investigating why or when majority- or dominant-group members become prejudiced toward members of minority or subordinate groups without considering the effects of prejudice and discrimination upon its victims. By contrast, my research program over the past quarter century deals with the "phenomenology" of prejudice and discrimination from the perspective of the victim and has sought to answer questions such as the following: What is it like to be discriminated against on the basis of an arbitrary characteristic such as ethnicity, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, etc.? What are the social-psychological and affective correlates and consequences to individuals who confront prejudice and discrimination by virtue of membership in a minority or subordinate group? This paper presents a sampling of my research on the "phenomenology" of prejudice and discrimination, along with several theoretical perspectives that I have used and developed to help to understand this issue. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Scaling norm conflicts in the area of prejudice and discrimination.

This study presents the development of a scale measuring militantly antidiscriminatory tendencies in particular social situations which require distinctive resolutions of norm conflicts. The Ss came from the high school population of a New England city who filled out a questionnaire requiring that they choose 1 of 4 courses of action for resolving Negro-white conflict situations. An 8-item Guttman scale resulted with a coefficient of reproducibility of .91. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Identification and changes in prejudice and in authoritarianism.

Ss "were first given the F Scale and a measure of anti-Negro prejudice… . Four weeks later they read a case history of a person who was prejudiced and authoritarian. Half of the subjects were told that the person in the case history was similar to themselves in background and objective personal characteristics. The other half… that the person was dissimilar to them. Three weeks later the F Scale and the anti-Negro prejudice scale were readministered. It was found that those low in prejudice at the first administration became more prejudiced but only if they were told the case history was about someone like themselves… . These results were interpreted in terms of the social support for suppressed 'wrong' feelings and in terms of the pressures to achieve cognitive consistency in one's self-concept." From Psyc Abstracts 36:04:4GD65S. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Judgments about judgments: The dissociation of consideration price and transaction commitment judgments.

There are many contexts in which people make judgments about prior judgments. For example, Internet shopping bots (e.g., NexTag.com) allow consumers to search for products and, if the price is too high, list a price at which they would consider making the purchase (i.e., base judgment). If the price drops to this level, the vendor generates an e-mail inviting the consumer to execute the transaction at the reduced price (i.e., contingent judgment). The authors show that the consideration price depends on the content of retrieved information, whereas the willingness to execute the transaction at the consideration price depends on the ease-of-retrieving the information. The authors use different offer prices to encourage the consumer to retrieve information consistent with different product quality levels. The authors also select offer prices so that information retrieval is more difficult at moderate offer prices than at high or low offer prices. Accordingly, the authors show that the consideration price increases as the offer price increases, but the willingness to execute the transaction at the consideration price is greater when there are high and low, as opposed to moderate, offer prices. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects on opinions of a change in scale judgments.

"If a person with a moderately pro position accepts items extending from neutral to strongly pro… a change limited to his perception of the moderately con items, in which they come to appear extremely con, should not affect his expressed position. But a change that makes the moderately con items appear less extreme or even neutral in his perception may incline him to agree with them." The study tested the effects of such a change in judgments on expressed opinion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When fiends become friends: The need to belong and perceptions of personal and group discrimination.

The present article examines the role that the need to belong (NTB) plays in people's judgments of personal and group discrimination and in the attributions people make for potentially discriminatory evaluations. The authors hypothesized that the NTB motivates people to conclude that (a) whereas they rarely experience personal discrimination, (b) their fellow in-group members do experience discrimination. In Study 1, people high in the NTB reported experiencing lower than average levels of personal and higher than average levels of group discrimination. In Study 2, an experimental manipulation of the NTB yielded similar results. In Study 3, women who were motivated to be accepted by a bogus male participant were less likely to attribute his negative evaluations of their work to prejudice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Extrinsic religious values and prejudice.

Religiosity and anti-Semitism highly related. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A justification-suppression model of the expression and experience of prejudice.

The authors propose a justification-suppression model (JSM), which characterizes the processes that lead to prejudice expression and the experience of one's own prejudice. They suggest that "genuine" prejudices are not directly expressed but are restrained by beliefs, values, and norms that suppress them. Prejudices are expressed when justifications (e.g., attributions, ideologies, stereotypes) release suppressed prejudices. The same process accounts for which prejudices are accepted into the self-concept. The JSM is used to organize the prejudice literature, and many empirical findings are recharacterized as factors affecting suppression or justification, rather than directly affecting genuine prejudice. The authors discuss the implications of the JSM for several topics, including prejudice measurement, ambivalence, and the distinction between prejudice and its expression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of interpersonal harm in distinguishing regret from guilt.

Regret and guilt are emotions that are produced by negative outcomes for which one is responsible. Both emotions have received ample attention in the psychological literature; however, it is still unclear to what extent regret and guilt represent distinct psychological processes. We examined the extent to which the distinction between interpersonal harm (negative outcomes for others) and intrapersonal harm (negative outcomes for self) is crucial in differentiating these two emotions. In a series of 3 studies we found that guilt is predominantly felt in situations of interpersonal harm, whereas regret is felt in both situations of interpersonal harm and intrapersonal harm. Moreover, the results show that in situations of interpersonal harm the phenomenology of regret shares many, but not all features with the phenomenology of guilt. We conclude that the emotion processes resulting from interpersonal and intrapersonal harm are clearly distinct, but that regret as an emotion label is applied to both types of processes whereas the emotion label guilt is primarily used to refer to experiences of interpersonal harm. Implications for emotion research are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sensitization and prejudice.

Slides were shown to two groups of Ss, selected previously for high and low ethnocentrism. Half of the Ss in each group were shown a critical slide picturing a Negro attacking a white man with a knife, the other half were shown a similar slide picturing a white man attacking a Negro with a knife. Recall measures of picture content were then taken. An analysis of the results revealed that the superior recall of the critical pictures attributed to those high in prejudice, when congruous material is presented, was attributed to sensitization. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Race prejudice and intolerance of ambiguity in children.

On the basis of tests given to 154 fourth and fifth grade children selected from the public schools of a midwest town, there appears to be no demonstrable relationship between prejudice, as defined by the Horowitz Faces Test and 6 operational definitions of intolerance of ambiguity involving decision time and various analyses of sociometric and Guess Who data. "Since anti-Negro race prejudice, at least in the midwest, is considered to be an important component of the perhaps more general term, ethnocentrism, this study does not support notions of an invariable relationship between ethnocentrism and intolerance of ambiguity… ." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Values as predictors of judgments and behaviors: The role of abstract and concrete mindsets.

This research makes strides toward reconciling mixed findings in the value-behavior relation by positing that values are abstract representations of ideal end states that are more likely to influence behavior when individuals think abstractly (vs. concretely) and focus on high- (vs. low-) level motivations for interpreting their actions. In 6 experiments, the authors measured the importance of values (or made them salient via a priming procedure) and simultaneously manipulated accessible mindsets (abstract vs. concrete), and assessed their effect on judgments and behaviors. An abstract (and not a concrete) mindset led participants to engage in judgments or behaviors that were consistent with a broad range of values, including power, benevolence, universalism, self-direction, individualism, and collectivism. These results support the notion that values are more likely to be expressed through value-congruent judgments and behaviors when individuals think abstractly about their actions, and not when they think concretely. Two of the experiments examined the process underlying these effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The regulation of explicit and implicit race bias: The role of motivations to respond without prejudice.

Three studies examined the moderating role of motivations to respond without prejudice (e.g., internal and external) in expressions of explicit and implicit race bias. In all studies, participants reported their explicit attitudes toward Blacks. Implicit measures consisted of a sequential priming task (Study 1) and the Implicit Association Test (Studies 2 and 3). Study 3 used a cognitive busyness manipulation to preclude effects of controlled processing on implicit responses. In each study, explicit race bias was moderated by internal motivation to respond without prejudice, whereas implicit race bias was moderated by the interaction of internal and external motivation to respond without prejudice. Specifically, high internal, low external participants exhibited lower levels of implicit race bias than did all other participants. Implications for the development of effective self-regulation of race bias are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The stability of interpersonal judgments in independent situations.

Ranking of self in relationship to position in a group was related to ratings of self. Ranking was relatively independent of specific content of rating but dependent upon size of group. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The comparability of positive and negative items in scales of ethnic prejudice.

"These findings suggest that the use of positive or negative items or a mixture of both is immaterial in the measurement of ethnic prejudice. All-negative item scales do not appear to possess any intrinsic superiority as has been previously assumed. While these reports support the choice of the E scale when desirable for continuity with earlier research, they equally support the use of a mixed scale when an all-negative (or all-positive) scale is regarded as creating problems of rapport." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stimulus dynamics and temporal discrimination: Implications for pacemakers.

The purpose of the present study was to observe the functional relationship between stimulus dynamics and stimulus duration judgments in humans. Stimulus duration was defined as the length of time that a spinning sphere appeared on a computer screen. Stimulus dynamics were defined by how quickly the sphere rotated on its y-axis. Using a logarithmic scale, a psychophysical bisection task was used to divide stimulus durations into two categories, short and long. Across three experiments, participants’ duration judgments were longer the faster the sphere was rotated. This effect was observed over both a long and short temporal scale and over a wide range of stimulus dynamics despite the fact that the reinforcement contingencies penalized participants for this effect. The results are discussed in terms of perceived change as the possible basis of temporal duration estimation. This hypothesis was investigated through applications of the leading quantitative models of temporal discrimination to the present data. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Overconfidence in case-study judgments.

This study investigated whether psychologists' confidence in their clinical decisions is really justified. It was hypothesized that as psychologists study information about a case (a) their confidence about the case increases markedly and steadily but (b) the accuracy of their conclusions about the case quickly reaches a ceiling. 32 judges, including 8 clinical psychologists, read background information about a published case, divided into 4 sections. After reading each section of the case, judges answered a set of 25 questions involving personality judgments about the case. Results strongly supported the hypotheses. Accuracy did not increase significantly with increasing information, but confidence increased steadily and significantly. All judges except 2 became overconfident, most of them markedly so. Clearly, increasing feelings of confidence are not a sure sign of increasing predictive accuracy about a case. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interdependence of successive absolute judgments.

The aim was "to determine whether successive absolute judgments of a cognitive nature are interdependent, and if so, to evaluate a method for controlling this bias." The design involved rating populations of countries, with one group of Ss rating a "test" country following rating of a sparsely populated one and a second group following the rating of a populous country. This type of design was used several times in longer lists of words. Results of 8 test items indicated that "ratings tend to be biased in the direction of the previous rating… bias increases as the number of response categories increases." When the Ss were instructed to rate extreme stimuli first, no bias effect was found. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of personal and shared threats upon social prejudice.

The effects of varying types of threat-arousing communications upon the expression of social prejudice was examined. Personal threat groups showed a greater increase in social prejudice than did the control group. Shared threat groups showed a decrease in prejudice in comparison with the control group. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The stigma of obesity in customer service: A mechanism for remediation and bottom-line consequences of interpersonal discrimination.

Using a customer service paradigm, the authors extended the justification-suppression model (JSM) of prejudice (C. S. Crandall & A. Eshleman, 2003) to include contemporary, covert forms of discrimination and to identify a discrimination remediation mechanism. Overall, the results of 3 studies revealed that actual and confederate obese shoppers in high-prejudice justification conditions faced more interpersonal discrimination than average-weight shoppers. Furthermore, Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that adopting strategies that remove perceivers' justifications for discriminating against obese individuals (i.e., the controllability of weight) decreases the incidence of interpersonal discrimination. Additionally, Study 3 demonstrates negative bottom-line consequences of interpersonal discrimination for organizations (e.g., customer loyalty, purchasing behavior). Together, these studies confirm that the JSM applies to covert forms of discrimination, show the importance of examining subtle discrimination, and offer a mechanism for theory-driven strategies for the reduction of covert forms of discrimination. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)