The Psychology of Sexual Prejudice

Sexual prejudice refers to negative attitudes toward an individual because of her or his sexual orientation. In this article, the term is used to characterize heterosexuals' negative attitudes toward (a) homosexual behavior, (b) people with a homosexual or bisexual orientation, and (c) communities of gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. Sexual prejudice is a preferable term to homophobia because it conveys no assumptions about the motivations underlying negative attitudes, locates the study of attitudes concerning sexual orientation within the broader context of social psychological research on prejudice, and avoids value judgments about such attitudes. Sexual prejudice remains widespread in the United States, although moral condemnation has decreased in the 1990s and opposition to antigay discrimination has increased. The article reviews current knowledge about the prevalence of sexual prejudice, its psychological correlates, its underlying motivations, and its relationship to hate crimes and other antigay behaviors.     

Prejudice Control and Interracial Relations: The Role of Motivation to Respond Without Prejudice

ABSTRACT A decade of research indicates that individual differences in motivation to respond without prejudice have important implications for the control of prejudice and interracial relations. In reviewing this work, we draw on W. Mischel and Y. Shoda's (1995, 1999) Cognitive–Affective Processing System (CAPS) to demonstrate that people with varying sources of motivation to respond without prejudice respond in distinct ways to situational cues, resulting in differing situation–behavior profiles in interracial contexts. People whose motivation is self-determined (i.e., the internally motivated) effectively control prejudice across situations and strive for positive interracial interactions. In contrast, people who respond without prejudice to avoid social sanction (i.e., the primarily externally motivated) consistently fail at regulating difficult to control prejudice and respond with anxiety and avoidance in interracial interactions. We further consider the nature of the cognitive–affective units of personality associated with motivation to respond without prejudice and their implications for the quality of interracial relations.     

The nature of The Nature of Prejudice

This paper attempts to establish the historical context for the development and publication of Gordon Allport's text, The Nature of Prejudice, and by so doing illustrate the importance of historicizing psychological social psychology. The Nature of Prejudice was, in part, the cumulative result of a decade of Gordon Allport's classroom teaching in a new interdisciplinary unit at Harvard, the Department of Social Relations. This paper chronicles key elements of Allport's course -"Prejudice and Intergroup Conflict"-from 1944 to the mid-1950s.     

Prime and Prejudice

Drawing upon theoretical perspectives from applied and social psychology, sociology, and management literatures, we develop a conceptual model in which conscious and subconscious prejudice interact to cause work discrimination. We posit that consciously non-prejudiced employees can face cognitive trade-offs outside of awareness that stem from a contradictory pull of primed subconscious prejudice. This cognitive paradox can lead to unintended, automatic discriminatory behaviour. Understanding the interplay between conscious lack of prejudice and primed subconscious prejudice, ostensibly, has greater organisational implications than studying either one alone. This is because employees cannot effectively grapple with unintended work discrimination without a more complete understanding of mechanisms that trigger these behaviours without awareness. In this article, we fuse new and prior points to offer novel theory insights.     

Race Prejudice and Economic Beliefs

Abstract

Following Yinger's assertion that the association between racism and personality variables is “exaggerated” and Heaven's findings that in South Africa white racism is associated with specific attitudes toward economic issues, the present study investigated the relationship between British race prejudice and economic beliefs. A British sample (N = 72) was administered an Attitudes toward West Indians scale, various personality and attitudinal measures, as well as an economic locus of control scale. Results showed racism to be significantly related to authoritarianism and the external/denial subscale of that scale. Further step-wise regression analysis showed scores on the authoritarian attitudes scale and the external/denial subscale to be significant predictors of prejudice.     

Complexity Training and Prejudice Reduction

It was argued that prejudicc is a likely outcome of simple cognitive structures, and that if a training procedure could be devised which would increase conccptual complexity in the xea of interracial affairs, thcn prejudice would be reduced. Accordingly, a complexity training task was developed which required Ss to engage in uniconceptual or multiconceptual thinking about videotaped stimulus persons who varied in race (black and white) and competence. Ss were 64 paid, white, high school students. Results showed that both complexity training procedures were effective in reducing prejudice and increasing complexity of thinking, but the multiconceptual training group failcd to signiticantly outpcrform the uniconceptual group. This latter result was interprctcd in tcrins of cognitive matching model.     

Reducing Implicit Prejudice

Implicit prejudices are social preferences that exist outside of conscious awareness or control. In this review, we summarize evidence for three mechanisms that influence the expression of implicit prejudice: associative change, contextual change, and change in control over implicit prejudice. We then review the evidence (or lack thereof) for answers to five open issues in implicit prejudice reduction research: (1) what shows effectiveness in real‐world application; (2) what doesn't work for implicit prejudice reduction; (3) what interventions produce long‐term changes in implicit prejudice; (4) measurement diversity in implicit prejudice reduction research; and (5) the relationship between implicit prejudice and behavior. Addressing these issues provides an agenda for clarifying the conditions and implications of reducing implicit prejudice.     

The Crystallization of Contemporary Racial Prejudice across the Lifespan

The conventional wisdom is that racial prejudice remains largely stable through adulthood. However, very little is known about the development of contemporary racial attitudes like symbolic racism. The growing crystallization of symbolic racism through the lifespan is tested using two data sets that measure the stability, consistency, and predictive validity of symbolic racism in samples ranging in age from young adults to the elderly. The results provide evidence that the crystallization of symbolic racism generally takes on a curvilinear trajectory across the lifespan, showing that it is already largely crystallized by voting age, that it continues to crystallize still further through adulthood and that it begins to decline in coherence in late adulthood. The results generally provide evidence confirming early speculations of symbolic racism theorists concerning the crystallization of symbolic racism across the lifespan and are discussed in terms of different theoretical perspectives on the relationship between aging and attitudes more generally.     

Effects of External and Internal Motivation to Control Prejudice on Implicit Prejudice: The Mediating Role of Efforts to Control Prejudiced Responses

We examined the effects of internal and external motivation to control prejudice on implicit prejudice, focusing on identifying a mediator of the relation between external motivation and implicit prejudice. White participants completed internal and external motivation to control prejudice measures several weeks before completing the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Participants who were more internally motivated showed less implicit prejudice, whereas those who were more externally motivated displayed more implicit prejudice. Consistent with an ironic processes explanation, the effect of external motivation on increased implicit prejudice was mediated by efforts to control prejudiced responses.     

The Social Benefits of Protecting Hate Speech and Exposing Sources of Prejudice

I argue that there are strong consequentialist grounds for thinking that hate speech should be legally protected. The protection of hate speech allows those who are hateful to make their beliefs public, thereby exposing prejudices that might otherwise be suppressed to evaluation by other members of society. This greater transparency about prejudices has two social benefits. First, it facilitates social trust by making it easier to discover who holds beliefs that should exclude them from positions of authority, responsibility, and influence. Second, it facilitates efforts to combat hatred by revealing which prejudiced members of society must be persuaded or discredited by those seeking to promote tolerance.