Prejudice and Intergroup Relations 175 condition showed relatively low levels of authoritarianism and were indistinguishable from a control group. Parenthetically, we can also note that this finding is inconsistent with the V-curve hypothesis.
But threats do not have to be to tangible things, like standards of living or physical security; threats to identity can be just as potent sources of prejudice, as a series of studies has shown. A crucial aspect of many cultural groups’ identity is bound up with the language they speak. When this linguistic identity is threatened – for example by an outgroup member deriding it – people may react sharply, emphasizing their own language still further and trading insults with the outgroup (Bourhis and Giles, 1977;
Bourhis et al., 1978). Breakwell (1978) studied threats to identity among football fans. She arranged for some participants (teenage boys) to learn that they were not
‘genuine’ supporters because they had attended only a few games. This was made to seem plausible by some official-sounding statements from some well-known football managers. This group was then compared to another group of boys, who believed themselves to be genuine fans. Breakwell reasoned that the former group would react negatively, because their identity as real football lovers had been called into question.
Their responses to subsequent questions about the relative merits of their own and another team’s supporters seemed to bear this out: they showed more ingroup bias compared to the latter group (see also Breakwell, 1988).
Even artificial groups in the laboratory can be induced to show derogatory atti-tudes towards an outgroup as a result of threat to the ingroup. We arranged for group members to receive feedback from another group, which was openly derogatory, cast-ing aspersions on the cast-ingroup’s intellectual abilities; only slightly negative; or mildly positive (Brown and Ross, 1982). The reactions to those different levels of threat were quite consistent: in the high and moderate threat conditions, annoyance with the outgroup significantly increased; in the low threat participants it decreased. Grant (1992) has found similar reactions to identity threatening communications in the context of male–female relations, as has Voci (2006) in the context of relations between northern and southern Italians.
Sometimes the identity threat needs only to be implied rather than overtly expressed.
Branscombe and Wann (1994) asked their American participants to watch a short film clip of a boxing match in which one fighter defeated the other (the clip was actually taken from the film Rocky IV). Half of them believed that the loser was Russian, the other half thought he was American. The blow to national pride experienced by the latter group resulted in members being more disparaging towards Russians, but this happened only to those participants for whom national identity was important.
Identification also moderates the effects of threats to gender identity. This was shown by Maass and colleagues (2003) in their innovative research on sexual harass-ment by men. Maass and her colleagues believe that men’s offensive sexual behaviour towards women is often motivated by the offenders feeling that their gender identity is threatened. To demonstrate this thesis, Maass and colleagues (2003) devised a laboratory paradigm in which male participants interacted with what they believed to be a female participant (she was actually an experimental confederate) in an experi-ment on ‘visual memory’. This experiexperi-ment required each participant to select images from a number of computer files and to send these to the other participant, suppos-edly to be memorized for a future recall task. The file icons were labelled ‘nature’,
‘animals’, ‘models’ and ‘porno’. The latter file was of particular interest, because it
contained sexually explicit images that independent judges had previously rated for offensiveness. The measure of sexual harassment was the number and offensiveness of images selected from the ‘porno’ file to be sent to the female confederate, who, by the way, clearly expressed her displeasure (via a chat line) at being sent any porno-graphic images at all. How did Maass and colleagues make their male participants feel threatened? In one study this was effected through the simple expedient of having the female confederate reveal herself to be a feminist (or a woman with more traditional gender role attitudes). The ‘feminist’ confederate was thought to pose a greater threat to the male participants because she was seen to challenge conventional gender ine-qualities. In the event, this ‘feminist’ confederate got sent significantly more – and significantly more offensive – pornographic images than the ‘traditional’ confederate.
This effect of the threat was even more apparent for those men who identified more strongly with their gender.7 In another study, the threat was manipulated either by implying that the male participant’s score on a previously administered sex-role inven-tory placed him inside the distribution of female scores (and outside the male distri-bution), or – in a more group-based way – by suggesting that the male and female distributions were becoming increasingly similar. These two forms of threat were labelled, respectively, ‘prototypicality threat’ (because the first suggested that the par-ticipant was not prototypically masculine) and ‘distinctiveness threat’ (because the second suggested that the men of the group were no longer distinctively different from women). These two conditions were compared to a control group where it was stated that the participant’s score was normal. The manipulations had predictable effects on the number and offensiveness of pornographic images sent to the woman:
participants in the threat conditions, and especially in the prototypicality threat con-dition, sent more offensive pictures that those in control (see Figure 6.5). Again, these differences were exacerbated among the men who identified more highly with their gender.
Thus far we have considered prejudice as an undifferentiated negative intergroup reaction to threat. In fact, this may oversimplify things somewhat. A similar level of prejudice in two groups may mask very different underlying emotions. This is, anyway, the conclusion which resulted from some theoretical analyses of intergroup emotions (Cottrell and Neuberg, 2005; Iyer and Leach, 2008; Mackie and Smith, 2002; Smith,
0.67
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0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5
Control Distinctiveness threat Prototypicality threat Number and offensiveness of pornographic images
Figure 6.5 Sexual harassment as a response to identity threat. Source: Maass et al., 2003
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Prejudice and Intergroup Relations 177 1993). Although they differ somewhat in their emphases, these intergroup emotions theories share some common assumptions. The first one is that a person can experi-ence emotions vicariously, through the group(s) that he or she belongs to. In other words, people do not have to experience some event directly – a threat, let’s say – to feel some emotion; if they perceive their group to be in a particular situation, then they may well feel emotions on behalf of that group. For this to happen, there is one minimum precondition: that they identify sufficiently with that group for its fortunes to matter to them. This is, of course, by now a familiar idea to us from the discussion of social identity theory earlier in this chapter (Tajfel and Turner, 1986). A second common assumption of intergroup emotions theories is that the emotions which group members feel in any situation depend on how they perceive the ingroup in rela-tion to some outgroup(s): Is an outgroup seen to be more powerful or weaker than the ingroup? Does the outgroup threaten the economic resources of the ingroup, or is it seen to be instead a source of ‘contamination’ because of the prevalence of harm-ful diseases or ‘alien’ values within it? For example, if the ingroup is seen as stronger than the outgroup, then anger might be a more probable emotion than fear (Smith, 1993). If the outgroup is perceived as a source of contamination rather than an economic threat, then disgust is more likely to result (Cottrell and Neuberg, 2005).
A third shared assumption – and a critical one for us, students of prejudice – is that different emotions lead to different intergroup behaviours. Thus anger and contempt are thought to generate hostility, whilst fear and disgust are more likely to lead to avoidance (Cottrell and Neuberg, 2005; Smith, 1993).
This intergroup emotions perspective has started to generate an impressive literature (see Branscombe and Doosje, 2004; Iyer and Leach, 2008; Mackie and Smith, 2002).
Let me present two examples of the research it has inspired which are relevant to our current concern with threat and prejudice. Mackie and colleagues (2000) arranged for their participants to read a series of newspaper headlines related to the issue of greater civil rights for gay people. Depending on experimental condition, the majority of these headlines supported gay rights or opposed them, thus conveying the impression to these student participants, all of whom were in favour, that their group’s position in the country at large was either strong or weak. Participants then expressed various emotions towards the outgroup (opponents of gay rights) and indicated whether they would want actively to confront them or to avoid them instead. Recall that, according to intergroup emotions theory, being in a strong ingroup (vis-à-vis an outgroup) should lead to anger and confrontation, whilst being in a weak ingroup should lead to fear and avoidance. The results only partially bore out these predictions. Those in the
‘strong’ ingroup condition did show more anger than those in the ‘weak’ condition.
However, the fear and avoidance reactions were less consistent with Mackie and colleagues’ (2000) hypothesis. These emotions did not differ between the conditions, and indeed participants in the ‘strong’ condition showed even marginally more avoid-ance than those in the ‘weak’ condition (see also Dumont et al., 2003).
Cottrell and Neuberg (2005) took a different approach. They asked their white American participants to report how much they disliked and how negatively they evaluated each of nine outgroups (African Americans, Asian Americans, gay men, fundamentalist Christians, and so on). They also elicited their emotional reactions to each of these groups (anger, disgust, fear), as well as the extent to which they believed that it posed a threat to the ingroup in various ways (to its health, physical safety,
social values). On the general measure of prejudice (or dislike) there were, unsurpris-ingly, some substantial differences between outgroups: fundamentalist Christians, feminist activists and gay men attracted most prejudice; native Americans, Asian Americans and African Americans elicited least. The interesting part, however, was that outgroups with similar prejudice scores were associated with very different emotional reactions and perceptions of threat. For example the levels of prejudice towards Asian and African Americans were indistinguishable. However, African Americans aroused markedly more fear and anxiety than Asian Americans, and this fact was linked to perceptions of threat in connection with physical safety and prop-erty. Likewise, gay men and fundamentalist Christians were disliked in equal measure, but the former group elicited more disgust, perhaps because they were perceived to be a greater threat to health. Since similar levels of prejudice were masking such dif-ferent emotions and perceptions of threat, it is plausible to conclude that people’s behaviour towards the different groups might also have differed, although Cottrell and Neuberg (2005) did not investigate this aspect of the situation.
To conclude the section on threat, let me return to those two newspaper cuttings with which I began: islamaphobia in Switzerland and xenophobia in South Africa.
The threats underlying these two antipathies are somewhat different. In the first case, what seems to be worrying many Swiss people is the potential impact of Islamic ideas and values on the Swiss way of life, on their cultural identity as a western Judeo-Christian nation. In the second case, the concerns are more concrete and economic: Zimbabwean immigrants are seen to be taking South African jobs or to be undercutting South African wages. Stephan and Stephan (2000) have incorpo-rated both types of threat into their integincorpo-rated threat theory (see also Stephan and Renfro, 2003). They labelled threats of the first type ‘symbolic threats’, which include any perceived threats to the way the ingroup chooses to define itself and to symbolize its identity. Such threats would include different religions, worldviews, cultural values or languages. The second type they called ‘realistic threats’, a phrase borrowed from the name of the realistic group conflict theory, which we encoun-tered previously. These include economic competition, conflicts over land or other scarce resources and threats to the physical safety or survival of the ingroup. To these two classes of threat, Stephan and Stephan (2000) add intergroup anxiety – an apprehension about anticipated encounters with outgroup members, which is due to uncertainty as to how to behave, fears about how one will be treated (Stephan and Stephan, 1985) and negative stereotypes of the outgroup.8 All four variables are thought to lead in the same direction: to more prejudicial attitudes and increased intergroup discrimination.
This integrated threat theory has been tested in a wide variety of intergroup con-texts, generally with supportive results (Curseu et al., 2007; Meeus et al., 2008;
Stephan et al., 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2005). Sometimes symbolic threats prove to be the more powerful predictor of prejudice; sometimes it is realistic threats that take centre stage. Occasionally both kinds need to be simultaneously present in order for prejudice to be found (Stephan et al., 2005). Intergroup anxiety, where it has been included, is nearly always a reliable correlate of prejudice, as are negative stereotypes.
Even work conducted outside the integrated threat framework finds reliable support for the role both of symbolic and of realistic threats (McLaren, 2003; McLaren and
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Prejudice and Intergroup Relations 179 Johnson, 2007). McLaren’s (2003) study is particularly interesting because it involved a very large sample (over 6,000 respondents), representative of seventeen European countries. In this instance the measure of prejudice was anti-immigrant sentiment, as indexed by the desire to deport immigrants back to their country of origin. Both realistic and symbolic threats posed by minority groups were assessed, as well as a number of other potentially important variables (such as the number of minority group friends) and the percentage of immigrants in the country (another potential source of threat). In the event, the three most robust correlates of prejudice were realistic and symbolic threat (both positive) and contact (negative). Once these three variables are controlled, the percentage of immigrants in each country bears no rela-tionship to prejudice (see Quillian, 1995). Moreover, potential sources of threat at an individual level (risk of becoming unemployed, income level risk) were mostly unre-lated to prejudice, once those three powerful factors had had their effects. Finally, in an attempt to discover what led to feelings of threat (symbolic and realistic, com-bined), McLaren (2003) conducted further analyses. This time the percentage of foreigners in each country was reliably correlated with perceptions of threat (higher percentage being associated with more threat) but, crucially, this relationship was qualified by the contact variable: the percentage of foreigners was only clearly related to perceived threat for those who had no minority group friends; for those with many minority group friends, the foreigner variable was completely unrelated to threat.
Here, then, intergroup contact can be seen to provide an important ‘buffer’ against a potentially threatening demographic variable like the proportion of foreigners. In Chapter 9 I shall have occasion to provide many other examples of the positive effects of intergroup contact.
Before concluding this chapter, there is one aspect of the integrated threat theory which deserves closer attention. It will be recalled that one of the threats proposed by Stephan and Stephan (2000) is that of negative stereotypes about the outgroup.
I must say I have always been rather puzzled by this. To my mind, it is a little odd to have as a hypothesized predictor of prejudice a variable which many regard as a com-ponent of prejudice itself! It is interesting that the status of negative stereotypes in the model has not escaped the attention of researchers. Stephan and colleagues (2002) themselves, in perhaps the most comprehensive test of the model, found that, empiri-cally, this variable sat more comfortably as an antecedent of threat rather than as a form of threat itself. An even more plausible suggestion has been made by Curseu and colleagues (2007). In their study of Dutch employees’ attitudes towards immigrant workers, they found little support for the Stephan and Stephan’s (2000) hypothesis that negative stereotypes act as a threat alongside other threats (symbolic, realistic, anxiety). Instead, their data indicated that negative stereotypes should be considered as an intervening variable, partially mediating the effects of the other threats on prejudice.
In this chapter I have been concerned with the origins of prejudice, which lie in the relationships between groups. As we have seen, intergroup relations have implica-tions for the groups’ material well-being and physical safety, for the social identities of their members, for their sense of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their group’s social position, and for how secure or threatened they feel. If I am asked, as I some-times am, to identify the most important factors in the genesis of prejudice, it is to
the material in this chapter that I point. Prejudice is above all an intergroup phenom-enon, and so it should not surprise us if intergroup variables are pre-eminent in its causation.
Summary
1 Prejudice can usefully be regarded as the outcome of conflicting group goals.
Research shows that groups competing for scarce resources typically display more biased attitudes and greater mutual animosity than groups which are co-operating to achieve jointly desired objectives.
2 Conflicting interests are not, however, necessary for the arousal of mild forms of prejudice. Groups show a tendency towards intergroup discrimination in the most minimal group situations. One explanation of such spontaneous ingroup favouritism is based on the need for a positive social identity. Social identities are thought to be maintained by making positively biased intergroup comparisons, so as to achieve some distinctiveness for the ingroup.
3 Social identity processes are relevant in two main ways for understanding preju-dice. Groups which are very similar to each other may be more biased in order to enhance their mutual distinctiveness, but only if group members identify with them sufficiently strongly. Groups of unequal status do not show the same levels of ingroup favouritism; typically, higher-status groups are more biased than low-status groups – unless destabilizing or delegitimating factors are at work, tending to undermine the status hierarchy.
4 Strength of group identification plays an important role in explaining preju-dice, but not in the obvious way – through the claim that greater identification leads to more prejudice. This claim is true only if intergroup comparisons are salient, or if the ingroup is defined in an essentialist way (in other words, if its definition implies that the ingroup has some fixed essence). More importantly, group identification moderates the effects of other variables: people who are more strongly attached to their ingroups usually react more sharply to other factors known to instigate prejudice.
5 Prejudice towards an outgroup can also be caused by a sense of relative dep-rivation – the perception that one’s own group is not doing as well as one believes it should be doing. Such expectations can derive from one’s memory of recent gains/losses made by the ingroup or, more often, from comparing the ingroup’s position with that of an outgroup. Much research confirms the importance of rela-tive deprivation in determining prejudice, although occasionally a paradoxical effect of relative gratification has also been observed: groups expecting to do well in the future are sometimes more prejudiced than those anticipating little change.
6 An overarching cause of prejudice is threat. Threats may take material forms (as threats to economic well-being or to physical safety), or they may be more symbolic in nature (like threats to cultural values or identity). Particular threats often instigate specific emotional responses in group members, and these, in turn, lead to different behaviours towards outgroups.
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Notes
1 Except in relatively rare circumstances, such as choosing to have a sex change operation or artificially changing the colour of one’s skin. In any case, such extreme ‘passing’ strategies can be fraught with difficulties (see Breakwell, 1988).
2 This is a matter of some dispute. According to one of the architects of SIT, the theory never stated or implied this hypothesis (Turner, 1999). However, without wishing to enter into a protracted textual dispute with my one time collaborator and still greatly respected col-league, I think it is fair to say that not everyone shares his view (see Brown, 2000b and Mummendey et al., 2001b for further discussion of the matter).
3 In fact the analysis was a little more complex than this. When analysing longitudinal data to test a causal hypothesis, it is necessary to control for the dependent measure – in this case, attitude – at the earlier time point. Thus the crucial non-significant relationships were actu-ally partial correlations between pre-election identification and post-election attitude, con-trolling for pre-election attitudes (see Finkel, 1995).
4 According to my dictionary, this term stems from a Jewish religious custom whereby a high priest symbolically laid the sins of a people on to a goat, which was then allowed to escape into the wilderness (Chambers 20th Century Dictionary, 1979). How ironic, therefore, that Jews themselves have so often become the scapegoats for the ‘sins’ of racist societies throughout human history.
5 The ‘J’ in the J-curve hypothesis comes from considering a graph of this rise and fall in standards. It resembles the curve of a letter ‘J’ laid upside down and at an angle.
6 The measures were focused on the respondents’ personal life conditions rather than on the conditions of their group. Thus the measures of deprivation and gratification are at an indi-vidual level, which makes the results obtained from these measures all the more surprising.
7 The participants’ social dominance orientation also magnified the effects of experimental condition.
8 Although intergroup anxiety and negative stereotypes featured prominently in the original model (Stephan and Stephan, 2000) and in many empirical tests of it, they are given slightly less emphasis in the revised model (Stephan and Renfro, 2002).
Further Reading
Ellemers, N., Spears, R., and Doosje, B. (eds) (1999) Social Identity: Context Commitment, Content. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mackie, D. M., and Smith, E. R. (eds) (2002) From Prejudice to Intergroup Emotions:
Differentiated Reactions to Social Groups. Hove: Psychology Press.
Scheepers, D., Spears, R., Doosje, B., and Manstead, A. S. R. (2006) The social functions of ingroup bias: Creating, confirming or changing social reality. European Review of Social Psychology 17: 359–96.
Sherif, M. (1966) Group Conflict and Cooperation: Their Social Psychology, chs 1, 2, 5, 6.
London: Routledge.
Tajfel, H. (1981a) Human Groups and Social Categories, chs 11–15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Walker, I., and Smith, H. (eds) (2002) Relative Deprivation: Specification, Development and Integration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Prejudice Old and New
In this chapter I want to pick up three themes which have recurred in various places earlier in the book. The first is that prejudice is not a static phenomenon. As I noted in Chapters 4 and 5, there is a good deal of research to show that the plainly pejora-tive stereotypes of some minority groups that were commonplace fifty years ago are much less in evidence today. This is as noticeable from casual observation of people’s everyday conversations as it is from the results of more systematic opinion surveys.
The second theme is that prejudice is not a monolithic concept. This should already be clear from the different chapter headings which have identified its charactero-logical, cognitive and social dimensions, but it emerged especially strongly in the last chapter, where I noted that different measures of prejudice – ingroup bias, out-group dislike, and so on – are often poorly correlated. The third theme is that there may be more to prejudice than meets the eye: there are some aspects of it that are outside our awareness or our control. We encountered these issues in Chapter 3 and 4, where I discussed several phenomena with automatic or unconscious characteristics.
These three themes come together in this chapter. I consider first whether prejudice is really on the wane. As I shall demonstrate, there is much evidence that it is, at least in western Europe and North America, where it has been most intensively studied, and at least at the level of publicly expressed attitudes. However, other evidence indi-cates that it is far from being extinct. Less obtrusive measures still reveal that people’s behaviour towards members of an outgroup is often not the same as it is towards members of their ingroup. In the second part of the chapter I discuss various theories and associated prejudice measures which have been proposed to explain these changes in the way prejudice manifests itself. Although some of these are substantively differ-ent, what they all have in common is an assumption that new societal norms and changing political, economic and social relations between groups have combined to create a climate in which novel forms of prejudice can flourish. Underlying all these new kinds of prejudice is some residual negative affect associated with the outgroup.
In the final section I address what has come to be something of a cause célèbre amongst many social psychologists: the relationship between explicit (pencil and paper) meas-ures of prejudice and more implicit measmeas-ures, which usually rely on different response
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times to undertake various speeded decision tasks. Should one type of measure be regarded as a ‘truer’ and more valid index of prejudice than the other?