Although prejudice-reduction policies and interventions abound, is it possible that some of them result in the precise opposite of their intended effect--an increase in prejudice? We examined this question by exploring the impact of motivation-based prejudice-reduction interventions and assessing whether certain popular practices might in fact increase prejudice. In two experiments, participant...

BACKGROUND The literature has rarely paid attention to the differential influence of intergroup contact on subtle and blatant prejudice. In this study, we hypothesized that the influence of intergroup contact on subtle prejudice will be smaller than its influence on blatant prejudice. METHOD This hypothesis was tested with data from a cross-sectional design on 1,655 school-aged native Spanish...

The present study identifies a broad taxonomy of motives underlying the desire to regulate prejudice and assess the impact of motivation to regulate prejudice on levels of explicit and implicit prejudice. Using self-determination theory as the foundation, six forms of motivation to regulate prejudice are proposed. In Study 1 (N = 257), an exploratory factor analysis reveals evidence for the six...

To date, there is little direct evidence that people who are motivated to respond without prejudice actively work to reduce their prejudice. The authors explored people's efforts to control prejudice for an upcoming interracial interaction. They proposed that people who were motivated to respond without prejudice should exert effort to control prejudice but that their efforts should reflect the...

Given its renown, many psychologists and sociologists likely consider the publication of Gordon Allport's (1954/1979) seminal book The Nature of Prejudice as the inauguration of the psychological study of prejudice. However, we have uncovered rarely-cited, published papers (starting in 1830) that provide a wealth of speculation on prejudice even before psychologists/sociologists attempted to me...

Although 50 years of research demonstrate that friendly intergroup contact reduces intergroup prejudice, the findings are based solely on self-reported, explicit prejudice. In two parallel experiments examining intergroup contact and prejudice-between Whites and Blacks in the United States (Experiment 1) and between Christians and Muslims in Lebanon (Experiment 2)-we examined whether intergroup...

Research on implicit and explicit prejudice has treated implicit prejudice as a unitary construct characterized by automatic access to negative concepts. The present article makes the case that tasks purported to measure implicit prejudice actually assess 2 different processes. Some assess the extent to which prejudice is activated automatically on the perception of a member of the target group...

The present research compared the effectiveness of meaningful negation—“That’s wrong”—and simple negation—“No”—to alter automatic prejudice. Participants were trained to negate prejudiceconsistent or prejudice-inconsistent information, using either simple or meaningful negation, and completed an evaluative priming measure of racial prejudice before and after training. No significant changes in ...

Traditional prejudice research departs from the theoretical expectation that specific types of prejudice targeting different outgroups are strongly correlated and can be summarized in a ‘general prejudice’ factor. The assumption is that different forms of prejudice have a mutual origin and can be triggered by the same factors. In this paper, we strive to answer two research questions: (1) do di...