The person-based nature of prejudice: Individual difference predictors of intergroup negativity

Abstract

Person-based factors influence a range of meaningful life outcomes, including intergroup processes, and have long been implicated in explaining prejudice. In addition to demonstrating significant heritability, person-based factors are evident in expressions of generalised prejudice, a robust finding that some people (relative to others) consistently score higher in prejudice towards multiple outgroups. Our contemporary review includes personality factors, ideological orientations (e.g., authoritarianism), religiosity, anxiety, threat, disgust sensitivity, and cognitive abilities and styles. Meta-analytic syntheses demonstrate that such constructs consistently predict prejudice, often at the upper bounds of effect sizes observed in psychological research. We conclude that prejudice theories need to better integrate person- and situation-based factors, including their interaction, to capture the complexity of prejudice and inform intervention development.

Keywords:

• Personality
• Individual differences
• Prejudice
• Intergroup relations
• Outgroup attitudes

Notes

¹ To highlight one difference, sentimentality [vs. toughness] is part of Big Five Agreeableness but HEXACO Emotionality.

² For instance, Cornelis and Van Hiel (2006) found prejudice more strongly associated with social–cultural (r = .51) than economic (r = .12) conservatism (ps < .05).

³ Some argue that liberals and conservatives are equivalently biased against groups they consider threatening (see Brandt, Reyna, Chambers, Crawford, & Wetherell, 2014). In Chambers, Schlenker, and Collisson (2013; Study 1), liberals (vs. conservatives) show less favourable attitudes towards Christian fundamentalists, anti-abortionists, wealthy people, the military, and so on; conservatives (vs. liberals) demonstrate less favourable attitudes towards gays, civil-rights leaders, feminists, environmentalists, and so on. Here, liberals dislike the powerful elites who impose positions or religious values. Contemporary prejudice operationalisations, however, emphasise group position and privilege (not only dislike). Liberals dislike groups holding and using power over others, and, therefore, their attitudes function to dissolve (not entrench) hierarchies, unlike prejudices of central interest to social psychologists as social problems. Examination of individual differences can provide valuable insights into certain prejudices. For instance, whereas liberals tend to respond favourably towards Blacks and the elderly, conservatives are more negative towards Blacks (“unconventional”, disadvantaged) but positive towards the elderly (disadvantaged but “conventional”; Lambert & Chasteen, 1997). Such nuanced interpretations are important in exploring “prejudice” from an individual difference perspective.

⁴ Recent studies find no associations between general disgust sensitivity and prejudice (Choma et al., 2012; Hodson, Choma et al., 2013; Hodson, Dube, & Choma, 2015). Rather, individual differences in ITG-DS particularly predict prejudice.