Changing prejudiced attitudes, promoting egalitarianism, and enhancing diversity through fundamental processes of persuasion

ABSTRACT

We review work from persuasion science relevant to reducing prejudiced attitudes. We begin by introducing the idea that the thoughts people generate – their number and valence – are critical for understanding when responding to persuasive attempts will result in egalitarian attitudes. A focus on thinking highlights the importance of understanding short and long-term attitude change in promoting diversity. How much people think is also consequential for spreading of initial change to more distal attitudes and generalization of change to other judgments. The second section describes a process of thought validation that emphasizes the importance of considering what people think and feel about their own thoughts. This meta-cognitive process is shown to make a difference in producing consequential changes in reducing prejudiced attitudes toward African Americans, immigrants, refugees, individuals with disabilities, and beyond. The conditions under which variables such as minority status and stigmatized sources affect elaboration and validation are also specified. The fourth section explores how these two processes are relevant for understanding explicit and implicit ambivalence and change in the domain of prejudiced attitudes. We highlight the utility of a process-oriented approach for designing future research and promoting more inclusive attitudes and actions.

KEYWORDS:

• Attitudes
• prejudice
• stereotype
• persuasion
• elaboration
• validation

Notes

¹ Learning about others can reduce prejudice not only by changing cognitions about out-group members, but also by changing emotions (Brown & Hewstone, 2005; Turner & Crisp, 2010).

² For some variables, a combination of motivational and ability factors could be at work. For example, being in a positive mood might make it easier for positive thoughts to come to mind (an ability bias), but might also motivate people to want to stay in that positive state by generating positive thoughts (motivational bias).

³ In the ELM, the same persuasion processes that are relevant for changing a relatively specific attitude that might have been biased by prejudice (e.g. attitudes towards hiring individuals with mental challenges in organisations) are useful for changing more general prejudiced attitudes (e.g. attitudes towards out-groups) and for changing the level of agreement with statements that promote equality (e.g. being in favour of incorporating people from more diverse backgrounds within institutions).

⁴ People generally find arguments to be more compelling the more they point to desirable and likely consequences of adopting the position advocated (R. E. Petty & Wegener, 1991). Manipulating argument quality and measuring the differential impact of strong vs. weak messages on subsequent attitudes towards the proposal is a methodological tool to assess how different variables affect the extent of thinking (see R. E. Petty et al., 1976; see Carpenter, 2015, for a review of studies using argument quality as a tool to gauge message processing).

⁵ An attitude towards a stigmatised or minority group (e.g. South American immigrants in Spain) is considered prejudiced when it is less favourable than the attitude towards another non-stigmatised or majority group (e.g. Spaniards in Spain), although it can be positive in absolute terms.

⁶ In another study, the discrepancy between implicit and explicit attitudes was manipulated rather than measured yielding similar results (R. E. Petty et al., 2006). That is greater implicit ambivalence was associated with a greater impact of argument quality on attitudes.

⁷ Future research should also take into consideration the goals underlying elaboration. In the research described throughout this review, most participants were likely to be motivated by their need to know. Recent research has examined an alternative motive in which people aim to process information to be entertained (cf., Moyyer-Guse´, 2008) (e.g. Cancela et al., 2020; Wilson et al., 2019). This research has shown that the same variable (e.g. personal relevance) that can enhance elaboration when people have a knowledge goal can decrease elaboration when people have an entertainment goal.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [0847834]; Ministerio de economía, industria y competitividad (ES)[PSI2017-83303-C2-1-P].