524 Prejudice, Racism, and Discrimination
high on RWA, past experience and perceived value dissimi-
larity were additional factors along with symbolic beliefs that
were useful in predicting their prejudicial attitude toward
homosexuals.
Because intergroup attitudes can be ambivalent rather
than uniformly positive or negative, Esses and her colleagues
extended their open-ended techniques to assess attitudinal
ambivalence toward various social groups. In one study,
Bell, Esses, and Maio (1996) assessed evaluations, stereo-
types, symbolic beliefs, and emotions that a sample of
English-Canadian university students in Ontario felt toward
Native People, French-Canadians, Canadians, and Oriental
immigrants. Respondents were more ambivalent toward
Native People than Canadians or Oriental immigrants, with
French-Canadians in between. Correlations between average
ambivalence scores and an overall summary evaluation of
each group showed that ambivalence was unrelated to atti-
tude toward Native Peoples but negatively related to attitudes
for the other groups, especially French-Canadians. Because
MAIA takes into account ambivalence in intergroup atti-
tudes, it could also qualify as an ambivalence approach to
prejudice.
Conclusion
As perhaps the ultimate form of an integrative approach to
the psychology of bigotry, one could ask what a general the-
ory of prejudice would look like. In reviewing the literature
on theories of racism and their own research on values and
prejudice, Biernat, Vescio, Theno, and Crandall (1996) out-
lined just such a general theory of prejudice. A general the-
ory, they suggested, should seek to predict or explain
prejudice by oppressors toward an array of potential target
groups, such as Blacks, homosexuals, ethnic groups, women,
and so on in the United States and in other countries. They
also generated a list of factors that promote prejudice. From
racism and belief congruence theories (as well as SDT, ITT,
and MAIA, it might be added), these prejudice-promoting
factors include negative affect toward Blacks (and other
groups), prototypic values such as antiegalitarianism, indi-
vidualism, and the Protestant ethic, the perception that mem-
bers of groups who are the target of prejudice violate
cherished beliefs and values, as well as normative and con-
textual cues that condone or permit prejudice and discrimina-
tion. Other contributing factors, they noted, would include
known correlates of prejudice, such as an authoritarian per-
sonality (especially RWA) and attributional styles in per-
ceivers that lead them to attribute negative outcomes
confronting oppressed people to internal, controllable causes
rather than external ones.
To their list of factors promoting prejudice should also be
added individual differences in aggressiveness and social
dominance orientation, realistic threats, and situational cues
that prime and stimulate negative out-group attitudes, both
subliminally and supraliminally. In addition, unconscious
processes of the types specified by the OTAP and automatic
processing approaches to prejudice would also need to be
taken into account. On the other hand, humanitarian and egal-
itarian values, internal motivation to avoid prejudice, and
empathy and sympathetic identification with the underdog
would help to counteract prejudice and its expression.
This outline for a general theory of prejudice summarizes
well the insights of psychology’s best theories for under-
standing prejudice at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It
highlights ambiguities that future research might try to re-
solve, such as whether egalitarian values promote or counter
prejudice or both, depending on yet other factors. Finally, it is
perhaps useful as a heuristic device for designing and execut-
ing studies of prejudice, with an eye to evaluating the relative
power of promotive and counteractive factors and assessing
their unique predictive power and interactions. Illustrating
just such an approach is the research by Biernat, Vescio,
Theno, and Crandall (1996), which (among other things) in-
cluded measures of core American values, prejudice scales,
supraliminal priming of values, and experimental variations
in value violation by attitude targets representing (in different
studies) variations in race, sexual orientation, and weight
status.
Having completed a review of prejudice from the perspec-
tive of the bigot, I now consider the psychology of prejudice
from the viewpoint of the victim or target.THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE VICTIM OF
PREJUDICE AND DISCRIMINATIONPsychologists have long been interested in the effects of dis-
crimination on members of oppressed groups. One early ap-
proach to exploring this question was to assess samples of
oppressed individuals on psychological measures as a means
of exploring the impact of oppression. Kardiner and Ovesey
(1951), for example, used psychoanalytic interviews and re-
sponses to projective tests such as the thematic apperception
test (TAT) and the Rorschach to assess the “mark of oppres-
sion” among Black Americans. Similarly, Karon (1975) com-
pared samples of White respondents and northern versus
southern Black respondents in the United States on a modi-
fied version of the Tomkins-Horn Picture Arrangement Test
(PAT), a projective test for assessing personality. Although
both studies showed evidence of the stigma of being Black in