512 Prejudice, Racism, and Discrimination
Value similarity had a strong effect on stimulus person ratings
in both studies and a stronger effect than group member-
ship characteristics (i.e., whether the stimulus person being
evaluated was an in-group or out-group member from the per-
spective of the respondent).
When only group membership cues are available, per-
ceivers infer that an out-group member has dissimilar beliefs,
triggering a discriminatory or prejudicial response toward her
or him, whether the out-group is defined by race or sexual
orientation (see Stein, Hardyck, & Smith, 1965; Pilkington &
Lydon, 1997). When belief similarity or dissimilarity is
crossed with group membership, belief effects (i.e., prefer-
ring the individual with similar beliefs to one with dissimilar
beliefs) are stronger. Race effects, however, usually remain
evident in interpersonally intimate domains such as eating to-
gether, dating, and marriage. Insko et al. (1983; Cox et al.,
1996) have suggested that race effects in these particular do-
mains reflect perceived disapproval of interracial contact by
reference persons such as parents and peers rather than inti-
macy per se.
In sum, as a perspective on prejudice, BCT anticipated the
subsequent focus on the importance of values in prejudice, an
idea pivotal to ambivalence approaches to prejudice that
emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. I now turn to ambivalence
approaches to prejudice.
Ambivalence Approaches
Myrdal (1994) was perhaps first to suggest that ambivalence
underlies White Americans’ attitudes and behaviors toward
Blacks. This idea lay fallow in U.S. psychology until the late
1970s (see Crosby, Bromley, & Saxe, 1980; Pettigrew, 1979).
By that point, though, it had become increasingly apparent that
White Americans were less prone to strident racism asserting
White superiority, Black inferiority, and racial segregation but
instead inclined toward subtler expressions of racism. Al-
though attitude surveys suggested growing racial tolerance
among White Americans from the 1960s onward, the evidence
was much less clear on indirect indicators (e.g., nonverbal be-
havior and helping behavior) that feelings of White Americans
toward Blacks had truly become more tolerant.
In the last few decades, several groups of researchers
concerned with prejudice, racism, and discrimination in the
United States have characterized White Americans’ attitudes
toward Black Americans in the latter twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries as being ambivalent in nature, that is,
consisting of both positive and negative elements (see Jones,
1997). They differ, however, in the nature of the positive and
negative elements comprising this ambivalence and other as-
pects of their models. These ambivalence approaches include
theories of aversive racism, symbolic and modern racism, re-
sponse amplification, ambivalent sexism, and blatant versus
subtle prejudice.Aversive RacismDovidio and Gaertner (1986), for example, proposed a the-
ory ofaversive racism,in which they characterized the racial
attitudes of most liberal, White Americans today as a subtler
and less obviously bigoted view of Black Americans than the
dominative racism(i.e., old-fashioned, “redneck” views of
White superiority and Black inferiority) of previous genera-
tions. According to the aversive racism perspective, preju-
dice in the United States of the later twentieth century
became a subtler, less direct, and perhaps more pernicious
form than before, although dominative racism has not disap-
peared altogether.
Aversive racism theory suggests that on one hand, most
White Americans subscribe strongly to an egalitarian value
system, inclining them to sympathize with victims of injus-
tice, such as Black Americans and other racial minorities, and
to support policies promoting racial equality. This strong ad-
herence to egalitarianism enables White Americans to regard
themselves as being unprejudiced and nondiscriminatory.
This positive component of the ambivalence comprising
aversive racism is not assumed, however, to include gen-
uinely pro-Black attitudes or sentiments of true friendship
between Whites and Blacks in the United States.
On the other hand, owing to a historically racist culture in
the United States and certain feelings of negative affect (e.g.,
uneasiness, disgust, fear, and discomfort, though not neces-
sarily hostility or hate) toward Black Americans, most White
Americans are assumed to avoid Black-White interracial in-
teractions and to be biased and discriminatory toward Black
Americans in situations in which they can do so without
appearing to be prejudiced or in which it may be justified
under a rationale preserving their erstwhile egalitarian val-
ues. Aversive racism is not assumed to be a psychopatho-
logical phenomenon but rather to reflect normal cognitive
processes and the influence of sociocultural and historical
processes on White Americans.
Several implications flow from aversive racism theory and
the idea that aversive racists are strongly motivated and vigi-
lant to avoid appearing racially bigoted. First, traditional prej-
udice measures in the form of standard attitude scales would
presumably be difficult and perhaps of limited use for assess-
ing aversive racism, according to Dovidio and Gaertner
(1986). Nevertheless, based on survey research up to the
1990s, Dovidio and Gaertner (1991) estimated that perhaps a
fifth of White U.S. citizens were overtly racist. The other 80%