The Psychology of the Victim of Prejudice and Discrimination 525the United States, they did not link it clearly to experiences of
discrimination encountered by their respondents.
Attributional Ambiguity Perspectives
Beginning in the 1970s, research on the psychology of being
a victim of prejudice and discrimination changed in several
important ways (see Dion, Earn, & Yee, 1978). First, it shifted
toward an experimental approach in which discrimination
experiences were manipulated by investigators in the psycho-
logical laboratory by creating conditions in which partici-
pants from stigmatized groups either could or could not
attribute a negative outcome to prejudice on the part of others
(an attributional ambiguity paradigm) or were explicitly
given the odds that their failure was due to discrimination by
allegedly biased judges of their performance (the base rate
paradigm). Second, these experimentally oriented researchers
often adopted a viewpoint stressing the attributional ambigu-
ity of being a target of prejudice (see Crocker & Major, 1989;
Crocker, Major, & Steele, 1998; Dion, 1975, 1986; Dion &
Earn, 1975; Dion et al., 1978).
According to an attributional ambiguity perspective, in-
stances of encountering prejudice or discrimination are often
ambiguous. For example, Black Americans who encounter a
rejection from a White American confront an attributional
dilemma to explain the situation and must decide whether the
rejection is due to something about themselves (i.e., a personal
characteristic) or to something about the person rejecting them
(e.g., a prejudicial bias or a discriminatory reaction against
Blacks). Attributional ambiguity perspectives emphasize that
the type of attributions that a victim of prejudice or discrimi-
nation makes in such a situation (i.e., an internal attribution to
the self, an external attribution of perceived prejudice or dis-
crimination, or perhaps both) has a psychological impact on
the victim’s self-evaluations and affective reactions.
Attributions of Prejudice and Self-Esteem
Dion (1975) provided the first suggestive evidence for a link
between attributions of prejudice and self-esteem in an ex-
periment where university women competed against several
opponents in a laboratory setting, who they were led to be-
lieve were either all male or all female; and the women them-
selves were made to fail either mildly or severely. Following
experimentally induced failure, the women rated themselves
on positive and negative traits comprising the female stereo-
type and self-esteem traits and indicated to what extent their
opponents were biased and prejudiced against them. From
this latter measure, women were further categorized into
high- versus low-perceived prejudice groups, with perceived
prejudice taken as an additional independent variable along
with the experimental variables of alleged sex of the oppo-
nents and severity of failure (i.e., an internal analysis).
Unsurprisingly, the greater the failure, the lower was the
women’s subsequent self-esteem. However, perceived preju-
dice moderated this effect and apparently mitigated the im-
pact of severe failure in decreasing women’s self-esteem.
Specifically, women who experienced severe failure with
male opponents and perceived it as reflecting sexist prejudice
showed higher self-regard than did those who did not see
their putative male opponents as prejudiced. Dion (1975) in-
terpreted this finding as suggesting that perceived prejudice
or discrimination may not inevitably lower self-esteem in the
victim. Rather, under some circumstances the attribution of
prejudice may sustain self-esteem by enabling the minority
or subordinate group member to attribute a negative experi-
ence to prejudice by others toward an arbitrary trait (i.e., their
group membership) rather than to their own personal quali-
ties as an individual.
In an important theoretical statement and elaboration of
the attributional ambiguity perspective, Crocker and Major
(1989) reviewed the then-existing literature and outlined sev-
eral ways that members of stigmatized groups could protect
their self-concepts in the face of a negative experience. For
example, a stigmatized group member could interpret the
negative encounter as due to prejudice or discrimination to-
ward their group. Alternatively, they could protect them-
selves from invidious comparisons with privileged majority
group members by comparing their outcomes to their own in-
group rather than to the out-group and by focusing on those
dimensions on which their group exceeds the dominant out-
group. Major and Schmader (1998) have added psychological
disengagement to the list of ways in which stigmatized group
members may psychologically insulate and protect them-
selves from prejudice and discrimination. Miller and Kaiser
(2001a, 2001b) recently outlined the wide variety of re-
sponses that those who are discriminated against may employ
to protect themselves, drawing from the literature on coping
and stress as well as attachment theory for insights.
Crocker and Major (1993) qualified the conditions under
which attributing negative outcomes to prejudice could
buttress one’s self-esteem: namely, when the stigma was
perceived as legitimate, justifiable, or controllable and legit-
imizing beliefs supported the stigmatized group’s lower
status, or when other important beliefs were threatened by at-
tributions of prejudice. Crocker, Cornwell, and Major (1993)
supported this reasoning in a subsequent experiment in which
obese women were rejected by an attractive male confederate
as a potential date. Although the obese women attributed the
negative outcome to their weight, they did not attribute it to