The Psychology of the Victim of Prejudice and Discrimination 527The Personal-Group Discrimination Discrepancy
Research originally conducted in the tradition of relative de-
privation theory has suggested that individuals in subordi-
nate and oppressed groups typically perceive more group
discrimination than personal discrimination. Specifically, in
testing models of egoistic relative deprivation (defined later),
Crosby (1982) observed that members of a sample of work-
ing women in Massachusetts believed that they, as individual
women, were personally less deprived and discriminated
against in terms of income and employment opportunities
than were women as a group. Crosby (1984) subsequently
attributed the tendency for women to perceive less personal
than group discrimination to a process of denial of their per-
sonal disadvantage.
This phenomenon has since been observed among ethnic
and racial groups in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere
and has been labeled the personal-group discrimination dis-
crepancy (PGDD; Taylor, Wright, Moghaddam, & Lalonde,
1990; Taylor, Wright, & Porter, 1994). Much like Crosby
(1982), Taylor et al. (1990) found that Haitian and East
Indian women in Montreal reported more group than per-
sonal discrimination across four sources of potential discrim-
ination (viz., race, culture, status as newcomers to Canada,
and sex). Dion and Kawakami (1996) likewise found a
PGDD across a variety of domains for six ethnic groups in
Toronto, three of them visible minorities and the other three
White or nonvisible minorities, although the PGDD was con-
sistently stronger among the visible minorities.
Explanations for the Personal-Group
Discrimination Discrepancy
One reason that people from oppressed groups may be reluc-
tant to claim that they have personally experienced prejudice
or discrimination is that there are social costs to attributing a
setback to discrimination. In two studies, Kaiser and Miller
(2001) showed that a Black person who attributed a failing
grade on a test to discrimination was perceived by Whites as
being a complainer and was evaluated less positively than
was a Black person attributing the failure to the low quality
of his answers on the test.
Perhaps the most comprehensive explanation of the
PGDD, at present, has been suggested by Postmes,
Branscombe, Spears, and Young (1999). Postmes and his
colleagues argued that the PGDD is not an intentional com-
parison between oneself and one’s group as regards experi-
enced discrimination. If the latter were the case, the
difference between separate ratings of perceived discrimina-
tion for self and for group (i.e., the standard way of assessing
the PGDD) should relate highly to a single direct comparison
for self (compared to others of one’s group, e.g., a gender
group) or in-group (compared to a comparison out-group,
e.g., the other gender group). In fact, standard PGDD scores
correlated only modestly with direct comparisons for self and
for group.
Instead, Postmes et al. (1999) proposed and showed that
ratings of personal discrimination and of group discrimina-
tion are based on two separate judgments: an interpersonal
judgment comparing self and other in-group members for
ratings of personal discrimination and an intergroup judg-
ment comparing one’s in-group to an out-group for ratings
of group discrimination. Consistent with this emphasis on
different types of judgment and comparison referents, they
also demonstrated that ratings of personal discrimination or
advantage reflect personal, self-serving motives; whereas
ratings of group discrimination or advantage are influenced
by social identity motives and in-group identification. Other
researchers’ analyses of the PGDD converge with Postmes
et al.’s conclusions (Dion & Kawakami, 1996; Kessler,
Mummendey, & Leisse, 2000; Quinn, Roese, Pennington, &
Olson, 1999).Perceived Prejudice and Discrimination as StressorsA Stress ModelA number of investigators have independently proposed that
perceiving oneself to be a target of prejudice or discrimina-
tion is a psychosocial stressor. For example, Dion, Dion, and
Pak (1992) contended that perceived prejudice or discrimina-
tion is a social stressor because it elicits cognitive appraisals
of threat such that its victims see themselves as being delib-
erate targets of negative behavior by one or more out-group
antagonists and impute stable, malevolent motives and inten-
tions to them. Moreover, prejudice and discrimination are
often unpredictable stressors, entailing greater adaptational
costs for the victim than a predictable or controllable stressor
(see Allison, 1998, for an excellent discussion of other stress
models).
If perceived prejudice and discrimination are indeed stres-
sors, they should produce in individuals various social-
psychological consequences known to result from stress,
such as negative affect, reported stress, psychological or psy-
chiatric symptoms, and lowered sense of well-being, as well
as heightened in-group identification (a frequent response to
external threat to one’s group). Dion et al.’s stress model of
perceived discrimination has now been amply supported by
both experimental and correlational studies. In an experiment
varying perceived prejudice in an attributional ambiguity