AbstractOur research on non-religion supports the proposed shift toward more interactive models of prejudice. Being nonreligious is easily hideable and, increasingly, of low salience, leading to experiences not easily understood via traditional or contemporary frameworks for studying prejudice and prejudice reduction. This context affords new opportunity to observe reverse forms of interactive prejudice, which can interfere with prejudice reduction.
Racial privity judgments – or the perceived causal connection between historical racial discrimination and current suffering among Black Americans – predicts sympathy for the victims of past injustices and perceptions of contemporary racial inequality. Four studies investigated the ideological roots of privity judgments; focusing on subjective temporal perceptions associated with privity judgments (e.g., subjective perceptions that past discrimination occurred more, versus less, recently). Study 1 revealed that liberals perceived historical instances of racial discrimination as having occurred more recently than conservatives, and that temporal perceptions of recency were associated with less anti-Black bias. Studies 2–4 manipulated temporal perceptions of recency by framing past discrimination as having occurred more recently. Results revealed that increasing perceived temporal recency resulted in reduced anti-Black bias and greater sympathy for present-day victims of racial discrimination across political ideology. Discussion surrounds how framing historical information as subjectively recent has implications for prejudice reduction.
Implicit prejudice are social preferences that exist outside of conscious awareness or conscious control. We summarize evidence for three mechanisms that influence the expression of implicit prejudice: associative change, contextual change, and change in control over implicit prejudice. We then review the evidence (or lack thereof) for five open issues in implicit prejudice reduction research: 1) what shows effectiveness in real-world application; 2) what doesn’t work for implicit prejudice reduction; 3) what interventions produce long-term changes in implicit prejudice; 4) measurement diversity in implicit prejudice reduction research; and 5) the relationship between implicit prejudice and behavior. Addressing these issues provide an agenda for clarifying the conditions and implications of reducing implicit prejudice.
Reducing Implicit Prejudice