Chapter 4: The Prejudiced Personality

Chapter 4: The Prejudiced Personality PSYCHODYNAMIC PERSPECTIVES  Authoritarianism Rigid personality characterized by categorical thinking, submissiveness to authority, and adherence to middle-class values. These individuals tend to dislike anyone who is different from themselves and thus tend to have stereotypes and prejudice toward many groups.  Parents tend to be strict disciplinarians, and patterns of prejudice in child and upbringing tends to be common  Character-conditioned prejudice  (Allport) believed prejudiced personality comes from the individual feeling threatened and insecure of everything and thus, develop a prejudiced view of others as a way of projecting their fears and self-doubts onto others  Problems with the psychodynamic approach 1) Researchers became critical of psychoanalytic approaches to personality 2) Authoritarian personality was concluded to be unsatisfactory under scientific standards  Measures of authoritarianism F (facism), A-S (anti-semitism), E (ethnocentrism) was unclear 3) Theory only explained prejudice in small subset of population and did not explain why many people who didn’t have an authoritarian personality did show prejudice toward at least one other group  Right-wing authoritarianism  Personality style in which the individual tends to be: 1) Politically conservative 2) More punitive toward criminals 3) More likely to endorse orthodox religious views 4) Very prejudiced toward outgroups  These individuals are both fearful and self-righteous RELIGION  Research shows that there’s a positive correlation of being more religious and having less tolerance & more stereotyped cognitions about others  Committed religiosity: religious viewpoint allowing an individual to hold a wide range of categories about which one can evaluate the world, and one’s ideas about the world and others tend to be more complex and open-minded VS Consensual religiosity: religious viewpoint in which the individual interpret religion more literally and concretely, make more generalizations about religion and be unreceptive to diff ideas and opinions  Extrinsic religious orientation: - uses religion for their own purposes - attends church infrequently - tends to be more prejudiced towards others Intrinsic religious orientation: - internalized their religious values

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lives according to these beliefs attends church regularly tends to more egalitarian Problems with these two distinctions: Not helpful in assessing religious beliefs of individuals in non-traditional religions Measures of religious orientations (ROS) and prejudice were self-reported Not all intrinsic individuals are low in prejudice, but only tolerant of only certain types of individuals - Need to further specify individuals with (IA) indiscriminately anti-religious and (IP) indiscriminately pro-religious Religion as Quest  *(Batson) – this religious orientation called “quest” as a “process of questioning, doubting and re-examination in response to contradictions and tragedies of life” - Higher scores of quest orientation = negatively correlated with prejudice, positive correlation to prosocial behavior (compassion)  *(Snyder, Kleyck, Strenta, Mentzer) – examined prejudiced responses to situations in which it’s obvious prejudice is the basis for one’s behavior or there is another alternative explanation for the behavior - Ps chose a movie theatre, to sit in a theatre with a black confederate or white - Results: intrinsic individuals choose to sit with the black confederate in overt, uambigious situations but sat with white confederate in ambiguous, covert situations Those high in quest orientation tend to sit with blacks in overt/covert conditions These show that an intrinsic religious-o is less related to low prejudice and more related to social desirability to appear non-prejudiced - Conclusion: intrinsic religious-o score lower on self-report measures of prejudice but not lower on measures compared to non-religious individuals