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We want to show an intraindividual variation in expressed prejudices, depending on the salience (accessibility of particular group information) of differen social identities. In social psychological research there’s a broad consensus on the fact, that individuals are either bigoted or tolerant, which seems to reflect their deep seated personality characteristics (e.g., Adorno et al., 1950). Although the original theory of an “authoritarian personality” has received much criticism and has been revised several times (Altemeyer, 1981; Feldman, 2003; Oesterreich, 1996; Stellmacher & Petzel, 2005), the basic concept of a prejudiced personality has been retained. Thus, psychological research has gathered massive evidence for the assumption that some people are more prejudiced, whereas others are less prejudiced or more tolerant (Duckitt, 2001; Hodson & Dhont, 2015; Sibley & Duckitt, 2008). The two most prominent personality variables, RWA (Altemeyer, 1981) and SDO (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999) show consistently strong positive correlations for various prejudices (Sibley & Duckitt, 2008). What’s more is the observation that these prejudices against several target groups are interrelated thus that an individual who has prejudices against one group also tend to have prejudices against other groups. This phenomenon of generalized prejudices (Allport, 1954; Ekehammar & Akrami, 2003), which is also build in Zick’s (2008) syndrome of group focused enmity, seems to be the most convincing evidence that prejudices must be part of a certain personality. However, recent research challenged the approach of a prejudiced personality (Brandt, Reyna, Chambers, Crawford, & Wetherell, 2014; Chambers, Schlenker, & Collisson, 2013; Lindner, Elad-Strenger, Hechler, & Kessler, 2019). The main criticism focuses on the Achilles heel of decades of prejudice research: its narrow focus on prejudice targets (e.g., ethnic, national, sexual orientation). Researchers may have selected the most intuitive examples of prejudice as effects to be explained (Kahneman & Miller, 1986). As Wells and Windschitl (1999) point out, the functional sample size of an experiment is very low, if the critical missing feature is stimulus sampling. As a result of the small functional sample size of prejudice research (due to the neglected stimulus sampling of prejudice targets), the understanding of the existence of a prejudiced personality has been manifested over the past five decades. In our previous study we tested the predictive validity of RWA and SDO for a broader sample of prejudice targets that included the often used conservative targets (e.g. Homosexuals) and added a set of liberal prejudice targets like Managers, Bankers and Lawyers etc. (Lindner et al., 2019). We were able to replicate the well-known observation of a strong positive correlation of RWA and SDO with conservative prejudice targets. What’s new is that we also demonstrated that individuals low in RWA and SDO are highly prejudiced towards liberal prejudice target-groups, which is inconsistent with a one-dimensional personality explanation. Moreover, both, individuals high and low in RWA and SDO have generalized prejudices toward different sets of target-groups. In addition to RWA and SDO, we measured conservatism, meritocracy and humanism as confounded ideologies. Radkiewicz (2016) has already demonstrated that the prejudice prediction of RWA is largely based on the conservatism that is built into the RWA-Scale. We replicated his finding and extended it for liberal prejudice targets. We also found that SDO shares much variance with conservatism and humanism, which, if removed, minimizes the prejudice prediction. Thus, criticism on RWA and SDO is twofold: first, the finding that individuals without the certain personality structure are highly prejudiced is inconsistent with a one-dimensional (personality) explanation. Second, the prejudice prediction of the personality variables heavily relies on its confounds with ideology. Although the previous research reveals major shortcomings of the concept of a prejudiced personality, it doesn’t offer an alternative explanation for the formation of an individual’s prejudices. Therefore, the proposed study aims to clarify the role of personality and social identity (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) within that process. Personality traits are stable over the life span and become entrenched with increasing age (Aken & Aken, 1991; Asendorpf & van Aken, 1999). If RWA and SDO are personality variables, the same should apply to them. So, if the personality of an individual predicts its prejudices and if the personality is stable over time, one should have the same prejudice pattern in different situations or contexts. In contrast, the social identity theory emphasizes the social context of individuals. An individual’s social identity is the knowledge, that (s)he is member of a particular social group and the extent to which (s)he identifies with that group. Any given individual may possess several social identities. When a particular social identity is made salient, self-categorization (Turner, 1987) is activated and individuals tend to behave more group-normative rather than idiosyncratic. So, if the identification of an individual with a particular social group lead to group-specific-normative behavior, the prejudice pattern should vary as a function of the salient group-membership. |
