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Social norms and prejudice

Pascal Gelfort, University of Jena; Thomas Kessler, University of Jena; David Urschler, HSD Hochschule Döpfer, University of Applied Sciences

As a precursor of hate crimes and a core component of ideologies of inequality, the concept of prejudice has been in the focus of social psychological research for decades. Whilst a lot of research has been conducted on the influence of personality, stereotypes, and group processes on prejudices, the idea of prejudice as normative and socially shared attitudes has rather been neglected (but see Crandall et al., 2002) even though it has already been stressed as a possible explanation for prejudice in early works on the topic. First evidence is provided by two studies (N 268 and N 270) measuring attitudes and normative acceptance of prejudice against a broad array of social groups. We found strong correlations between social norms and the expression of prejudice. Furthermore, we could show that expressed prejudices and stereotypical assumptions are highly correlated between participants, which provides further evidence for the idea that individuals share evaluations of and attitudes towards groups. These findings raise the question of how social contexts can be informative of prejudices expressed by individuals, how social norms motivate the expression of negative group evaluations and whether an analysis of an individual's environment might predict prejudice beyond measures of individual and personality differences. To further understand the processes underlying socio-contextual effects in the prejudice literature, for example on effects of contact on prejudice (Christ et al., 2014) and normative environments on hate speech (Soral et al., 2020), basic research on the processes underlying the conformity to and internalization of prejudice-related norms is necessary. The presented work provides a starting point to close the gap between the literature on norms and intergroup attitudes.

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