Reducing prejudice essentially entails changing the values and beliefs by which people live. This is tricky for a number of reasons. One is that people’s values and beliefs are often a long-standing basis of their psychological security. Another is that prejudice often serves specific psychological functions for people, such as allowing them to displace their hostile feelings or buttress their shaky self-esteem. A third difficulty arises because, once established, prejudiced views and stereotypes constitute schemas, and like other schemas, they tend to bias perceptions, attributions, and memories in ways that are self-perpetuating. Finally, people sometimes are not even aware of their prejudices and their influence. All of these factors make prejudice difficult to combat.

However, although there is no one-size-fits-all solution, a number of encouraging approaches are available. We will start from the top, so to speak, and examine how reducing prejudice can proceed from change at the societal or institutional level. Given that the effectiveness of such institutional change sometimes hinges on people controlling their expressions of prejudice, we will turn next to whether and when we are able to effectively do so. We will then discuss how we can go beyond controlling the expression of prejudice to actually change people’s prejudiced attitudes and ease intergroup conflict.

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Remember that prejudice exists within a cultural context, legitimized (albeit subtly at times) by the laws, customs, and norms that form the fabric of the society in which people live. Thus, one of the great challenges in reducing prejudice lies in changing these laws, customs, and norms. Often such change is made by individuals within a society, but sometimes the institutional structure can help to guide people toward this goal.

For example, when the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education declared public-school segregation unconstitutional, the United States imposed a legal backbone behind reducing prejudice. Particularly in those areas of the country where this mandate was communicated with an air of inevitability, rather than as an imposition that people would avoid if they could, desegregation fostered integration and reduced prejudice (Pettigrew, 1961). As we discussed in chapter 6, a change in behavior (in this case, by law) often can lead to a change in attitude. Remember that people strive for consistency between the two. As cognitive dissonance theory teaches us, once behavior changes (e.g., more interaction with and civil behavior toward outgroups), relevant attitudes tend to fall in line (e.g., more tolerant attitudes toward outgroups).

In addition to changing the intergroup atmosphere, institutional changes can have long-term consequences for the majority group’s perceptions of the disadvantaged group. The rationale behind desegregation was that separate schools for White and Black students were inherently unequal (see FIGURE 11.5). So what happens when the educational structure becomes (more) equal? As minorities are afforded greater opportunities, the diversity of people who emerge as success stories in our society also increases. The more such counterstereotypic narratives pervade the cultural landscape, the more people are exposed to examples of real people who break down preconceived ideas about certain groups. Affirmative action and improved educational and economic success for minority groups thus help to change associations and stereotypes of disadvantaged groups (Allport, 1954). The less a group is associated with poorer neighborhoods and jobs, lower academic performance, increased crime, and the like, the better. Remember the finding we noted in chapter 10 about the effect of President Obama’s success: When President Obama is the example that people bring to mind when thinking of Black people, they are less likely to be prejudiced (Columb & Plant, 2011; Plant et al., 2009).

Recognizing this cycle of group images and prejudice, we see how powerfully the mass media affect how majority group members perceive minority group members. The Jeffersons in the 1970s and 1980s, Murphy Brown in the early 1990s, and Glee in 2010 were important in bringing into mainstream awareness the issues faced by African American families, single working moms, and gay teenagers. And research confirms that the more people are exposed to counterstereotypic fictional examples of minority groups (in The Jeffersons, for example, an upwardly mobile Black family), the less they show automatic activation of stereotyped associations (Blair et al., 2001; Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001). In fact, an ambitious field experiment in Rwanda exposed people to one of two radio shows over the course of a year, either a soap opera with health messages or a soap opera with themes about reducing intergroup prejudice (Paluck, 2009). Those exposed to the show with themes about reducing prejudice showed more positive attitudes about and behavior toward interracial marriage.

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A Dual Process View of Prejudice

The issue of controlling prejudice takes us back to the dual process approach (Devine, 1989; Fazio, 1990), first introduced in chapter 3. In Process 1, stereotypes and biased attitudes are brought to mind quickly and automatically (through a reflexive or experiential process). In Process 2, people employ reflective or cognitive processes to regulate or control the degree to which those thoughts and attitudes affect their behavior and judgment.

Because prejudicial thoughts are often reinforced by a long history of socialization and cues in one’s environment, they can come to mind easily and be difficult to tamp down. The success of Process 2 depends on people’s motivations for controlling their thoughts. When a motivation to avoid being biased stems from an internalized goal of being nonprejudiced, people can often keep implicit biases from influencing their decisions and judgment. In many cases, though, the motivation to control prejudice stems from the perception of external pressures, such as the pressure to be politically correct or to avoid making others angry (Plant & Devine, 1998, 2009). In these cases, people may be able to control their biases, but they end up being resentful about having to censor themselves (Plant & Devine, 2001).

Given the negative consequences of extrinsically motivated efforts to suppress prejudice, how is it possible to increase people’s intrinsic motivation to control prejudice? One way is to impress on them the necessity of cooperating with those with whom they are working. When people realize they need to cooperate with an outgroup person, they can be motivated to be nonbiased in their interactions with the outgroup and even show improved memory for the unique or individual aspects of that person (Neuberg & Fiske, 1987). At some level people realize that falling back on stereotypes to form impressions might not provide the most accurate assessment of another person’s character and abilities. The need to work together on a common goal helps to cue this motivation to be accurate and allows people to set their biases aside.

More recent research has uncovered the neurological mechanisms that support these two processes (Lieberman et al., 2002). Bartholow and colleagues (2006) have examined specific electrical signals emitted from the brain that are indicative of efforts at cognitive control. They found that when White participants are presented with pictures of Black targets, the more of these signals that their brains emit, the lower the accessibility of stereotypic thoughts. However, this occurred only when people’s cognitive-control abilities were intact. When they were impaired through the consumption of alcohol, fewer of these specific signals were emitted, and participants were less able to control their tendency to stereotype others.

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Taking a neuroscience perspective, research shows that when White participants were exposed very briefly (for only 30 milliseconds) to pictures of Black faces, they showed increased activation in the amygdala (the fear center of the brain) to the degree that they associated “Black American” with “bad” on an implicit association test (FIGURE 11.6) (Cunningham et al., 2004; Phelps et al., 2000). With such a brief exposure, people can do little to override knee-jerk reactions. What is interesting is that lengthening exposure to the faces to 250 milliseconds increased activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), the region of the brain responsible for more effortful and controlled processes of judgment and decision making. Furthermore, the more DLPFC activation people experienced, the lower the amygdala activation they exhibited. These findings suggest that automatic negative attitudes that might have sprung to mind initially can be modified by more controlled processes (Cunningham et al., 2004).

Prejudice Isn’t Always Easily Controlled

All of this research sounds pretty encouraging, but marshalling resources for mental control takes effort and energy. As a result, people face a few limitations when they attempt to control their biases.

The first limitation is that sometimes people make judgments of others when they are already aroused or upset. In these situations, cognitive control is impaired, so people likely will fall back on their prejudices and stereotypes. Consider, for example, a study in which White participants were asked to deliver shocks (that were not actually administered) to a White or Black confederate under the pretext of a behavior-modification study (Rogers & Prentice-Dunn, 1981). Half the White participants were angry about an overheard insult directed toward them by the confederate. When not angered, the White participants actually chose a less severe shock for the Black confederate than they did for the White confederate. However, after the White participants were angered, they shocked the Black confederate more strongly than his White counterpart. The arousal and negative emotion caused the participants to regress to gut-level negative attitudes.

People also can have difficulty with regulating their automatically activated thoughts when they are pressed for time, distracted, or otherwise cognitively busy. Teachers are more likely to be biased in their evaluations of students if they have to grade essays under time pressure. If instead they have ample time to make their judgments, they are better able to set aside their biases to provide fairer assessments of students’ work (Kruglanski & Freund, 1983). People are also more capable of setting aside biases when they are most cognitively alert. This fact leads to the provocative idea that a tendency to stereotype might be affected by circadian rhythms, the individual differences in daily cycles of mental alertness which make some people rise bright and early and make others night owls. In a study of how circadian rhythms can affect jury decision making, Bodenhausen (1990) recruited participants to play the roles of jurors in an ambiguous case where the offense either was or was not stereotypical of the defendant’s group (such as a student athlete accused of cheating on an exam). Did participants allow their stereotypes of the defendant to sway their verdicts? Not if they were participating in the study during their optimal time of day. But if morning people were participating in the evening or evening people were participating early in the morning, their verdicts were strongly colored by stereotypes.

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The Downsides of Control Strategies

Even when people succeed in controlling their biases, some downstream consequences of these efforts can be negative. First, you might recall from our discussion of ego depletion in chapter 5 (Muraven et al., 1998) that exerting mental effort in one context makes it harder to exert effort afterward in another context. For example, when White college students had any kind of conversation with a Black peer, regardless of whether the conversation was even about race, they performed more poorly on a demanding computer task right afterward than when they had this conversation with another White student (Richeson et al., 2003; Richeson & Shelton, 2003; Richeson & Trawalter, 2005). In addition, trying to push an unwanted thought out of mind often has the ironic effect of activating that thought even more. As a result, the more people try not to think of a stereotypic bias, the more it can eventually creep back in, especially when cognitive resources are limited (Follenfant & Ric, 2010; Gordijn et al., 2004; Macrae et al., 1994).

Failure of control strategies can happen even when it seems that one has gotten past initial stereotypes to appreciate the outgroup person’s individual qualities. In one study, participants who watched a video of a stigmatized student talking showed stereotype activation within the first 15 seconds, but after 12 minutes the stereotype was no longer active or guiding judgment (Kunda et al., 2002). This might seem to be good news, but not so fast. If participants later learned that the person in the video disagreed with them, the stereotype was reactivated. The implication is that, in our own interactions, we might often succeed in getting past initial stereotypes, but those stereotypes still might lurk just offstage, waiting to make an appearance if the situation prompts negative or threatening feelings toward that person.

We’ve seen that conscious efforts to control prejudice, although well intentioned, can fail or backfire completely. The implication is that reducing prejudice requires more than employing strategies to control prejudice; it also requires going to the source and changing people’s prejudicial attitudes. How do we do this?

One strategy that seems to be an intuitive way to foster more positive intergroup attitudes is to encourage people actually to interact with those who are the targets of their prejudice. In the late 1940s and the 1950s, as American society started to break down barriers of racial segregation, some interesting effects on racial prejudice were observed. For example, the more White and Black merchant marines served together in racially mixed crews, the more positive their racial attitudes became (Brophy, 1946). Such observations suggest that if people of different groups interact, prejudice should be reduced. There is certainly some truth to this. Research on the mere exposure effect (see chapters 8 and 14) shows that familiarity does increase liking, all other things being equal.

The problem with this strategy is that only rarely are all other things equal! If you look around the world and back in history, you quickly notice countless examples of people of different groups having extensive contact—yet their prejudices remain and even intensify. For example, in the American South there has long been considerable contact between Blacks and Whites, but this contact historically did not lead to decreases in prejudice (Pettigrew, 1959). Why did interracial contact in the merchant marines reduce prejudice, whereas other forms of contact do not?

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In considering such questions, Allport (1954) proposed that contact between groups can reduce prejudice only if it occurs under optimal conditions. According to Allport’s original recipe, four principal ingredients are necessary for positive intergroup contact:

In the time since Allport laid out this recipe for reducing prejudice, hundreds of studies with thousands of participants have examined whether intergroup contact that meets these requirements can reduce prejudices based on such distinctions as race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, and physical and mental disabilities. These studies range from archival studies of historical situations to controlled interventions that manipulate features of the contact setting. Despite the diversity of methodologies, research generally finds that the more closely the contact meets Allport’s requirements, the more effectively it reduces a majority group’s prejudice against minorities (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006; Tropp & Pettigrew, 2005).

To explore one of these ingredients for change in a bit more detail, let’s explore a classic study by Sherif and colleagues (Harvey et al., 1961) that dramatically demonstrates the power of superordinate goals to reduce prejudice. In a unique study, Sherif and colleagues invited 22 psychologically healthy boys to participate in a summer camp in Oklahoma. Because the camp was at the former hideout of the noted Old West outlaw Jesse James, this study has come be known as the Robbers Cave study. As the boys arrived at the camp, Sherif assigned them to one of two groups, the “Rattlers” or the “Eagles.” During the first week, the groups were kept separate, but as soon as they learned of each other’s existence, the seeds of prejudice toward the other group began to grow (thus showing how mere categorization can breed prejudice).

During the second week, Sherif set up a series of competitive tasks between the groups. As realistic group conflict theory would predict, this competition quickly generated remarkable hostility, prejudice, and even violence between the groups as they competed for scarce prizes. In the span of a few days, the groups were stealing from each other, using derogatory labels to refer to each other (calling the rival group sissies, communists, and stinkers; the study was conducted during the 1950s!), and getting into fistfights. Was all lost at the Robbers Cave?

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It certainly appeared that way until, during the third week, Sherif introduced different types of challenges. In one of these challenges, he sabotaged the camp’s water supply by clogging the faucet of the main water tank. The camp counselors announced that there was in fact a leak and that to find the leak all 22 boys would need to search the pipes running from the reservoir to the camp. Thus, the campers were faced with a common goal that required their cooperation. As the Eagles and Rattlers collaborated on this and other such challenges, their hostilities disintegrated. They were no longer two groups warring with each other, but rather one united group working together. Successfully achieving common goals effectively reduced their prejudice.

Another way of looking at these challenges is that the Rattlers and Eagles faced a shared threat. In the example described above, it was the shared threat of going without water. Can you think of a historical example that led to a similarly cooperative spirit, only on a much grander scale? Many observers have suggested that the events of September 11, 2001, had a similar impact in reducing some types of intergroup biases in America. During and after this tragedy, the American people were confronted with the shared threat of terrorism at the hands of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. How did they react? In a rousing display of patriotism and goodwill, they united. Previous divisions among groups of people were set aside—at least for a time.

Research backs up the potential of shared threats to dismantle prejudices that otherwise would occur. For example, in one study testing whether people’s psychological insecurity can lead to prejudice, American participants either did or did not reflect on their mortality and then evaluated an Arab student (Pyszczynski et al., 2012). As you know from our discussions of terror management theory, thinking about death tends to increase prejudice as people cling to their own group identifications. And indeed, that occurred in this study as well. However, some of the participants were first asked to think about the worldwide implications of global warming, an environmental threat that all people face. Thinking about this shared threat reduced the effect on anti-Arab prejudice of death reminders. As the researchers noted, this suggests that there may be a sunny side to global warming. As people think about the fate they share with others, this sense of common humanity can help to reduce prejudice.

Why Does Optimal Contact Work?

Although the Robbers Cave experiment is usually described as an example of how superordinate goals can help break down intergroup biases, Allport’s other key ingredients for optimal contact were present as well: The boys had equal status, the cooperative activities were sanctioned by the camp counselors, and there were plenty of activities where the boys could get to know one another. But knowing that these factors reduce prejudice doesn’t tell us much about why. Other research has isolated a few key mechanisms by which optimal contact creates positive change:

Reducing stereotyping. Consider that one of the most effective forms of contact involves members of different groups exchanging intimate knowledge about each other. This allows the once-different other to be decategorized. As a result, people are less likely to stereotype members of the outgroup (Kawakami et al., 2000).

Reducing anxiety. Optimal contact also reduces anxiety that people may have about interacting with people who are different from themselves (Stephan & Stephan, 1985). The unfamiliar can be unsettling, so by enhancing familiarity and reducing anxiety, contact helps to reduce prejudice.

Fostering empathy. Finally, optimal contact can lead someone to adopt the other person’s perspective and increase feelings of empathy. This helps people to look past group differences to see what they have in common with others.

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When Do the Effects of Contact Generalize Beyond the Individual?

An important question is, does contact reduce only prejudice toward that individual whom you get to know? Or do these effects generalize to that person’s group? If Frank develops a friendship with a Muslim roommate, Ahmed, during a stay at summer camp, will this contact generalize and reduce Frank’s prejudice against other Muslims when he goes back to school? Here, too, the answer is not a simple yes or no. Rather, it depends on a sequence of stages that play out over time (FIGURE 11.7) (Pettigrew, 1998; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006).

In an initial stage, as two people become friends, their sense of group boundaries melts away. Perhaps you have had this experience of talking to another person and simply forgetting that he or she is from a different group. This is decategorization at work. When sharing their love of music, Frank and Ahmed are not Christian and Muslim, they are simply two roommates and friends. Their liking for each other replaces any initial anxiety they might have felt about interacting with a member of another group.

But if Frank is to generalize his positive impression of Ahmed to other Muslims, and if Ahmed is to generalize his positive impression of Frank to other Christians, those different social categories must again become salient during a second stage, after contact has been established (Brown & Hewstone, 2005). Also, Frank’s overall impression of Muslims is more likely to change if he regards Ahmed as representative of the outgroup as a whole (Brown et al., 1999). If Frank views Ahmed as quite unlike other Muslims, then his positive feelings toward his new friend might never contribute to his broader view of Muslims. But if the category differences between them become salient and each considers the other to be representative of his religious group, then both Frank and Ahmed will develop more positive attitudes toward the respective religious outgroup more broadly.

You might be noticing a few rubs here. Effective contact seems to require getting to know an outgroup member as an individual, but this process of decategorization can prevent people from seeing that person as also being a representative of their group. There is a tension between focusing on people’s individual characteristics and recognizing the unique vantage point of their group or cultural background. But understanding others’ group identities is a key step in reducing prejudice against the group as a whole. This might be part of the reason that members of minority groups often prefer an ideology of multiculturalism, which endorses seeing the value of different cultural identities, over an ideology of being colorblind, whereby people simply pretend that group membership doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter (Plaut et al., 2009).

Another potential pitfall is that although this second stage of established contact might reduce intergroup prejudice, there is no guarantee that it will promote intergroup cooperation. For this reason, researchers have suggested that a stage of recategorizing outgroups into a unified group, or common ingroup identity, will further reduce prejudice by harnessing the biases people have in favor of their ingroups (Gaertner & Dovidio, 2000). If Frank and Ahmed see each other and other members of their respective religious groups as all part of the same camp or the same nation, then they are all in the same overarching ingroup. Perhaps this is the final dash of spice needed in the recipe of contact that will not only end intergroup prejudices but also lead to peace and cooperation.

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Is this vision just pie in the sky? There are hopeful signs that having a common ingroup identity can effectively reduce some manifestations of prejudice. A few years ago a school district in Delaware instituted the Green Circle program for elementary school students. Over the course of a month, first and second graders in this program participated in exercises that encouraged them to think of their social world—which they designated their “green circle”—as getting bigger and bigger to underscore the idea that all people belong to one family, the human family. Students who participated in the program were more likely later to want to share and play with other children who were of different genders, weights, and races than students in the same school who had not yet gone through the program (Houlette et al., 2004). Studies suggest that adults also can become less prejudiced and more tolerant when the common humanity among members of different groups is made salient (Motyl et al., 2011).

Although these findings are surely encouraging, Allport (1954) was skeptical about how well people can keep salient the superordinate identity of human, as opposed to more circumscribed national, regional, and family identities. For example, some theorists suggest that we are most likely to identify with groups that provide optimal distinctiveness (Brewer, 1991). Such groups are large enough to foster a sense of commonality, while small enough to allow us to feel distinct from others. Geographical differences mean different languages, customs, arts, values, styles of living—all useful ways to define what feels like a shared but unique identity. Keeping salient the more abstract identity we all share is no easy chore, but superordinate goals and concerns can help. In real and ongoing interactions, even good friends from different groups probably cycle back and forth between these different identities, depending on the context.

Does Contact Increase Positive Attitudes?

It should be noted that our discussion so far has focused largely on how contact can help the majority group member foster positive intergroup attitudes toward the minority group member and his or her group. What about the other side of the coin? Does optimal contact also improve intergroup attitudes for the minority group member, such as the African American woman or the gay man put into contact with members of the majority group? A small body of research on this question shows that contact is more of a mixed bag for those in the minority (Tropp & Pettigrew, 2005). Contact situations often are framed from the perspective of reducing biases held by a majority group. The risk is that minority-group members can feel stripped of an important minority identity. Furthermore, when minority-group individuals are exposed to prejudice against their group, which is more likely to occur in the initial stages of contact, this prejudice can intensify their negative attitudes toward the majority group (Tropp, 2003). Contact situations might need to be designed specifically to reduce minority-group members’ own biases against the majority.

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As we’ve just seen, Allport provided us with an excellent playbook for reducing intergroup prejudices through positive and cooperative contact. But sometimes people hold prejudices about groups with which they never interact. When the opportunities for contact are infrequent, can other psychological strategies reduce intergroup biases? The answer is yes.

Perspective Taking and Empathy

Earlier, we mentioned that one of the reasons optimal contact can be so effective is that it creates opportunities to take the perspective of members of the other group and see the world through their eyes. Direct contact isn’t the only way for people to learn this lesson. To see why, let’s go back in time to 1968, just a few days after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Jane Elliott, a third-grade teacher in Riceville Iowa, was watching the news of this tragedy and dreamed up a remarkable classroom exercise to teach her all-White class of children about the injustice of racial prejudice (Peters, 1987).

Over the next couple of days, she divided the class into two groups, those that had brown eyes and those that had blue eyes. She spent one day defining one group as the privileged and the other as the downtrodden. These designations were reflected in her actions and demeanor to the class, telling them, for example, that brown-eyed individuals are special and careful, whereas blue-eyed individuals are lazy and forgetful.

What Elliott observed from this and subsequent implementations of the exercise was a remarkable, and apparently enduring, sensitivity to prejudice. Her students became acutely aware of the harmful effects that their own prejudices could have (see Peters & Cobb, 1985). It is powerful stuff, and we encourage you to search the Internet (Google or YouTube “Jane Elliott” plus “A Class Divided”) to check out some video clips. In having her third graders spend a day being stigmatized for the color of their eyes, Jane Elliott implemented an impressive exercise in perspective taking.

Perspective taking is a powerful tool for reducing prejudice, because it increases empathy for the target’s situation and creates a sense of connection between oneself and an outgroup. This strategy reduces prejudice against a single individual, and those positive feelings are often likely to generalize to other members of the outgroup (Dovidio et al., 2004; Galinsky & Moskowitz, 2000; Vescio et al., 2003; Vorauer & Sasaki, 2009). For example, in one study, participants who were asked to imagine vividly the experiences of a young woman who had been diagnosed with AIDS (as opposed to taking a more objective viewpoint toward her plight) felt more empathy for AIDS victims in general as well as for her (Batson et al., 1997).

The success of perspective taking is impressive. It seems to work not only for more explicit types of prejudice but also for the more implicit and subtle forms of bias we described earlier. For example, imagine that you are White and that you are asked to write about a day in the life of a young Black man (Todd et al., 2011). If you were in the perspective-taking condition, you would be told to visualize what the young man might be thinking and feeling as he went about his day. If you were in the control condition, you would be told to take a more objective approach to writing about his day. After doing your respective assignment as well as some other unrelated surveys, you are led to a different room and asked to grab two chairs from a stack and set them up for a mock-interview task between you and an assistant named either “Jake,” a typical White name, or “Tyrone,” a typical Black name.

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Unknown to you, and to the participants who actually were in this study, the researchers measured the distance between the two chairs as an implicit measure of prejudice. They reasoned that if people had a more positive attitude toward the interviewer, they would set the chairs closer together. As you can see in FIGURE 11.9, participants in the control condition elected to sit farther away from Tyrone than from Jake. But if they first had to take the perspective of another young Black man during the earlier task, they sat at the same distance from the assistant regardless of his race. When we think about what it’s like to walk a day in the life of someone else, our biases are often diminished. In fact, in one very clever study conducted in Barcelona, Spain, researchers used virtual reality to have light-skinned female participants see and feel what it would look like to walk around with darker skin. Participants who spent about 20 minutes inhabiting a virtual body with darker skin subsequently exhibited a weaker implicit negative attitude toward Blacks on an IAT than did participants who had a light-skinned virtual body, those who had an alien-looking, purple-skinned virtual body, or those who did not have a virtual body and merely saw a dark-skinned person walk in the background of their virtual world (Peck et al., 2013).

Reducing Prejudice by Bolstering the Self

Perspective taking reduces prejudice by changing the way people think about others. But can we also reduce prejudice by changing how people think about themselves? Because some prejudices result from people’s deep-seated feelings of insecurity, when their feelings about themselves are bolstered, they often can become more tolerant and compassionate toward those who are different.

You may recall a couple of theories suggesting that people take on negative attitudes toward others to protect their positive view of themselves. For example, according to terror management theory (Solomon et al., 1991), when a person encounters someone else who holds a very different cultural worldview, it can threaten the belief system that upholds his or her sense of personal value, which can increase fears about death. When people feel that their self-esteem is threatened, or if they are reminded of their mortality, they cling more tightly to their own worldview, which can mean derogating those with a different belief system. This suggests that one remedy for prejudice is to bolster an individual’s sense of self-esteem (Harmon-Jones et al., 1997; Schmeichel et al., 2009).

Research shows that bolstering self-esteem can be an effective means of reducing prejudice. In one study, participants received either positive or neutral feedback about their personalities before being reminded of their mortality. After these two experiences, they were asked to evaluate essays about the United States, presumably written by international students. One of the essays praised the United States, remarking on what a great country it is, and the other disparaged the United States, remarking on how awful it is. When participants were reminded of death and had not had their self-esteem boosted, their ethnocentric biases were revealed in their evaluations: They liked the author who praised the United States and disliked the author who disparaged the United States. However, when participants’ self-esteem previously had been raised by the personality feedback, they liked the two authors equally (Harmon-Jones et al., 1997).

Self-affirmation theory (Steele, 1988) also predicts that prejudice can be a defensive reaction to feelings of personal insecurity. In the Fein and Spencer (1997) study discussed in chapter 10, participants who received negative feedback were more likely to derogate a Jewish student. However, if participants first had the chance to think about how they lived up to their own values, they showed no such pattern of discrimination.

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Although bolstering a person’s self-esteem can reduce prejudice, there is one caveat to this effect. If the value system being bolstered is the cultural worldview threatened by the outgroup, then the effects of self-affirmation can backfire (Arndt & Greenberg, 1999). For example, although you might be able to reduce antigay prejudice by affirming people’s values and abilities in areas such as athletics or sense of humor, an affirmation of their traditional family values will do little to decrease this prejudice (Lehmiller et al., 2010; Vescio & Biernat, 2003).

Reducing Prejudice with a More Multicultural Ideology

Part of why bolstering how people see themselves reduces prejudice is because it makes people more open minded and less defensive (Sherman & Cohen, 2006). This leads us to consider perhaps a more straightforward strategy for reducing prejudice: reminding people of their tolerant values. Making such values salient can indeed have positive effects (e.g., Greenberg et al., 1992).

One way of encouraging tolerance is conveyed as an effort to embrace a colorblind ideology, which views people only on their individual merits, avoiding any judgment based on group membership. One concern with the colorblind approach is that it encourages efforts simply to control any biases or prejudices that one has toward an outgroup. Although this can sometimes be an effective way to avoid engaging in discrimination, our earlier discussion of controlling prejudice revealed that these efforts can also backfire.

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Another criticism of the colorblind approach is that it can imply that everyone should conform to the status quo and act as if ethnic differences don’t matter. As we alluded to above, the colorblind approach is a much more comfortable stance for the advantaged majority group than for currently disadvantaged minority groups. Allport’s original formulation of the contact hypothesis largely adopted a colorblind approach. More recent research reveals that Whites in the United States tend to take this to the extreme, sometimes failing to mention a person’s race, even when doing so is simply stating a descriptive fact about an individual that could help describe the person to whom they are referring (Apfelbaum et al., 2008; Norton et al., 2006).

An alternative is to embrace cultural pluralism, or a multicultural ideology, which acknowledges and appreciates different cultural viewpoints. This view emphasizes not just tolerating but actively embracing diversity. To understand the distinction between these two ideologies, consider the metaphors used in the United States and Canada, two countries that were formed largely as a result of immigration. The United States is typically referred to as a melting pot, a place where people of different ethnicities and former nationalities might converge and blend to form a single group. In Canada, the prevailing metaphor is the salad bowl, where citizens form an integrated collective while still maintaining their distinct ethnic heritage.

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From a psychological perspective, these different ideologies suggest different ways of approaching intergroup relations. A colorblind approach suggests that we should avoid focusing on group identity, whereas multiculturalism suggests that we should approach group differences as something to be celebrated. Going into an interaction with a multicultural mind-set might sidestep all of the problems we see when people are focused on avoiding being biased. This is just what Trawalter and Richeson (2006) have found. When White participants were told to avoid being biased during an interaction with Black students, they became cognitively depleted from the effort and probably less receptive to future intergroup interactions. But when they were instead told to approach the interaction as an opportunity to have a positive interracial exchange, those effects weren’t present, and the interaction went more smoothly.

In a clever application of this same idea, Kerry Kawakami and her colleagues (Kawakami et al., 2007) showed that these approach tendencies can be trained quite subtly. In one of their studies, participants completed an initial task in which they simply had to pull a joystick toward them when they saw the word approach displayed on a screen or push it away from them when they saw the word avoid. Unknown to the participants, faces were subliminally presented just before the target words appeared. Some individuals always were shown a Black face when they were cued to approach; others were shown a Black face when they were cued to avoid. After completing this task, participants had an unconscious association to approach or avoid Blacks. When they were asked to engage in an interracial interaction with a Black confederate, those in the approach condition behaved in a more friendly and open way than those in the avoid condition. These results show that our goals for interactions can be cued and created unconsciously as well as consciously and that an approach orientation toward diverse others can be quite beneficial.

Although these findings are encouraging, embracing diversity is not without its challenges. Promoting diversity also makes salient both group categories and differences between groups. And in cultural-diversity training, the line between teaching about group differences and promoting stereotyping is sometimes crossed.

Social psychology has taught us a lot, not just about where prejudice comes from and how it is activated but also about how it can be reduced. Yes, there is a long and varied list of cures, but that’s because bias has many different causes and manifestations. Although our interest in being egalitarian can motivate us to control our biases, the bottom line is that seeking out common ground and understanding while also embracing the value of different viewpoints and perspectives may be the most effective way of achieving intergroup harmony.

However, encouraging tolerance assumes that people want to be tolerant. This is where broader changes in cultural norms can play a powerful role in helping people internalize these motivations. The more we see others behave and interact in an egalitarian way, the more we follow suit. Reducing prejudice doesn’t happen overnight. All of us will suffer relapses on the way, but cultures can shift gradually toward equality. Reducing prejudice against a segment of the population can benefit everyone in the end. For example, cross-national data from the World Bank reveals a strong positive correlation between equivalent educational opportunities for both girls and boys and the economic prosperity of a country (Chen, 2004). We can all benefit from maximizing the well-being and opportunities of everyone in society.

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