Believing others share one’s prejudice gives social permission to act on it.

Evidence

Perceiving (at least local) social consensus validates people’s beliefs and encourages them to translate their attitudes into action. Sechrist and Stangor (2001) manipulated perceived consensus to explore the extent to which it can create consistency between people’s attitudes and behaviors. They found that highly prejudiced college students who were provided with information that their anti-Black beliefs were shared by other students at their university subsequently sat farther away from an African American target than participants who were informed that their beliefs were not shared. That the correspondence between scores on a prejudice questionnaire and seating distance was greater when people believed that most other students shared their beliefs, suggests that knowing that others share one’s prejudices gives social permission for those prejudices to be acted upon. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1913

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the Allport contact-theory reassessment: perceived consensus is a permissive condition for translating prejudice into discriminatory behavior.
• SEED: Angle: anti-prejudice norms may fail precisely when they are perceived as not locally shared — contact interventions must build perceived local consensus.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1913