Differentiated intergroup emotions predict behavior better than a single hatred construct

Evidence

Allport missed some things, however. Perhaps the most important new insight is that many emotions, not only hatred, are involved in intergroup relations. Moreover, these differentiated emotions have distinct causes and effects. Allport’s model focused on hatred and considered negative emotions to be largely interchangeable, driven by a single inner “pool” of frustration that seeks an expression, even against a displaced target. However, current thinking on emotion distinguishes anger from fear, disgust, contempt, guilt, and other possibilities, as distinct emotions with different determinants (people’s appraisals of intergroup situations) and different effects (action tendencies). The current focus on the antecedents and consequences of differentiated emotional reactions provides predictive power beyond Allport’s more narrow focus on hatred. Recent work even demonstrates that prejudice can involve subjectively positive emotions; as noted earlier, research on the Stereotype Content Model shows that women, the elderly, and the handicapped often elicit sympathetic reactions that coexist with stereotypes of these groups’ incompetence (Fiske et al., 2002). — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2282

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Stereotype Content Model (Fiske) and to the affect-and-cognition tension running through social psychology; also echoes the figure-ground thinking from soundscape work about what gets foregrounded. — connects to: Different intergroup threats evoke different emotions, not a single unified response. — Blake M. Riek, Eric W. Mania, and Samuel L. Gaertner, Intergroup Threat and Outgroup…, 139
• DEFINE: Clarifies the emotion-appraisal and action-tendency framework that replaced Allport’s frustration-aggression single-pool model.