Group emotions fluctuate on short timescales unlike stable stereotypes

Evidence

Considering prejudice and intergroup relations as involving emotion opens up several new research directions. First, emotions are time-dependent states. Self-evidently, they ebb and flow across time, over scales ranging from seconds to perhaps hours or days. This contrasts with stereotypes and prejudice (conceptualized as an attitude), which are notoriously stable and therefore difficult to change even when change is desired. Emphasizing the role of emotion suggests measuring reactions to groups across time, perhaps using daily diary measures or experience-sampling methods (Smith & Mackie, in press). People may be particularly likely to perform emotiondriven behaviors or to show biases in judgment processes precisely when they are experiencing intense group-based emotions. — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 2285

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: why prejudice interventions targeting stable attitudes keep failing — because the emotionally volatile, episodic component may actually drive discriminatory behavior. The fix would be timing interventions to spikes in group-based emotion.
• XREF: Methodologically echoes the experience-sampling/daily-diary approaches familiar from affect and well-being research. — connects to: Threshold events can propagate collective political emotions — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1955