Internal egalitarian motives arise from conformity to new group norms, not personality

Evidence

Crandall et al. (2002) looked at University of Kansas students’ attempts to suppress their prejudices. Many of the students come to this relatively progressive university town from rural communities with more tolerance for racial, religious, and ethnic prejudices than their peers possess. Students are often surprised by the lack of tolerance for the racism, sexism, and other prejudices that they have grown up with quite comfortably. At first, their expressions of counternormative prejudice (e.g., too much prejudice toward women and Blacks, but also too little prejudice toward, say, date rapists) are met with argument, even derision and social rejection. … This is externally motivated conformity. In time, however, to the extent that students want to belong at the university, they must conform to norms about proper conduct. Crandall et al. (2002) found that as students became less identified with their hometowns and old high school, and more identified with the university, their internal motives to suppress prejudice increased. In this case, the “internal motives to suppress prejudice” function less like a personality variable and more as an indicator that people are trying to fit themselves into local group norms. — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 1924

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the paradox noted elsewhere that suppressing bias can backfire — anti-prejudice norms are still norms, subject to the same conformity mechanisms as prejudice itself.
• DEFINE: Clarifies that ‘internal suppression of prejudice’ measures something social rather than an intrapsychic trait.