Personal prejudice toward groups tracks perceived social norms almost exactly

Evidence

Crandall et al. (2002) had college students indicate the prevailing social norms of the acceptability of prejudice toward 105 different social groups. Students agreed that some prejudices were acceptable (e.g., rapists, child molesters, drug dealers, thieves) and others (e.g., African Americans, blind people, Jews, Canadians) were not. A second group of college students’ ratings of how they, personally, felt about the same groups showed a near perfect relationship between the social norm ratings and people’s personal prejudices toward the 105 groups, r = 0.96. Thus, people’s reports of their own prejudices were an almost perfect reflection of norms designating which prejudices are appropriate or inappropriate. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1902

Categorization

• XREF: Empirical anchor for the Allport-reassessment thread: extends contact-theory questions by showing norm-conformity, not just intergroup contact, drives expressed prejudice. Connects to Pettigrew’s norm-conformity critique and Crandall’s suppression model.
• SEED: The r=0.96 finding is a strong empirical datum for an essay on how ‘personal’ prejudice is largely socially licensed — why decrying prejudice as deviant misframes its transmission.