Prejudice is a relative evaluative decrement against misfit role occupants, not blanket negativity

Evidence

The unfavorable attitudinal shift that follows from role incongruity will not necessarily produce a negative attitude-in-context. If a role has high status, the attitude toward the group members as role occupants probably would not be negative but merely less positive than the corresponding attitude toward members of the groups who have historically occupied the role. For example, consider the role incongruity that an African American physician or dentist might encounter, perhaps being thought to have less technical competence than his or her European American counterpart. Attitudes toward such a medical practitioner are unlikely to be negative because such roles have considerable prestige. Rather, African American physicians and dentists might be evaluated favorably, but less favorably than their European American counterparts. Discriminatory behavior (e.g., reluctance to become a patient of an African American) is a likely outcome. It is this lowering of the evaluation of members of the target group because of their group membership that constitutes role-incongruity prejudice. … Even unfavorably evaluated qualities, such as extremely dominant behavior, can be positively evaluated if they are considered within a specific role context in which they are useful, such as engaging in competitive activity (Diekman, 2001). As these examples show, personal qualities that are positive in the abstract can take on less positive or even negative connotations in the context of incongruent roles, and qualities that are negative in the abstract can take on less negative or even positive connotations. — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 194

Categorization

• XREF: Extends contact-theory and stereotype-content reasoning already in the vault: prejudice here is measured as an evaluative gap, not categorical dislike, relevant to how Islamophobia and antisemitism claims are operationalized.
• DEFINE: Defines role-incongruity prejudice as the lowering of evaluation due to group membership within a role context.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years…, 194