Prejudice targets often downplay rather than exaggerate personal discrimination

Evidence

Contemporary scholars question Allport’s assumption that chronic targets of prejudice are “hypersensitive” to prejudice, and suggest instead that targets often minimize or deny the extent to which they are targets of prejudice (see Major, Quinton, & Schmader, 2002, for a review). Consistent with this latter view, many studies find that women and ethnic minorities see less discrimination directed against themselves personally than they do against members of their group (e.g., Crosby, 1984). This discrepancy is reliable across a variety of groups (see Taylor, Wright, & Porter, 1994, for a review). Women and ethnic minorities also often have difficulty recalling times when they were targets of prejudice (Stangor et al., 2003), avoid labeling negative treatment as discrimination, even when the treatment legally qualifies as such (Magley, Hulin, Fitzgerald, & DeNardo, 1999), and fail to recognize when they are interacting with a highly prejudiced (vs. low-prejudiced) partner, even though they feel greater discomfort when interacting with the former (Vorauer & Kumhyr, 2001). — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 945

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to social identity theory and the personal/group discrimination discrepancy. Also resonates with the pattern in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Home Boy of protagonists who minimize their own experience of prejudice. — connects to: Digressive victimhood deflects discrimination accusations onto an unrelated topic — Felix Danbold, Ivuoma N. Onyeador, and Miguel M. Unzueta, Dominant groups support digressive…, 24
• DEEPTHINKING: A counterintuitive, well-supported reversal of a classic assumption that has broad implications for how discrimination is measured and perceived.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 945