Prejudiced individuals commonly report compunction alongside their expressed prejudice

Evidence

To address the question of how often people personally experience different emotions, Shimanoff (1984) asked students to keep a diary of their daily conversations. She observed that guilt at the interpersonal level is an important emotion. In fact, guilt, regret, and sorrow were among the most commonly mentioned emotions. At the group level, little is known about the frequency with which collective guilt is experienced for different forms of group-based harm doing. Allport (1954) found that when White college students were asked to write an essay on “My experience with, and attitude toward, minority groups in America,” an amazingly high percentage (90 percent) of people expressed prejudice. Individuals who expressed prejudice also reported some form of guilt or “compunction” in Allport’s terminology (see also Devine et al., 1991). Only 10 percent displayed prejudice without also reporting any feelings of guilt. — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt, 691

Categorization

• XREF: Allport’s ‘compunction’ concept parallels the guilt-after-threat pattern the Roccas framework predicts for attachment-oriented identifiers. — connects to: Low-prejudice people feel compunction over mismatches between how they should and would react; Overt self-reporting of prejudice is contaminated by social-desirability concerns — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 269; Prejudice level determines who experiences guilt versus mere discomfort from should-would discrepancies — Janet K. Swim and Deborah L. Miller, White Guilt: Its Antecedents and…, 34 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Overt self-reporting of prejudice is contaminated by social-desirability concerns #complicates (0.85) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 269
• Low-prejudice people feel compunction over mismatches between how they should and would react #qualifies (0.82)
• Prejudice level determines who experiences guilt versus mere discomfort from should-would discrepancies #qualifies (0.78) — Janet K. Swim and Deborah L. Miller, White Guilt, 34
• Prejudiced people avoid introspection and blame external forces #complicates (0.74) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 564