Stephanie R. Mallinas

This chapter explores the causes and consequences of the source of people's motivation to respond without prejudice. We demonstrate how motivation that stems from internal/personal dedication to egalitarian responding differs from motivation that reflects external/social concerns about normative nonprejudiced standards and describe how this difference elucidates why, when, whether, and how people respond without prejudice across situations and assessments. We explore how social norms, egalitarian values, intergroup contact, and childhood experiences influence the development and function of these motivations. In addition, we examine the consequences of motivation for both implicit and explicit expressions of prejudice and stereotyping and the course and quality of intergroup interactions. Finally, we address how people's motivation to respond without prejudice may influence factors central to modern day prejudice such as systemic and colorblind prejudice and reactions to White privilege.

We conceptualize sexual prejudice (i.e., prejudice toward gay/lesbian people) as including two related but distinct individual difference components – moral disapproval and outgroup antipathy. Whereas moral disapproval concerns the perceived wrongness of gay/lesbian sexuality, outgroup antipathy concerns negative evaluations of gay/lesbian individuals. Confirmatory factor analysis supports this two-factor structure. In undergraduate and nationally representative samples, we demonstrate that moral disapproval relates to higher religiosity (Studies 1a-1b), whereas outgroup antipathy relates to generalized and racial prejudice (Study 2). Further, outgroup contact predicts reductions in antipathy throughout college students' first semester, whereas religious sources contribute to moral disapproval across the semester (Study 3). Finally, moral disapproval relates to negativity toward sexually active single targets regardless of sexual orientation, whereas outgroup antipathy relates to negativity toward gay/lesbian targets regardless of sexual behavior (Study 4). These findings highlight the benefits of considering moral disapproval and outgroup antipathy separately. •Sexual prejudice can be conceptualized as moral disapproval and outgroup antipathy.•Moral disapproval and outgroup antipathy differentially relate to several factors.•Different factors influence these attitudes and their reduction over time.

In many domains of social life, people risk wrongly accusing an innocent person (i.e., false alarm error) or failing to catch a guilty person (i.e., miss error). Do liberals and conservatives differ in their concern about these types of errors? Across six studies, we found that conservatives were more bothered by miss errors than liberals, whereas liberals were more bothered by false alarm errors than conservatives. These associations were driven by social as opposed to economic ideology (Studies 1b-3b). Further, conservatives were more bothered by less threatening miss errors than liberals, but liberals and conservatives were equally bothered by clearly threatening miss errors (Studies 2a & 2b), suggesting that threat is a mechanism for the association between conservatism and miss concern. In Study 3a, social conservatism related to increased concern about miss errors when they occurred in authoritative contexts, but not when they occurred in authority-void contexts. In contrast, social liberalism related to increased concern about false alarm errors regardless of authoritative context. Studies 3a and 3b also demonstrated that belief in retributive justice, moralization of respect for authority, and threat sensitivity statistically mediated the association between social conservatism and miss concern, whereas moralization of fairness and egalitarian concerns mediated the association between social liberalism and false alarm concern. Together these studies provide a nuanced examination of the role of political ideology in responses to errors in determinations of guilt.

Recently, major societal events have shaped perceptions of race relations in the US. The current work argues that people’s motivations to be nonprejudiced toward Black people have changed in concert with these broader societal forces. Analyses of two independent archival datasets reveal that nonprejudiced motivations changed predictably in accordance with shifts in the social milieu over the last 15 years. In one dataset ( N = 13,395), we track movement in internal and external motivations to respond without prejudice from 2004 to 2017. Internal motivation initially decreased before ticking upward following multiple events suggesting worsening race relations (e.g., noteworthy killings of unarmed Black men, resurgent racialized politics). Conversely, external motivation initially increased but reversed course across the same time span. A second dataset ( N = 2,503) corroborates these trends in two conceptually related nonprejudiced motivations. Results suggest that changes in nonprejudiced motivations may reflect broader shifts in the sociopolitical climate.