Prejudice against fat people was compared with symbolic racism. An anti-fat attitudes questionnaire was developed and used in several studies testing the notion that antipathy toward fat people is part of an "ideology of blame." Three commonalities between antifat attitudes and racism were explored: (a) the association between values, beliefs, and the rejection of a stigmatized group, (b) the oldfashioned antipathy toward deviance of many sorts, and (c) the lack of self-interest in out-group antipathy. Parallels were found on all 3 dimensions. No in-group bias was shown by fat people. Fatism appears to behave much like symbolic racism, but with less of the negative social desirability of racism.
The authors propose a justification-suppression model (JSM), which characterizes the processes that lead to prejudice expression and the experience of one's own prejudice. They suggest that "genuine" prejudices are not directly expressed but are restrained by beliefs, values, and norms that suppress them. Prejudices are expressed when justifications (e.g., attributions, ideologies, stereotypes) release suppressed prejudices. The same process accounts for which prejudices are accepted into the self-concept The JSM is used to organize the prejudice literature, and many empirical findings are recharacterized as factors affecting suppression or justification, rather than directly affecting genuine prejudice. The authors discuss the implications of the JSM for several topics, including prejudice measurement, ambivalence, and the distinction between prejudice and its expression.
The authors studied social norms and prejudice using M. Sherif and C. W. Sherif's (1953) group norm theory of attitudes. In 7 studies (N = 1,504), social norms were measured and manipulated to examine their effects on prejudice; both normatively proscribed and normatively prescribed forms of prejudice were included. The public expression of prejudice toward 105 social groups was very highly correlated with social approval of that expression. Participants closely adhere to social norms when expressing prejudice, evaluating scenarios of discrimination, and reacting to hostile jokes. The authors reconceptualized the source of motivation to suppress prejudice in terms of identifying with new reference groups and adapting oneself to fit new norms. Suppression scales seem to measure patterns of concern about group norms rather than personal commitments to reducing prejudice; high suppressors are strong norm followers. Compared with low suppressors, high suppressors follow normative rules more closely and are more strongly influenced by shifts in local social norms. There is much value in continuing the study of normative influence and self-adaptation to social norms, particularly in terms of the group norm theory of attitudes.
A neo-Darwinian heuristic for decisions involving altruism is'hypothesized in this article. Following W. Hamilton's (1964) analysis of inclusive fitness, the assumption of this study is that tendencies to help another person are selected against, except when the donor and recipient are related and share genes underlying these tendencies. An important social psychological implication of Hamilton's formulation is that in group-living individuals (a) natural selection favors those who are prone to help others as a function of the latters' relatedness, potential fecundity, or other features indicating a recipient's capacity to enhance the donors' inclusive fitness, and (b) this effect is especially strong when help is biologically significant (e.g., the recipient will not survive otherwise). Such a heuristic is demonstrated in several studies involving hypothetical decisions to help: In life-or-death situations, people chose to aid close kin over distant kin, the young over the old, the healthy over the sick, the wealthy over the poor, and the premenopausal woman over the postmenopausal woman; whereas when it is a matter of an everyday favor, they gave less weight to kinship and opted to help either the very young or the very old over those of intermediate age, the sick over the healthy, and the poor over the wealthy.
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