Threat of own prejudice and reverse discrimination in interracial situations.

The effect of self-affirmation on perception of racism

“…Many individuals from perpetrator groups strive to maintain an unprejudiced self-image (Dutton & Lake, 1973;Gaertner & Dovidio, 1986;Monin & Miller, 2001;O'Brien, 2002) and report feeling guilty when they are reminded of their prejudices (Monteith & Voils, 1998). Similar motivations to maintain an unprejudiced self-image may operate at the level of collective self or social identity, and these motivations may lead people from perpetrator groups to minimize the extent of racism against target groups.…”

Moral credentials and the expression of prejudice.

“…First, whereas the emphasis in prior work has been on the consequences of feeling prejudiced, we consider the opposite, the consequences of feeling nonprejudiced. Second, rather than focusing on those cases in which someone else provides people with evidence that they are unprejudiced (e.g., Dutton & Lake, 1973), we focus on those cases in which people, through their prior actions, provide themselves with such evidence.…”

“…Participants who are told that they are prejudiced generally try to disconfirm this negative label by being more sympathetic to members of the target category. For example, Dutton and Lake (1973;see also Dutton & Lennox, 1974) shook the confidence of students who rated themselves low on prejudice by giving them false biofeedback indicating that they were highly aroused after viewing slides of interracial couples. As participants left the laboratory with their payment, either a White or a Black panhandler approached them.…”

“…To rule out this possibility, in Study 3 we used different experimenters in the two phases of the experiment. The use of different experimenters to administer the manipulation and collect the dependent measure is a standard technique for determining whether an effect is based solely on impression management (e.g., Dutton & Lake, 1973;Freedman & Fraser, 1966, Study 2). If the effect vanishes when two experimenters are involved (e.g., Rosenberg, 1965), then it can be attributed to something akin to evaluation apprehension.…”

“…Fear of immediate social disapprobation is not the only reason people resist expressing negative beliefs about out-groups. Many individuals have internalized antiprejudice norms and closely monitor themselves to avoid behaving in ways that might clash with their egalitarian values (Devine, Monteith, Zuwerink, & Elliot, 1991;Dutton & Lake, 1973;Gaertner & Dovidio, 1986; I. Katz & Hass, 1988;Myrdal, 1944;Plant & Devine, 1998).…”