Ingroup Identity Moderates the Impact of Social Explanations on Prejudice: External Explanations for the Low Status of an Outgroup are not Necessarily a Good Thing
Whereas the Social Explanations Framework (Gill & Andreychik, 2007a) suggests that external explanations regarding a low status group (e.g., discrimination) will foster positive attitudes, Social Identity Theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1986) suggests that such explanations can increase prejudice. Two studies suggest that the Social Explanations Framework captures the psychology of dominant group members who are weakly identified with the dominant ingroup, whereas Social Identity Theory captures the psychology of high identifiers.
Belief in Human Kinds versus Belief in Inherent Character: Which Type of Essentialism is Associated with Prejudice?
Recently, scholars have begun to examine the possibility that essentialism of social groupsa belief that social groups are bound together by deep propertiesis linked to negative intergroup attitudes. Attempts to document such links have met with mixed success however. Some scholars have found that essentialistic beliefs are associated with prejudice (Keller, 2005), whereas others have found puzzling and inconsistent patterns (e.g., Haslam, Rothschild, and Ernst, 2000).
We propose that relations between essentialism and prejudice will become clearer once a distinction is made between two types of essentialistic beliefs. The distinction is between a belief in social groups as human kinds, which involves the notion that membership in a social grouptypically defined in terms of physicalityis linked to an underlying property, versus a belief in social groups as possessing inherent character, which involves the notion that the behaviors, cognitions, and emotions of a group grow out of an underlying property. We expect that prejudice will be most strongly associated with this latter type of essentialism.
In two correlational studies testing our hypothesis in the context of both gender and racial attitudes, scores on an Essentialism of Inherent Character Scale were significantly related to prejudice such that those endorsing biological explanations for gender- or race-linked behavior, cognition, and emotion showed higher levels of prejudice. In contrast, scores on an Essentialism of Physical Attributes Scale showed no relation to prejudice. It thus appears that essentialism does beget prejudice, but only if it is essentialism of inherent character.
Social Explanatory Style as a Foundation of Empathic Orientation
We examined whether peoples social explanations the explanatory frameworks they use to make sense of others behaviors and outcomes are tied to their social orientation, or the extent to which they demonstrate tendencies such as empathy and forgiveness. While evidence for a social explanatory style (i.e., a characteristic manner of explaining behavior across targets and contexts) was mixed, results demonstrated that social explanations interacted with epistemic motives (e.g., attributional complexity) to predict social orientation.