This research project will advance understanding in the area of prejudice and stigma reduction by contributing to understanding the obstacles people face in prejudice confrontation. Prejudice remains a significant and frequent experience for members of stigmatized groups; one with important consequences for physical and psychological well-being. Previous research on prejudice reduction demonstrates that one effective way to decrease prejudice is to confront it when it occurs. Not only does prejudice confrontation reduce subsequent expressions of prejudice, but it also empowers victims of prejudice. Despite these positive consequences of prejudice confrontation, people often refrain from confronting the prejudice they witness. Understanding the factors that predict whether people will confront prejudice would benefit our understanding of an important social psychological phenomenon. The project also includes development of a training program to teach people how to overcome the obstacles to confrontation.
This research builds on previous knowledge about prejudice confrontation. The first set of studies investigates participants' judgments about the urgency of taking action against prejudice by measuring perceptions of harm and injustice as a function of the type of prejudice, target presence, and witness reactions. The second set of studies measures participants' perceptions of responsibility for confronting prejudice as a function of the number of witnesses, target presence, and role accountability. The third and final set of studies examines whether participants confront prejudice as a function of perceptions of confrontation self-efficacy and outcome expectancies. Importantly, this research can provide a base from which to build training programs to empower those who witness prejudice to voice their disapproval, and ultimately these findings may generalize and be useful in attenuating the occurrence of other incivilities (e.g., bullying, teasing).
The act of verbally or non-verbally addressing a prejudiced comment or behavior is called prejudice confrontation. Past research suggests that when someone confronts another person’s prejudice, the confronted individual is less likely to repeat that behavior. Given that confrontation is an important tool in reducing prejudice, it is important to understand the situations in which people are (vs. are not) likely to confront prejudice they witness. Classic work on bystander intervention (Latané & Darley, 1970) suggests that one factor that affects the likelihood of taking action in emergencies is the perception of one’s responsibility to take action. In emergency situations, people often diffuse responsibility for taking action to other bystanders. Thus, the more people who witness someone in need of help, the less likely that any given person is to provide help. The goal of the current research was to determine whether a similar phenomenon occurs in prejudice confrontation: is it also the case that the more people who witness a prejudice incident, the less likely any given person is to confront that prejudice? We hypothesized that bystander intervention would occur in prejudice incidents, and the current research tested this hypothesis. Participants read, edited, and provided feedback on an essay containing a prejudiced remark. The essay was ostensibly written by a fellow student. The task was completed in one of four conditions, produced by two levels of two independent variables. First, participants completed the feedback task either alone or in the presence of three confederates (students posing as other participants in the study). Second, at the beginning of the experimental session, participants were told that based on their responses to a leadership inventory they had completed earlier, that they were assigned to be the leader of all participants in that session. The dependent measures included written comments on the essay calling attention to the prejudiced comment, and responses to a questionnaire. Results demonstrated that despite piloting suggesting variable responses to the comment we utilized, well over 80% of the participants directly confronted the prejudiced remark contained within the essay. Analyses demonstrated that the percentage of participants who confronted did not vary across experimental condition. While it is possible that the independent variables did not affect prejudice confrontation likelihood, we suspect that a methodological phenomenon known as a ceiling effect occurred—virtually all of the participants confronted the prejudice in all conditions, rendering us unable to determine whether the likelihood of confrontation changed across experimental condition. Future research should refine the prejudiced comment to ensure that it is ambiguous enough that some, but not all, participants will deem it worthy of confrontation—so that any effect of the independent variables on prejudice confrontation can be observed. The intellectual merit of this work is related to advancing the social psychological literature on prejudice confrontation. The results do not definitively suggest that diffusion of responsibility occurs in prejudice incidents. However, with additional research, it will become clear whether such diffusion of responsibility occurs. In addition, subsequent research will determine whether clear designation of a leadership role among bystanders can overcome any such diffusion of responsibility. It is important to note that results produced in other studies funded collaboratively with the current research demonstrated that perception of responsibility is a partial mediator of prejudice confrontation. More work needs to be done to determine the factors that contribute to perception of responsibility and its effects on prejudice confrontation. The broader impacts of this work are educational in nature. First, given that past research demonstrates that prejudice confrontation reduces the likelihood of subsequent prejudice, research on the situations in which prejudice is/is not likely to be confronted is useful in societal efforts to combat prejudice. If subsequent research demonstrates clearly that people are likely to diffuse responsibility for prejudice confrontation to other bystanders, then educational efforts can focus on raising awareness of this tendency and encouraging people to overcome it (a strategy that has been demonstrated to be effective in reducing diffusion of responsibility in emergency situations). Second, this work was completed at an institution without a graduate program in psychology. Approximately 15 undergraduate students participated in the project as research assistants. These students served as experimenters, assisted with the development of experimental materials, data entry, analysis, and interpretation. They presented our findings at the university’s undergraduate research conference. These students have gone on to pursue graduate training in psychology and related fields. Thus, this work is contributing to the broader development of psychology through building research acumen in emerging scholars.
