| Prejudice, not being founded on reason, cannot be removed by argument, Samuel Johnson once wrote. Cognitive approaches to reduce prejudice, such as perspective taking or suppression of stereotypes, have only produced limited results even with prolonged and intense training in laboratory settings (Dovidio, Kawakami, & Gaertner, 2000). These approaches may rather decrease the tension on the surface than solve the problem of prejudice at its root: they suppress its expressions due to legitimacy constraints. Meanwhile, prejudice has recently been consensually defined as a negative attitude toward outgroups, consisting both cognitive aspects, such as unjustified beliefs, and affective aspects, namely, (negative) social emotions with particular outgroups as target (Smith, 1993). In this research, we investigate the hypothesis that social prejudice and discrimination can be reduced by influencing intergroup emotions, by means of making salient dual layers of social identities. Specifically, it explores the following research questions: can prejudice be reduced by making the individual s multiple identities salient? Moreover, how do intergroup emotions interfere into this process? This proposal integrates Intergroup Emotion Theory and dual social identity models (derived from Common Ingroup Identity Model) into a model of the affective route between social identity and prejudice. We argue that a dual layer of social identities can attenuate negative emotions toward outgroups (link 1a and 1b), and reduce ingroup bias in behavioral tendencies, thus facilitating intergroup contacts, which results in decreased social discrimination and prejudice. Most centrally, we investigate the mechanism underlying the affective aspects of intergroup relations. We believe that the affective route, rather than cognitive approaches, is the dominant route from social identity to social prejudice and discrimination. |
