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Prejudice from Thin Air
Emotions Reach Into The Social Mind

Spike Lee's film Do the Right Thing vividly illustrates two unfortunate yet fairly ubiquitous features of intergroup relations - that people's perceptions of groups to which they don't belong (outgroups) are frequently rife with prejudice and stereotypes, and that the degree of prejudice expressed by individuals often fluctuates in response to unrelated factors in the environment. In this film, a long summer of unrelenting heat produced increased feelings of anger among the African American and Italian American residents of a Brooklyn neighborhood. These feelings, although unrelated to intergroup relations, exacerbated prejudice toward members of the ethnic outgroup, provoked many small instances of intergroup conflict, and eventually exploded into a riot where individuals acted in ways that were uncharacteristic of their usual behavior. Interestingly, the characters in this film appeared to be unaware that heat-induced anger and frustration was fanning the flames of their animosity toward outgroup members.

Is this an accurate picture of reality? Can emotions influence attitudes toward members of other social groups without people's awareness or control? Are emotions capable of shaping the social mind in such a way that they can automatically create prejudice from thin air? Recent work by NSF-funded social psychologists, David DeSteno, of Northeastern University, and Nilanjana Dasgupta, of the University of Massachusetts, suggests that the answer is yes. Their research shows that certain emotions, even though their occurrence is not caused by intergroup interactions, can diffuse into group settings and incite spontaneous expressions of prejudice toward outgroups. The research appears in the May issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the American Psychological Society.

Decades of psychological research have documented people's propensity to favor their own social group (ingroup) and harbor relative prejudice toward members of outgroups. Indeed, recent research has shown that these prejudices and preferences may come to be imprinted in the mind nonconsciously, simply by virtue of living in a culture in which some groups are more valued than others. Moreover, these attitudes have the capacity to become so automatized that people may experience a spontaneous negative response upon seeing a member of a stigmatized outgroup or a spontaneous positive response upon seeing a member of a valued ingroup.

"Understanding the nature of such automatic attitudes is made pressing because we are beginning to discover that automatic bias against outgroups and preference for ingroups may not remain confined to the mind; they may spill over into people's behavior toward in- and outgroup members" says Dasgupta. "Indeed, intergroup judgments and behavior under uncertainty, distraction, time pressure, or reduced concerns with accuracy may be particularly susceptible to automatic prejudice. If emotions can create or magnify automatic bias against outgroups, such attitudes may, in turn, guide people's behavior in ways that fuel intergroup antagonism and conflict" Dasgupta elaborates.

As an initial examination of the linkage between emotion and prejudice, Dasgupta and DeSteno decided to focus on the issue of what happens when individuals come into contact with new social groups they know nothing about? In many ways, this question would clarify if emotions are able to produce a bias from nowhere. DeSteno and Dasgupta theorized that as long as people were experiencing a neutral emotional state, new groups may not evoke automatic bias because the mind has not learned to spontaneously associate negative qualities with such groups. However, when people experience specific emotions that are relevant to intergroup relations (e.g., anger), the emotional system may exert a powerful influence on their automatic evaluations of outgroups. "The key to our prediction rests on the fact that the emotion system often acts as an efficient signal about one's environment," DeSteno says. "Experiencing an emotion serves a functional purpose. It prepares an organism to meet an adaptive challenge by shunting cognitive and physiological processes toward certain responses and actions. For humans, successful navigation of the social world is a significant challenge and imperative. Making the right judgments about how to interact with others is fundamental to survival. Indeed, emerging work in neuroscience has bolstered this view by revealing that damage to areas of the brain that play a central role in emotion regulation is often accompanied by deficits in successful social interactions" DeSteno asserts.

Given the historical importance played by one's ingroup with respect to safety, survival, and cooperative resource accumulation, other groups may often represent potential sources of competition and conflict. Consequently, when people experience an emotion, like anger, that signifies the likelihood of conflict in the environment, the emotional experience may serve as a lens to distort their nonconscious evaluations of an outgroup, even when the outgroup is a novel one. In essence, when anger signals that conflict is likely, the mind may automatically evaluate members of outgroups negatively. As DeSteno puts it, "when conflict is likely, different equals bad."

To examine if their prediction about the nonconscious link between emotion and prejudice was correct, DeSteno and Dasgupta utilized techniques designed to measure people's automatic attitudes. These techniques rely on the fact that people are usually quicker to classify sequentially presented stimuli if these stimuli share the same evaluative overtone. For example, people are quicker to recognize a picture of a baby presented on a computer screen if it had been preceded by the word "peace" than by the word "war." Thus, the speed with which people associate positive versus negative words with particular stimuli is an indirect indicator of the degree of positivity or negativity the mind automatically attaches to those stimuli.

In two studies, the researchers had participants complete a bogus personality test on the basis of which they were categorized into one of two types of personality groups: people who tend to overestimate the likelihood of events versus people who tend to underestimate them. In reality, participants had been randomly assigned to one of these fictitious groups. Then, participants were shown pictures of other individuals who belonged to their ingroup or outgroup; these individuals' group membership was indicated only by the color of the backdrop behind the individual in the picture (i.e., red vs. blue). Next, one of three emotions was induced in participants by having them recall a past event that had made them feel very angry, very sad, or neutral. Once the emotions had been evoked, participants completed a computer task designed to assess their automatic attitudes toward their ingroup and outgroup. In this task, they had to categorize positive versus negative words and pictures of ingroup versus outgroup members that were flashed briefly on computer screens in front of them.

As Dasgupta and DeSteno expected, participants who were in a neutral emotional state were equally fast at associating positive words with pictures of ingroup members and outgroup members. In other words, these participants did not automatically evaluate outgroup members differently from ingroup members. However, among participants who were induced to feel angry, a different pattern of data emerged: these individuals were substantially slower at associating positive words with members of the outgroup than with members of their ingroup. Why? Because anger distorted participants' automatic perceptions of outgroup members. In short, anger created an unconscious prejudice from thin air.

These findings are important because they expose the deep-seated and nonconscious link between emotions and intergroup relations. They are the first to show that emotions are capable of shaping nonconscious attitudes toward outgroups in ways that may influence one of the central adaptive challenges in contemporary society - the negotiation of intergroup interactions.

Psychological Science is ranked among the top 10 general psychology journals for impact by the Institute for Scientific Information. The American Psychological Society represents psychologists advocating science-based research in the public's interest.

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