I am not prejudiced towards ‘them’. . . I am ambivalent! The moderating roles of attitudinal basis and motivation to respond without prejudice

According to the Justification-Suppression model of prejudice (Crandall & Eshleman, 2003), people covertly express prejudice through attitudinal ambivalence toward outgroups that is based on beliefs. We predicted that this would only be the case for people who are more externally, but not more internally, motivated to control their prejudice. In line with predictions, across 2 studies, results show that participants (i.e., college students) evaluating the outgroup in a normative context inducing prejudice suppression are (a) more likely to self-report ambivalent beliefs than ambivalent emotions concerning the outgroup compared with participants whose prejudice expression is induced, and (b) they only do so to the extent that they are externally rather than internally motivated to respond without prejudice. This pattern of findings suggests that fear of prejudice-related social sanction rather than dedication to egalitarian individual standards enhances the likelihood to express outgroup ambivalence when prejudice expression is constrained by antiprejudice social norms.