An experiment examined how speakers, level of prejudice would affect several dimensions of their communication to either an outgroup or an ingroup member. Stereotypes influence a person's expectations about the not only through their generally negative valence, but also through implicit information a stereotyped group's competence. Therefore, someone who consciously believes stereotypes of African-Americans (i.e., a high prejudiced person) should be more likely to interact with an African-American in a Americans in a way that 'talks down' to him or her. Previous research has shown that, compared to low prejudiced people, high prejudiced people tend to use higher levels of linguistic abstraction in describing stereotype-consistent behaviors of African-Americans when speaking about them to a European-American audience. However, this difference has never been examined in speech to an outgroup member. A second line of research has demonstrated that people use more presumptuous speech when they assume that they have higher status than their conversation partner. However, how presumptuousness may vary as a function of an individual difference variable, such as prejudice level, has never been examined. In the present study, high and low modern racists played the role of a 'peer counselor' to an alleged African-American or European-American target person. Four main hypotheses were tested. First, it was expected that high modern racists would use higher levels of linguistic abstraction when describing stereotypical behaviors of the African-American target than would low modern racists. Second, it was expected that high modern racists would use more presumptuous speech when describing stereotypical behaviors of the African-American target than would low modern racists. For both linguistic abstraction and presumptuousness, the hypothesized effects were expected to be, most evident in descriptions of negative stereotypical behaviors. Third, high modern racists were expected to spend more time counseling the African-American target than would low prejudiced participants. Finally, high modern racists were not expected to use more overt negativity in their communication to the African-American target than would low modern racists. The hypotheses generally were supported. The findings are discussed as evidence for subtle indicators of prejudice in the speech of high modern racists, although the possibility that a suppression mechanism is operating in low modern racists also is considered / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_24396 |
| Date | January 1999 |
| Contributors | Schnake, Sherry Beth (Author), Ruscher, Janet B (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
Page generated in 0.0091 seconds