A study with British participants (N = 90) tested a potential mediator of the effect of essentialist beliefs about the national ingroup on prejudice against immigrants. Essentialist beliefs were defined as beliefs in genetic determinism, a basic assumption that group membership is "written in the blood" and that the groups' boundaries and characteristics are determined by genetic and/or biologi...

Understanding intergroup prejudice is a dominant research focus for social psychology. Prejudice is usually conceptualised as a continuum of positive/negative affect; but this has limitations. It does not reflect people's ability to maintain simultaneous positive and negative stereotypes of others. Nor does it explain extreme prejudice (bigotry). Some researchers have proposed multidimensional ...

One view in the study of intergroup conflict is that pride implies prejudice. However, an increasing number of scholars have come to view in-group pride more benignly, suggesting that pride can be accompanied by a full range of feelings toward the out-group. In this paper, we focus on a substantively interesting case of ingroup/out-group attitudes – national pride and hostility towards immigran...

Why do essentialist beliefs promote prejudice? We proposed that essentialist beliefs increase prejudice toward Black people because they imply that existing social hierarchies reflect a naturally occurring structure. We tested this hypothesis in three studies (N 1⁄4 621). Study 1 revealed that racial essentialism was associated with increased prejudice toward Blacks among both White and Black a...

Past work suggested that dual identity was effective to reduce prejudice. This study extended research on dual identity and prejudice by identifying a boundary condition in this relationship, that is, group permeability. In Study 1, we replicated previous studies with Chinese individuals and found that inducing dual identity (emphasizing subgroup differences and a common nation identity), compa...

As a multinational country incorporating 56 officially recognized ethnic groups, China is concerned with the mental health of members of minority ethnic groups, with an increasing focus on supporting Chinese ethnic minority college students. Nevertheless, in daily life, members of minority ethnic groups in China often perceive prejudice, which may in turn negatively influence their mental healt...