Progress made in predicting illness will alter information on the risk of illness. Whereas formerly we all shared the same uncertainty insofar as our health was concerned and believed ourselves to be equal in the face of illness, we now know that we do not all have the same chances. The genetic revolution at the root of this upheaval will, of course, have important consequences for private insu...

In recent years, there have been growing efforts to understand and modulate stigma and prejudice from the standpoint of the psychological flexibility model, a pragmatic model of complex human behavior. The present paper provides an overview of the empirical evidence on the applicability of the psychological flexibility model, and its applied strategy, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), to...

This article provides an introduction to research on European prejudice and discrimination. First, we list the distinctive characteristics of a European perspective and provide a short sketch of European immigration and ethnic groups. Europe has become a multicultural community. Nevertheless, public opinion and the continent’s politics often do not reflect this empirical fact. Prejudice and dis...

Many prejudice reduction strategies involve linking the self to outgroup members. We tested the novel question of whether establishing a potent link with a single outgroup member can reduce explicit and implicit prejudice toward the outgroup as a whole. White participants completed a mock adoption procedure where they "adopted" a baby from another country. Three experiments showed that this sin...

Recent polls indicate that atheists are among the least liked people in areas with religious majorities (i.e., in most of the world). The sociofunctional approach to prejudice, combined with a cultural evolutionary theory of religion‘s effects on cooperation, suggest that anti-atheist prejudice is particularly motivated by distrust. Consistent with this theoretical framework, a broad sample of ...

Understanding intergroup prejudice is a dominant research focus for social psychology. Prejudice is usually conceptualized as a continuum of positive/negative affect, but this has limitations. It neither reflects people's ability to maintain simultaneous positive and negative stereotypes of others nor explains extreme prejudice (bigotry). Some researchers have proposed multidimensional models o...

Anti-Catholicism in mid-Victorian Britain has had numerous historians, but none have posited a theory of religious prejudice to help explain it. This article argues that anti-Catholicism in midVictorian Britain can be interpreted as an example of prejudice rather than as a problem of differences over competing theologies on true religion. It suggests ways in which behavioral theory can help exp...

This article reviews the development of international research on the relationship between discrimination and health. It provides an overview of theoretical and empirical work on stigma and prejudice and their impact on discrimination and health. It argues that the literature on these issues has drawn primarily from social psychology and has focused on the impact of attitudes associated with st...