Incorporating status bias into prejudice research

Abstract

Is prejudice against social groups rooted in intergroup distinctions or in the groups' low status? Whereas much research has focused on the former idea, this dissertation examines the latter. This form of prejudice is of particular concern as it puts members of disadvantaged groups at further disadvantage through prejudice and discrimination targeted against them. To consider this form of prejudice, I propose incorporating status bias, the tendency to prefer high-status groups over low-status groups, into prejudice research. Building on Social Dominance Theory, I conceptualize status bias as rooted in objective group status, consistent with the idea that it reinforces actual group-based inequalities. Throughout seven empirical studies using various study designs and methods, this dissertation examines status bias and its contributions to two major issues in prejudice research: the ideological foundations of prejudice and its reduction through intergroup contact. The results demonstrate that status bias forms group evaluations jointly with other biases and varies in its strength across evaluations of different kinds of target groups. Moreover, distinguishing between status bias and ingroup bias is promising for the study of the ideological foundations of prejudice, particularly SDO and RWA. Both ideologies were previously thought to motivate ingroup bias; however, this research did not differentiate it from status bias. The results reveal that SDO was not associated with stronger ingroup bias; instead, it was associated with stronger status bias, suggesting that incorporating the distinction between the biases into research on the ideological foundations of prejudice is a promising approach. Furthermore, distinguishing between status bias and ingroup bias can improve the assessment of the effectiveness of interventions to reduce prejudice. As such, intergroup contact was associated with weaker ingroup bias but stronger status bias. This pattern has previously been unobserved due to the lack of distinction between biases. Together, the findings demonstrate the merit of incorporating status bias into different fields of prejudice research.