How do the following influence prejudice: o Need for status o Negative emotions o The authoritarian personality

How do the following influence prejudice:
o Need for status
o Negative emotions
o The authoritarian personality

Some of the earliest research on determinants of prejudice looked at people's personalities. Need for status, self-regard, and need to belong have all been found to be related to level of prejudice. People who are high in need for status (i.e. want to highlight the unequal nature of status between groups) tend to be more prejudiced.

There is clearly a role for negative emotions (e.g., humiliation, thoughts of dying) in eliciting prejudice against other groups. People who are humiliated or somehow insulted will aggress against minority groups when they are given the opportunity. Again, this is a good example of displacement of aggression.

The Authoritarian Personality

Perhaps the most studied personality characteristic as it relates to prejudice is authoritarianism. Research on authoritarianism has its roots in the 1940s -- researchers who were looking at the role of personality in how Germans could engage in the Holocaust. Adorno and his colleagues found that hostility towards Jews often correlated with hostility toward all minorities. They hypothesized that what was really going on was more of an ethnocentrism (i.e. a belief in the superiority of one's own ethnic and cultural group and a corresponding disdain for all other groups). They developed these beliefs into a scale that measured authoritarianism: a personality style characterized by ethnocentric belief.