Realistic and Symbolic Threats, Religiosity and Gender as Predictors of Prejudice

Abstract

Prejudice is a complex phenomenon underlying intergroup conflicts, which has become the special focus of social psychologists since the mid-20th century. Numerous factors that are responsible for it can be reduced to two broad sets of personality-level and situational-level factors. The present study, leaning upon interactionist perspective, attempts to understand the shares of personality and situational variables in prejudice. Ethnocentric dispositions, and values as defined by Shalom Schwartz are used as personality variables, while realistic and symbolic threats proposed by the Intergroup Threat Theory are employed as situational variables.

Furthermore, basing upon confirmatory factor analysis, the study distinguishes between two types of prejudice labeled as more sensitive and less sensitive prejudice, and shows that particular differences found among those types indicate the heterogeneous nature of prejudice. Through experimental manipulation of threats, data analysis of 589 undergraduate students from a number of Tbilisi-based universities demonstrates that both types of prejudice are positively predicted by both, situational variables – symbolic and realistic threats, and personality factors – ethnocentrism and the value of tradition, while the value of universalism-tolerance is a negative predictor, and universalism-concern emerges as the second negative predictor for less sensitive prejudice only.

Additionally, the results show that the relationship between the tradition value and both types of prejudice is moderated by the effect of symbolic threat only, and the effect of

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