The Motivation to Express Prejudice

Contemporary prejudice research focuses primarily on people who are motivated to respond without prejudice and the ways in which unintentional bias can cause these people to act in a manner inconsistent with this motivation. However, some real-world phenomena (e.g., hate speech, hate crimes) and experimental findings (e.g., Plant & Devine, 2001, 2009) suggest that some prejudice is intentional. These phenomena and findings are difficult to explain solely from the motivations to respond without prejudice. We argue that some people are motivated to express prejudice, and we develop the Motivation to Express Prejudice Scale (MP) to measure this motivation. In 7 studies involving more than 6,000 participants, we demonstrate that, across scale versions targeted at Black people and gay men, the MP has good reliability and convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity. In normative climates that prohibit prejudice, the internal and external motivations to express prejudice are functionally nonindependent, but they become more independent when normative climates permit more prejudice toward a target group. People high in the motivation to express prejudice are relatively likely to resist pressure to support programs promoting intergroup contact and to vote for political candidates who support oppressive policies. The motivation to express prejudice predicted these outcomes even when controlling for attitudes and the motivations to respond without prejudice. This work encourages contemporary prejudice researchers to give greater consideration to the intentional aspects of negative intergroup behavior and to broaden the range of phenomena, target groups, and samples that they study.