Effectiveness of Perceiving Normal and Extreme Outgroups’ Bivalent Emotions in Reducing Infrahumanisation (or Intergroup Preference)

Abstract

People tend to consider outgroups inferior to the ingroup and express prejudice against them, though such expressions are less blatant in modern days. For example, instead of denying full humanness to outgroup members, people may perceive them as less capable of experiencing uniquely human (UH) emotions (i.e., infrahumanisation). Recent researchers, however, have questioned whether people actually infrahumanise outgroup members or simply reserve positive emotions, UH or not, more for their ingroup than for outgroups (i.e., intergroup preference). Drawing on preliminary evidence that bivalent emotional experiences (e.g., happy and sad) involve cognitive complexity and are viewed as a positive quality, we recruited 88 British participants to test the hypothesis that presenting outgroup members’ bivalent emotions was more effective in reducing intergroup preference (and not infrahumanisation) than presenting their univalent emotions. We further predicted that the effect of perceived bivalent emotions was less pronounced for outgroups that are more stigmatised (e.g., drug addicts vs. Uzbeks). Results showed that our bivalent-emotion manipulation did not have any significant impact on attitudes towards an outgroup, thereby failing to support both of our hypotheses. However, we found an unexpected significant interaction between humanness and prosociality (η_p² = .37), which indicated that antisocial emotions were ascribed more strongly to the outgroup than were prosocial ones (consistent with intergroup preference) when the emotions were non-UH (consistent with infrahumanisation). Further, this pattern was stronger for drug addicts, which are the more stigmatized outgroup, than Uzbeks (η_p² = .18). Taken together, the current study offers a new perspective on explaining prejudice against outgroup members — that is, both infrahumanisation and intergroup preference seem to operate in tandem, especially when intergroup relations are at their worst. Finally, we surprisingly found that Uzbeks were evaluated not only more favourably than drug addicts but also more favourably than the average person (ds > .40).