Ambivalent prejudice is a social psychological theory that states that, when people become aware that they have conflicting beliefs about an outgroup (a group of people that do not belong to an individual's own group), they experience an unpleasant mental feeling generally referred to as cognitive dissonance. These feelings are brought about because the individual on one hand believes in humanitarian virtues such as helping those in need, but on the other hand also believes in individualistic virtues such as working hard to improve one's life.
Bernard Whitley and Mary Kite contend that this dissonance motivates people to alter their thoughts in an attempt to reduce their discomfort. Depending on the situation or context that has primed them, people will give priority to either the positive beliefs or the negative beliefs, leading to a corresponding behavioral shift known as response amplification.
Theoretical framework According to Susan Fiske, there are two underlying characteristics of stigmatized groups around the world: the ideas that status predicts perceived competence and that cooperation predicts perceived warmth. Two combinations of competence and warmth produce ambivalent prejudices. The combined perception of groups as warm but incompetent leads to pitied groups, such as traditional women or older people. The combined perception of groups as competent but cold leads to envied groups, such as nontraditional women or minority entrepreneurs. Fiske uses this conception of prejudice to explain ambivalent sexism, heterosexism, racism, anti-immigrant biases, ageism, and classism.
Views According to Whitley and Kite, ambivalent prejudice comes from one person having both good and bad thoughts about an outgroup. The example in their book The Psychology of Prejudice and Discrimination talks about race and how some people often have ambivalent attitudes towards people of other races. This means that their behavior is also ambivalent: "sometimes it is positive, sometimes negative."
Irwin Katz said that ambivalent prejudice occurs when only the individual becomes aware of the conflicting attitudes, which can be caused for most people simply by coming face to face with someone from the outgroup. According to Katz, that conflict of attitudes can cause problems with one's self-image because it seems as if one is not living up to all important values that one holds. The conflict can cause negative emotions, which are expressed in negative behavior.
Irwin Katz and Glen Hass (1988) believed that contradicting American values are to blame for ambivalent prejudice. The first value is that hard work will always pay off and people get what they deserve, but the other value is that all people are equal and that people should help the less fortunate. When that is applied to race, many people are torn. They see disadvantaged people of other races as not working hard enough to be worth as much as people of their own race, but they also understand that people of other race have a harder time financially and socially. Those mixed emotions lead to ambivalence.
Tara MacDonald and Mark Zanna suggested that stereotypes were to blame for ambivalent prejudice. According to MacDonald and Zanna, people can like others and respect others, and both emotions work independently of each other. When a person feels those things towards an entire group, it is because of stereotypes. Therefore, a person can like and disrespect people of other races because of certain stereotypes, or they can dislike but respect the same group of people for other stereotypes.
In a study testing the nature of ambivalent prejudice, Hisako Matsuo and Kevin McIntyre (2005) studied American attitudes toward immigrant groups. He proposed that ambivalent prejudice stems from two views. There is the individualistic attitude that values the Protestant work ethic, an attitude that is associated with more negative attitudes toward outgroups. The other view is an egalitarian or humanitarian one, which is associated with more positive attitudes toward outgroups.
Measures Researchers use a variety of methods to measure ambivalent prejudice. The most widely used method is the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI), developed by Glick and Fiske in 1996.G. Boyle & D. Saklofske (Eds.), Measures of Personality & Social Psychological Constructs. Elsevier/Academic Press. The ASI focuses on sexism, a form of ambivalent prejudice characterized by both hostile and benevolent attitudes toward women. These attitudes reflect typical ingroup-outgroup dynamics, where men, as the higher-status group, exhibit ambivalence rooted in three sources—paternalism, gender differentiation, and heterosexuality—principles measured by the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory."Social psychological measures of stereotyping and prejudice." In G. Boyle & D. Saklofske (eds.), Measures of Personality & Social Psychological Constructs. Elsevier/Academic Press.
Hostile sexism targets women who resist traditional gender roles, resembling overly negative, old-fashioned sexism. The theory identifies resentment toward nontraditional women along each dimension: dominative paternalism, competitive gender differentiation, and heterosexual hostility. Conversely, women who co-operate with traditional gender roles and relationships evoke benevolent sexism, characterized by attitudes like protective paternalism, complementary gender differentiation, and heterosexual intimacy. The ASI measures sexism along all of the six dimensions that compose hostile sexism and benevolent sexism.
The ASI is a self-report measure consisting of 22 items, evenly divided between hostile sexism and benevolent sexism subscales (11 each). Participants rate their agreement to the statements on a 6-point Likert scale, where 0 indicates strong disagreement and 5 indicates strong agreement. Certain items are reversed coded so that agreement with the statement indicates lower levels of sexism and disagreement with the statement indicates higher levels of sexism. Both subscales can be either calculated separately or averaged together to get an overall measure of sexism.
Example items from the ASI include:
(Below is a series of statements concerning men and women and their relationships in contemporary society that this study wrote for their subjects to evaluate.)
Benevolent sexism subset: People are often truly happy in life without being romantically involved with a member of the other sex. No matter how accomplished he is, a man is not truly complete as a person unless he has the love of a woman. Men are complete without women. Every man ought to have a woman whom he adores. Women should be cherished and protected by men. Women, as compared to men, tend to have a more refined sense of culture and good taste. Women, compared to men, tend to have superior moral sensibility. Many women have a quality of purity that few men possess.
Hostile sexism subset: Women exaggerate problems they have at work. Most women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist. Women are too easily offended. Most women fail to fully appreciate all that men do for them. Feminists are not seeking for women to have more power than men. There are actually very few women who get a kick out of teasing men by seeming sexually available and then refusing male advances. Researchers use various other methods to measure different types of ambivalent prejudices. For example, the Modern Racism Scale measures aspects of ambivalent racism.
The Modern Racism Scale, developed by McConahay in 1986, is another tool for assessing subtle and ambivalent racial prejudice. It evaluates attitudes such as the denial of systemic discrimination, resentment over perceived favoritism toward racial minorities, and a tendency to blame disadvantaged groups for their circumstances. By probing these ambivalent attitudes, the MRS reveals a duality in perceptions: individuals may outwardly support equality while simultaneously resisting measures aimed at addressing racial inequality.McConahay, J. B. (1986). Modern racism, ambivalence, and the Modern Racism Scale. In J. F. Dovidio & S. L. Gaertner (Eds.), Prejudice, discrimination, and racism (pp. 91–125). Academic Press.
The MRS employs statements like "Discrimination against [outgroup] is no longer a problem in today’s society" and "Over the past few years, [outgroup] has been getting more than they deserve." Participants rate their agreement for these statements on a Likert scale, allowing researchers to measure subtle forms of bias that align with modern social norms. While the MRS has been widely used in studies of policy attitudes and contextual influences on prejudice, it is not without limitations. Other researchers point out its vulnerability to social desirability bias, where respondents may underreport negative attitudes, and its cultural specificity, which requires careful adaptation for use outside the United States.
Beyond the Modern Racism Scale, researchers have developed additional tools to study ambivalent prejudice in other contexts, such as gender, immigration, and intergroup dynamics. The Humanitarianism-Protestant Work Ethic Scale (HPWES), developed by Katz and Hass in 1988, assesses the conflict between humanitarian values, such as empathy and support for helping disadvantaged groups, and individualistic values that emphasize self-reliance and hard work. This scale has been specifically useful in studying attitudes toward immigrants and refugees—groups often viewed ambivalently as deserving of compassion but also perceived as burdensome to societal resources. Research using this scale has shown that these conflicting values drive much of the ambivalence toward marginalized groups.Matsuo, Hisako & McIntyre, Kevin & Willoughby, Lisa & Uwalaka, Emmanuel. (2013). Attitudes Toward Immigrants: Test of Protestant Work Ethic, Egalitarianism, Social Contact, and Ethnic Origin. IAFOR Journal of the Social Sciences. 1. 10.22492/ijss.1.1.01.
Implicit measures, like the Implicit Association Test (IAT), can also prove useful by uncovering unconscious or automatic biases. Unlike explicit self-report tools, the IAT is said to assess how individuals may unconsciously associate social groups with both positive and negative attributes. For example, an individual might implicitly link an outgroup with warmth while simultaneously associating it with incompetence, showing the two sides of ambivalence. Similarly, affective priming tasks examine how exposure to stereotypes or group-related stimuli influences immediate, subconscious reactions.Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(6), 1464–1480.Fazio, R. H., Jackson, J. R., Dunton, B. C., & Williams, C. J. (1995). Variability in automatic activation as an unobtrusive measure of racial attitudes: a bona fide pipeline?. Journal of personality and social psychology, 69(6), 1013–1027. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.69.6.1013