People With Low Self-Esteem Show More Signs of Prejudice When
people are feeling badly about themselves, they’re more likely
to show bias against people who are different. A new study
published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association
for Psychological Science, examines how that works. “This is one
of the oldest accounts of why people stereotype and have
prejudice: It makes us feel better about ourselves,” says
Jeffrey Sherman of the University of California, Davis, who
wrote the study with Thomas Allen. “When we feel bad about
ourselves, we can denigrate other people, and that makes us feel
better about ourselves.” Sherman and Allen used the Implicit
Association Test (IAT)—a task designed to assess people’s
automatic reactions to words and/or images—to investigate this
claim. In order to reveal people’s implicit prejudice,
participants are asked to watch a computer monitor while a
series of positive words, negative words, and pictures of black
or white faces appear. In the first part of the tes