Prejudice

Prejudice and it's associated constructs (e.g., Racism/Sexism, Discrimination, Oppression, etc.) is a major area of foci in our lab. We have historically examined the role of collective identities in at least two ways: 1) as a coping or mediational/moderation mechanism for targets of prejudice and 2) Oppositional Identity as a core ingredient of isms (i.e., racism, sexism, etc.).

Collective Identity: Mediational/Moderation Mechanism

In our earliest research, we examined the role of racial identity as a coping mechanism for people who were members of stigmatized groups. In my work on the Rejection Identification Model (Branscombe, Schmitt, & Harvey, 1999), we demonstrated that identifying with a racial group can buffer the impact of rejection (i.e., discrimination) on a person's self-esteem.

Oppositional Identity

While the term was originally used by the late Anthropologist John Ogbu to explain Black students lack of interest in schools, we utilize the concept in an inverse way. The notion that ougroups are inversely opposite to ingroups is at the root of many theories and models of of prejudice. We argue that a common denominator of these models is that prejudice people tend to view themselves, by way of their ingroup, as being inversely related to outgroups. We call this Oppositional Identity. Thus, rather than looking at it an intragroup phenomena as Ogbu did, we look at it as an intergroup phenomena.