Introduction

As noted in Chapter 1, the social psychological literature uses the term “prejudice” to refer to an individual's tendency or disposition to respond negatively to deviant individuals or groups. Following the relevant literature, we will use this term, in addition to terms such as negative responses or responding to deviance, quite frequently in this chapter. Now suppose one is asked to predict the degree of prejudice of an arbitrary inhabitant of our earth. A likely answer is to say that “it depends” and that more information about that person will make for a better prediction. We agree and will attempt to present in this chapter some of that information. We will discuss effects of individual differences and demographic characteristics on prejudice and responses to deviance. Most readers will know some people with rather strong negative responses to many deviant individuals or groups and who may even dislike all kinds of people with deviant conditions. We will attempt to demonstrate that such negative response tendencies can be seen as resulting from the operation of two important motivational systems, namely the FF and C system, which were introduced in Chapters 2 and 3, and which are supposed to underlie different types of social control, such as stigmatization and repair.

The most convincing way of demonstrating relationships between the FF and C system, on the one hand, and negative response tendencies to deviance, on the other hand, would be to have direct measurements of the strength of those systems and relate these to responses to deviance.