Are there psychological consequences of perceiving that you have been a target of prejudice or believing that you have been discriminate against because your ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation? Many studies show that being the target of prejudice is associated with reduced well-being. Correlational studies show that people who see themselves as victims of discrimination also have poorer well-being than people who do not. Perceiving yourself as a target of discrimination is associated with depression and lower self-esteem. The provocative hypothesis states that awareness of the possibility of being a target of discrimination may provide the stigmatized with a means of self-esteem protection when they are faced with negative outcomes. The scientists behind this hypothesis state that the availability of prejudice as a plausible external cause of negative outcomes might allow the stigmatized person to discount their own role in producing those outcomes. Crocker and Major also hypothesized that, because prejudice is external to the self, attributing negative outcomes to prejudice should protect self-esteem. This is based on models of emotion that posit that attributing negative vents to causes external to the self protects affect and self-esteem and attributing negative outcomes to causes internal to the self for which the person is responsible leads to negative affect and low self-esteem.

There are some scientists who challenge the attribution to prejudice as an external attribution. They think that because one’s group membership is an aspect of the self, attributions to prejudice have a strong internal component. Some also dispute the hypothesis that attributions to discrimination protect self-esteem. These scientists think that because attributions to discrimination threaten one’s social identity, making such attributions will heighten and not decrease negative affect for members of stigmatized groups. They also say that attributions to discrimination are less damaging for members of high-status groups than for members of low-status groups because discrimination has a different meaning for the high-status groups than for the low-status groups. The conducted experiments by these scientists show that attributions to prejudice contain both an internal and an external component.

The discounting hypothesis does not require that attributions to discrimination are exclusively external. Attributing rejection to discrimination should be less painful than attributing it to internal, stable, global factors such as a lack of ability. It protects self-esteem under some circumstances. Research on this hypothesis showed that attributions to discrimination can protect self-esteem from rejection or failure. There is evidence that the perception of injustice is associated with the emotional response of anger. Anger is also a frequent response to perceiving that you’re being discriminated. There, you might expect people who blame rejection on discrimination to be angrier than people who blame rejection on a lack of ability or a jerk.

One of the goals of this study is to test the discounting hypothesis. The writers of this article believe that judgments of responsibility also play a role in determining when attributions to prejudice will protect self-esteem. Attributions to prejudice should be self-protective. This means that they should shift responsibility for negative events away from the self and toward discrimination. They lead individuals to discount their own responsibility for producing negative events. The writers predict than the more people discount a negative event (blaming it on prejudice more than on themselves) the higher their self-esteem is.

The study

This study tested the key theoretical assumptions of the discounting hypothesis and the self-blame discounting hypothesis. Male and female participants read a vignette in which a professor of the other sex rejected their request to enrol in a course. One third of the participants read that the professor was sexist and that he/she excluded only members of the participant’s gender. This is the so-called prejudice condition. Another third of the participants read that the professor was a jerk and that he/she excluded everyone who tried to admit the class. The last third group read that the professor thought they were stupid and excluded only the participant from the course in the personal rejection condition. Participants were then asked to indicate the extent to which the rejection was due to discrimination, internal causes, external causes and also how much they were to blame for the rejection. The writers also looked ad potential depressed, anxious and hostile emotions and they also examined the impact of rejection condition on the types of emotions. The writers thought that ratings of self-blame would be lower in the prejudice condition compared to the personal rejection condition. They also tested whether attributions to internal causes were lower and attributions to external causes were higher in the prejudice condition compared to the personal rejection condition. They also tested whether discounting would mediate the depressed emotion effect.

The results showed that participants in the prejudice condition rated the rejection as significantly more due to discrimination than did participants in the personal rejection condition. Participants in the personal rejection condition rated the rejection as significantly more due to discrimination than did those in the everyone rejected condition. Women were also more likely to blame the rejection on discrimination than were men. Participants in the prejudice condition were less likely to imagine blaming themselves for the professor’s refusal to let the in the course than were participants in the personal rejection condition. Also, participants in the prejudice condition anticipated attributing the rejection less to internal causes than did those in the personal rejection condition. Participants in the personal rejection and prejudice conditions attributed more to external causes than did participants in the everyone rejected condition. Participants in the personal rejection condition anticipated feeling more depressed than those in the everyone rejection condition. Also, participants in the prejudice condition anticipated feeling less depressed than those in the personal rejection condition. Participants in the prejudice and personal rejection conditions imagined feeling more hostile affect than the other group. Also, participants in the personal rejection condition expected to feel more anxiety than participants in the everyone rejected condition. The ratings in the prejudice conditions fell between these two.

The findings show the complex nature of attributions to discrimination. Being rejected because of prejudice against one’s group implicated the self, but it does not lead to as much self-blame and is not regarded as being due as much to internal causes as is being rejected because of lack of ability. People who were asked to imagine that a prejudiced professor rejected them anticipated feeling less depressed than people who imagined being personally rejected because of assumed intelligence. This self-protective effect of prejudice relative to personal deserving could be found among women and men. Different types of attributions are associated with distinct emotional responses. The discounting hypothesis also received support. This means that the more people blamed rejection on discrimination relative to blaming it on themselves, the less depression they experienced. Self-esteem is protected by blaming rejection on prejudice compared to blaming it on a lack of personal ability. It is not protected by blaming rejection on prejudice compared to blaming it on an indiscriminate jerk who excludes everyone. It makes people angrier to feel like a target of prejudice than to feel like a target of a person who excludes everyone. Self-esteem is only protected by attributing outcomes to prejudice against one’s social group when it serves to protect an even more core component of the self. Members of stigmatized and non-stigmatized groups can feel better about themselves if they attribute a negative outcome to discrimination rather than to a lack of personal deservings.

A limitation of this study was the use of a vignette paradigm rather than a paradigm in which people were actually exposed to prejudice.