[1] Bernard Whitley and Mary Kite[2] contend that this dissonance motivates people to alter their thoughts in an attempt to reduce their discomfort.
[3] Fiske uses this conception of prejudice to explain ambivalent sexism, heterosexism, racism, anti-immigrant biases, ageism, and classism.
The theory identifies resentment toward nontraditional women along each dimension: dominative paternalism, competitive gender differentiation, and heterosexual hostility.
[3] Example items from the ASI include:[3] (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.
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.
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.
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.
[11][12] Beyond the Modern Racism Scale, researchers have developed additional tools to study ambivalent prejudice in other contexts, such as gender, immigration, and intergroup dynamics.
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.
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.
For instance, research has shown that ambivalent individuals often overcompensate with excessive praise or criticism depending on situational cues.
[18] Physiological measures like skin conductance and heart rate variability capture emotional reactions during interactions with outgroup members.
The typical attitude exhibited towards these women will be expressed as resentment, which may manifest in explicit discriminatory behaviour attacking their profession or new role.
Benevolent sexism is expressed more implicitly, often seeing women as objects to be protected and requiring a traditional male figure to guide and nourish them.
In a systematic literature review by Bareket and Fiske (2023), hostile sexism leads to more direct violence, which tends to be expressed in relation to the status quo being threatened by women power.
[3] Problack attitudes attribute black disadvantage to larger social structures and factors including discrimination, segregation, and lack of opportunities.
[25] This leads to a conflict between basic values held by wider society and moral dilemmas in concrete daily interactions with people with disabilities.
"[8] Matsuo and McIntyre used a sample survey of college students to test egalitarianism and the Protestant work ethic (PWE) and how it relates to perceptions of refugees.
[8] Response amplification is a strategy that may be used to lessen the negative effects of cognitive dissonance that arises from conflicting beliefs one may hold towards their out-groups.
[27] As part of the study, the assigned teammate was instructed to intentionally cause the failure or successful achievement of the task by the researchers.
When working to counteract prejudice, the focus should be on the most stereotypically negative aspect for a group, for example, competence for older people.
[3] In addition, constructive contact, that involving cooperation and equal status in the setting, for example, between groups improves emotional intelligence.