Status Discrepancy and Prejudice

The effect of status discrepancy on attitudes toward Negroes is examined by positing an additive model of the relation between status variable and prejudice through a dummy-variable multiple-regression procedure and investigating departures from the predictions of the model. According to the status-discrepancy hypothesis, status-discrepant individuals should exhibit greater prejudice than predicted by the additive regression model. Two problems are considered, one involving income and education as status variable, the other involving education and education of spouse, using data from a representative national sample of the adult white population of the United States. For both problems, the predictions of the additive model closely match the observed patterns, indicating that status discrepancy perse has no effect on prejudice.