The Collective Nature of Prejudice: What the Collective can Contribute to the Individual Perspective

Research on prejudice has consistently shown that individual-difference measures, such as right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, consistently predict prejudice. The focus of these explanations is on differences of an evaluation of a given target group between individuals (within-target variance). However, systematic differences in how different target groups are evaluated (between-target variance) are typically not considered as a source of information. Yet such differences can reveal whether individuals share a common ranking of target groups, that is, whether prejudice is consensually shared. Across five studies, we decomposed variance in prejudice into individual (within-target) and consensual (between-target) components to examine what a collective perspective can add to individual-difference accounts. Between-target variance, reflecting consensual prejudice hierarchies, accounted for a substantial share of the variance in prejudice that individual-difference measures did not capture (Studies 1–3; Ns = 544, 436, and 176). This consensual component was embedded in social contexts: evaluations of target groups varied across regions, and neighboring regions were more similar in their levels of prejudice than distant ones (Study 4; N = 56,752 across 311 regions). Finally, region-level prejudice toward one group predicted individual-level prejudice toward another group, in addition to individual-difference measures (Study 5; N = 49,519 across 313 regions). Together, these findings suggest that individual and collective perspectives capture complementary aspects of prejudice, and that between-target variance offers valuable information on how prejudice is socially shared.