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The Self-Protective Properties of Stigma: Evolution of a Modern Classic

2003; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 14; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

1532-7965

Jennifer Crocker, Brenda Major,

Racial and Ethnic Identity Research

We thank Trish Devine for nominating our work as a modem classic and Ralph Erber and Lenny Martin for giving us this opportunity to reflect on how these ideas originated and evolved over time and how others have used them. Our original idea about the self-protective functions of social stigma germinated for a long time, and there are people who directly and indirectly shaped our ideas, some of whom probably have no idea how they influenced us. The origins of this work, at least in the mind of one of us (Jennifer Crocker) can be traced to a 1982 invitation to attend a summer institute on Stigma and Interpersonal Relations at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Crocker applied to the summer institute because a secretary put the flyer in her mailbox, and it sounded interesting. She had been studying cognitive processes in stereotyping so thought her work was possibly relevant to stigma, although frankly she wasn't sure. The summer institute was directed by Dale Miller and Bob Scott; included an interdisciplinary group of psychologists, sociologists, education researchers, anthropologists, and historians; and was a truly exciting intellectual experience. Each morning the stigma scholars met as a group to discuss readings that someone in the group had identified as important or interesting. Among those readings was Porter and Washington's Annual Review of Sociology chapter on Black identity and self-esteem, which argued that contrary to popular wisdom and a lot of psychological theorizing, Blacks do not always suffer from low self-esteem (Porter & Washington, 1979). At the time, it was a puzzling finding to Crocker, but not particularly relevant to her work on subtyping and stereotype change, and she didn't think further about it. Over the next few years at Northwestern University, Crocker's research evolved to include more emotional processes, and she began to study the relations among self-esteem, threats to the self, and prejudice. Established wisdom suggested that people who are low in self-esteem are more prejudiced, but her research indicated that when threatened, high self-esteem people are more likely to derogate out-groups or think their group is superior to out-groups (Crocker & Luhtanen, 1990; Crocker, Thompson, McGraw, & Ingerman, 1987). In 1985, Crocker left Northwestern (their choice, not hers) and joined the faculty at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her second semester there, she gave a lecture on stereotyping and prejudice in her Introduction to Social Psychology course. After the class, an African American student approached her, observing that she sometimes wondered whether people were prejudiced against her. For example, she said, she drove a new red car, and recently a White man in a pickup truck almost hit her. She wondered if it could have happened because he was prejudiced against her. Although Crocker couldn't give her an answer, the conversation connected in Crocker's mind with the Porter and Washington (1979) article on race and self-esteem. She thought that the uncertainty, or attributional ambiguity that this student had experienced about whether she was the target of prejudice might account for high self-esteem in African Americans. As Crocker thought about this, she realized that her colleague, Brenda Major, had a research paradigm that might be really useful for studying this phenomenon of attributional ambiguity. Major was interested in why highly attractive women did not have higher self-esteem than those who were less attractive and had done a study showing that attractive women were less likely to think they had written a good essay when the man who praised their essay could see them, because the blinds were up on a one-way mirror, than when the man couldn't see them because the blinds were down (Major, Carrington, & Camevale, 1984). When the blinds were up, the women suspected he had ulterior motives for praising their essay, and they were less likely to believe they had written a really good essay. Less attractive women did not show this effect. Crocker scufried to Major's office to talk about this idea and the connection with her previous research. Major was intrigued by Crocker's idea about