ABSTRACT

In a classic study, Minard (1952) examined racial interactions between white and black coal miners inside and outside the Pocahontas Coal Field of McDowell, West Virginia, USA. Although this research was conducted when segregation was still legal in many states, its message directly relates to a number of recent research efforts in the realm of group-based emotions. Minard found that whereas white coal miners treated black co-workers as equals in the context of the mine, they also dealt with them as social inferiors in the outside world. These data are often presented as evidence that the situational and normative pressures constrain the manifestation of people’s behavior, especially in the realm of intergroup relations, and obscure the impact of more enduring aspects of people such as attitudes. In short, one should not expect people’s prejudice to materialize in discrimination in any straightforward way. Only by taking some distance from any particular context and by averaging over many behaviors should researchers expect to observe a decent level of correspondence between attitude and behavior.