ABSTRACT
Prejudice entails systematically different reactions to different kinds of outgroups, and many of these reactions are ambivalent, in the sense of reflecting simultaneously positive and negative emotions. Perceived status predicts perceived competence, in the just world that people participants phenomenologically inhabit and perceived competition negatively predicts perceived warmth, in the unforgiving world of stereotypes. The term stereotype suggests uniformly negative qualities attributed to a group, a position supported by many prominent social psychologists. The ambivalent intergroup emotions reflect insidious and potentially dangerous prejudices in which the positive side of ambivalent feelings legitimates and reinforces the negative aspects of stereotypes, emotions, and discrimination. Indeed, a naive multiculturalism suggests that emphasizing the positive aspects of stereotypic beliefs about various groups creates good feelings and thereby reduces prejudice. The Nazis had a sincere, though hysterical belief in the potential power of the alleged international Jewish conspiracy, and many Hutus similarly resented the perceived power of the Tutsis in Rwanda.
