Reducing Prejudice Across Cultures Via Social Tuning

This research examines whether culture influences the extent to which people’s attitudes tune toward others’ egalitarian beliefs. Hong Kong Chinese, but not American, participants were less prejudiced, explicitly and implicitly, toward homosexuals when they interacted with a person who appeared to hold egalitarian views as opposed to neutral views (Experiment 1). In Experiments 2 and 3, cultural concepts were manipulated. Americans and Hong Kong Chinese who were primed with a collectivist mind-set showed less explicit and implicit prejudice when the experimenter was thought to endorse egalitarian views than when no views were conveyed. Such differences were not found when both cultural groups were primed with an individualist mind-set. These findings suggest that cultural value orientations can help mitigate prejudice.