Framing interethnic ideology: Effects of multicultural and color-blind perspectives on judgments of groups and individuals

In 3 experiments, White American college students received a message advocating either a color-blind or a multicultural ideological approach to improving interethnic relations and then made judgments about various ethnic groups and individuals. Relative to a color-blind perspective, the multicultural perspective led to stronger stereotypes, greater accuracy in these stereotypes, and greater use of category information in judgments of individuals. This increase in between-category differentiation occurred both for attributes that favored the in-group and for attributes that favored the out-group and was also paired in some cases with greater overall positivity toward the out-group. The findings lead us to question the implicit assumption driving the majority of social psychological efforts at prejudice reduction: that the categorization process leads to prejudice, and that the relevance of social categories must therefore be de-emphasized.