Prejudice and Openness to the Other: Investigating Responses to Testimonies of Race-Based Suffering

摘要

The present study employed a variety of existing measures to assess openness to the other in the ecologically valid context of listening to real-life testimonies of race-based suffering. Variation in system threat, and individual differences in two measures of prejudice—right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO)—were all investigated for their impact on respondent openness. Among 36 student volunteers, it was found that a woman’s testimony featuring a high degree of system threat engendered less openness to the other among participants high in SDO than less threatening testimony offered by a man. Additionally, participant levels of RWA explained a significant amount of variance in their openness to the other across both male and female testimonies. This study quantitatively confirms that testimonies of race-based suffering—utterances that have great potential to interrupt master narratives and invite deep learning—are likely to be met with a complex and interactive pattern of resistance that must be more fully understood.