Examining Dispositional and Situational Effects on Outgroup Attitudes y JOKE MEEUS * , BART DURIEZ, NORBERT VANBESELAERE, KAREN PHALET and PETER KUPPENS Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium Abstract Two research lines have dominated the quest for the antecedents of outgroup attitudes. Whereas the first has viewed outgroup attitudes as a result of individual differences, the second stressed the importance of the intergroup situation. In order to investigate the interplay of individual differences and situational characteristics, key predictors of the individual differences perspective (i.e. right-wing authoritarianism or RWA, and social dominance orientation or SDO) and the intergroup relations perspective (i.e. ingroup identification and ingroup threat) were simultaneously tested. Two studies revealed additive but no interaction effects of RWA and SDO, ingroup identification and threat. Additionally, Study 1 showed that threat effects remain limited to the outgroup that is portrayed as threatening and do not generalize to other outgroups. Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. INTRODUCTION Life is littered with examples in which members of one group express implicit or explicit negative attitudes towards members of other groups. Although this can be innocent and even entertaining, this can also cause unbridgeable gaps between people. Because of this, issues of migration and how to improve intergroup attitudes and behaviours between different cultural communities within one country are becoming top priority on the political agenda of Western countries. In an attempt to contribute to this issue, psychologists have tried to gain insight into the genesis of negative outgroup attitudes. Two research lines have dominated this quest. The first regards negative outgroup attitudes as resulting from stable individual differences making people more or less prone to adopt such negative attitudes. The second views these attitudes as resulting from (perceived) European Journal of Personality Eur. J. Pers. 23: 307–328 (2009) Published online 27 March 2009 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/per.710 *Correspondence to: Joke Meeus, Department of Psychology, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Tiensestraat 102, 3000 Leuven, Belgium. E-mail: Joke.Meeus@psy.kuleuven.be y The contribution of the second and last author was supported by the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders (FWO). Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 6 June 2008 Revised 30 October 2008 Accepted 22 January 2009