10.1177/0146167204264654 PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN Cunningham et al. / ETHNOCENTRISM
Implicit and Explicit Ethnocentrism:
Revisiting the Ideologies of Prejudice
William A. Cunningham
Yale University
John B. Nezlek
College of William & Mary
Mahzarin R. Banaji
Harvard University
Two studies investigated relationships among individual differ-
ences in implicit and explicit prejudice, right-wing ideology, and
rigidity in thinking. The first study examined these relation-
ships focusing on White Americans’ prejudice toward Black
Americans. The second study provided the first test of implicit
ethnocentrism and its relationship to explicit ethnocentrism by
studying the relationship between attitudes toward five social
groups. Factor analyses found support for both implicit and
explicit ethnocentrism. In both studies, mean explicit attitudes
toward outgroups were positive, whereas implicit attitudes were
negative, suggesting that implicit and explicit prejudices are dis-
tinct; however, in both studies, implicit and explicit attitudes
were related (r = .37, .47). Latent variable modeling indicates a
simple structure within this ethnocentric system, with variables
organized in order of specificity. These results lead to the conclu-
sion that (a) implicit ethnocentrism exists and (b) it is related to
and distinct from explicit ethnocentrism.
Keywords: ethnocentrism; ideology; prejudice; implicit attitudes;
explicit attitudes
. . . but the basic fact is firmly established—prejudice is
more than an incident in many lives; it is often
lockstitched into the very fabric of personality .... To
change it, the whole pattern of life would have to be
altered.
—Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (1954, p. 408)
Emphatically stated in the writings of Gordon Allport
and Henri Tajfel, the modern approach to the study of
prejudice and stereotyping radically altered our under-
standing of the psychological roots of prejudice,
ethnocentrism, and intergroup conflict. A central fea-
ture of this modern view is the notion that constructs
such as stereotype and prejudice are ordinary—that they
are firmly grounded in the ways in which humans com-
monly perceive, categorize, learn, and remember. This
simple observation has guided theory and research on
how humans evaluate other humans as members of
socially defined categories and in recent years has been
accompanied by an interest in the implicit expression of
prejudice.
As useful as such an approach has been, the emphasis
on single acts of thinking and feeling, conscious and
unconscious, has left unexamined critical aspects of the
structure and function of this cognitive-affective system.
It has, for example, tended to ignore the broader net-
work of ideology that represents one’s political and
social view of the world and the place of social groups in
it. In this research, we integrate what is known about the
social cognition of prejudice—specifically that prejudice
operates in both explicit (conscious) and implicit
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Authors’ Note: Portions of this research were presented at the 1998
meeting of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, Lexington,
KY. This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health
Grant MH-75672 and National Science Foundation Grant SBR-
9709924 to Mahzarin R. Banaji. Study 1 is based on William A.
Cunningham’s College of William & Mary master’s thesis supervised by
John B. Nezlek, and we thank the additional members of the commit-
tee for their thoughtful suggestions: Peter Derks and Kelly Shaver. For
helpful comments on earlier versions of this article, we thank Brian
Nosek, Kris Preacher, Siri Carpenter, Kristi Lemm, Kathleen Brophy,
Aiden Gregg, Tony Greenwald, Greg Walton, Eric Uhlmann, and Robert
C. MacCallum. Correspondence concerning this article should be
addressed to William A. Cunningham, Department of Psychology,
University of Toronto, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, M5S3G3;
e-mail: cunningham@psych.utoronto.ca.
PSPB, Vol. 30 No. 10, October 2004 1332-1346
DOI: 10.1177/0146167204264654
© 2004 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.