Ingroup glorification and attachment, cognitive ambivalence towards, and negative action tendencies against, outgroups

The current work argues that expressing outgroup ambivalence based on cognitive information is a strategy to justify one‟s prejudice, which may ultimately “cover” the discriminatory nature of outgroup-directed negative action tendencies, depending on individuals‟ ingroup „attachment‟ and „glorification‟ levels. As expected, after expressing prejudice in a normative context inducing prejudice suppression (a) high-glorification participants were more prone to outgroup-directed aggressive actions when these latter were self-reported after the expression of ambivalent beliefs but not emotions concerning the outgroup, and (b) high-attachment participants were more prone to outgroup-directed avoidant actions, when these latter were self-reported after the expression of ambivalent beliefs but not emotions concerning the outgroup.