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The Impact Of Prejudice On Women's Wellbeing: A Moderated-Mediation Rejection Identification Model On Feminist Identity, Liana Shaw

Honors College

The study’s purpose was to assess sexism’s impact on women’s wellbeing based on the Rejection-Identification Model (Branscombe et al., 1999), in which perceived prejudice increases group identification, which in turn buffers the negative consequences of prejudice on wellbeing. Surveys were administered via Qualtrics. Using PROCESS analyses in SPSS, Study 1 (n = 1,083) investigated whether or not these relationships between prejudice, group identification, and wellbeing were moderated by feminist identity (Model 59; Hayes, 2018). Results showed that while women higher in feminist identity do experience greater depression in response to perceived prejudice, they also have a significantly stronger relationship between …

The Man-Hating Woman: Studying Bystander Perceptions Of Social Media Sexism Confrontations, Erika Hipsky

Honors College

Social media platforms enable users to perpetuate discriminatory rhetoric and oppressive structures, including sexism. While previous research on sexism confrontations has mainly focused on face-to-face interactions, there is little information available on how confrontations operate within the context of social media. This thesis examines the influence of confronter approach (HATE or CARE) and identity (man or woman) on TikTok sexism confrontations. Female participants, acting as bystanders (N = 57), were surveyed on their perceptions of four TikTok confrontations: HATE Woman, CARE Woman, HATE Man, and CARE Man. Regardless of confronter gender, participants viewed CARE confrontations as more likable than HATE …

Religious Self-Identity And Racism, Alexandria Morgan

Honors College

This project is a replication of a study by Johnson, Rowatt, and LaBouff (2010) that subliminally primed American Christian participants to think about Christianity subconsciously and found increased prejudice towards Black Americans. This study is often cited to support the claim that “thinking about religion makes people more prejudiced,” despite not having been replicated effectively. Replicability is crucial to make appropriate claims. We replicated the original study with updated explicit priming methods as well as updated racial prejudice scales with a recruited national sample of 500 white American Christians through Prolific.ac. Participants were randomly assigned to a priming condition, where …

Mediation Of The Religion-Prejudice Link, Aaron R. Dustin

Honors College

Although religious teachings typically recommend prosocial behavior, religiosity is reliably linked to prejudice. This paradoxical relationship raises the question: what is it about religion that might lead to prejudice despite religion’s apparent drive for prosociality? The answer may lie with religious fundamentalism, a particularly rigid way of holding one’s religious beliefs as the single deepest and most certain source of truth. We propose that religious fundamentalism mediates the relationship between religiosity and prejudice. We also seek to explore the influence of three facets of inflexible thinking (belief rigidity, dualism, and inviolacy) on the relationship between religious fundamentalism and prejudice.

We …

The Role Of Threat, Emotion, And Individual Difference Characteristics In Attitudes And Perceptions Of Minority Groups, Aeleah Granger

Honors College

A socio-functional approach to prejudice posits that different out-groups are perceived to pose different types of threats to group success by in-group members. These different types of threats include physical safety/security threats, economic threats, moral threats, etc. Within this framework, each type of threat elicits a different emotional response from in-group members. In the current pair of studies, we investigated the extent to which Arab Americans and Muslim Americans (Study 1), as well as deaf individuals and those with disabilities (Study 2) are attitudinally conflated into the same social category by measuring the emotional responses they elicit from participants, and …

What Shapes Our Attitudes Toward Outgroups?: Measuring Implicit And Explicit Homosexual Prejudice, Morgan Kinney

Honors College

The emotional bases of homosexual prejudice are not completely understood, often times not even by the people who hold the prejudice themselves. Because implicit biases can go undetected even by the person holding them, and because they happen before conscious control of emotions is available, these attitudes may be best measured through physiological measures like startle eye-blink response. My honors thesis measures implicit attitudes toward homosexuals using psychophysiological means and examines the influence of religious fundamentalism and right-wing authoritarianism on those non-conscious automatic attitudes. Facial Electromyography (EMG) was used to detect startle responses to an auditory probe while viewing romantic, …

An Investigation Into The Perceptions Of International And Out-Of-State Students On The University Of Maine Campus, Matthew Pinkham

Honors College

The present study was designed to investigate in-state students’ perceptions of two out-groups on the University of Maine campus: out-of-state students and international students and the experiences of international students. Two separate surveys were administered online over two semesters: the first’s goal was to evaluate perceptions host students might have of their peers and if these peers were perceived to be from distinct out-groups, while the second survey was an exploratory survey allowing international students to describe their experiences while studying at UMaine. Two hundred and fifty seven in-state students responded to the first survey. Results from this survey showed …