Flexible confronters, informative confronters, and low stakes prodders: A person-centered approach to prejudice confrontation styles

Abstract

When people encounter prejudice, they may respond by expressing disapproval (i.e., confronting prejudice). Prior research has identified five primary features that characterize prejudice confrontations: educational, argumentative, help-seeking, empathy, and humor. In the present research, we used a person-centered approach to identify profiles of individuals based on these self-reported prejudice confrontation styles (PCS). Latent profile analyses were conducted across three online U.S. studies (N_total = 978) to classify individuals by PCS profiles. Four profiles classified undergraduates' and White adults' PCS: high in educational, help-seeking, and empathy and low in argumentative and humor (informative confronters), moderate in educational, help-seeking, empathy, and humor and low in argumentative (low stakes prodders), and low on all subscales (i.e., non-confronters), and moderate-to-high in all subscales (flexible confronters). Informative confronters, low stakes prodders, and non-confronter profiles emerged among the Black sample, but not the flexible confronter profile. Across the three samples, confronter profiles differed in several lay theories of prejudice and intentions to confront prejudice against a range of derogated and disadvantaged groups. These findings identified four primary PCS profiles and illustrated differences across profiles in how people think about and intend to respond to prejudice.