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This article has two goals. The first is to consider what the social-psychological literature on social identity, ingroup-outgroup perception, and prejudice contributes to the understanding of AIDS-related stigma. The second is to address ways to make the world more comfortable and compassionate for people with AIDS (PWAs). At the core of AIDS-related stigma is the perception that PWAs are members of an outgroup threatening one's social identity as a member of the nondeviant ingroup. A variety of psychological principles operate to heighten this perception and to make the boundaries between "us" and "them" seemingly impenetrable. Furthermore, reactions to PWAs are strongly affective and often involve multiple and conflicting emotional experiences. Models that consider the multifaceted, symbolic aspects of AIDS-related stigma may inform strategies for reducing the stigma. However, because many people may be resistant to direct attitude change tactics, the authors suggest an additional strategy that seeks to change attitudes indirectly by first changing behaviors.

AbstractClose peer relationships are critical to children's and adolescents' healthy development and well‐being, yet youth sometimes struggle to make friends. The present work tested whether an online version of the Fast Friends procedure could engender closeness among 9‐ to 13‐year‐old youth. Participant dyads (N = 131), matched in age and gender, were randomly assigned to answer personal questions that encourage self‐disclosure and play a collaborative game (Fast Friends condition) or to engage in similar activities without self‐disclosure or collaboration (control condition). Fast Friends dyads reported feeling closer and expressed more interest in future contact than control dyads. The discussion addresses potential future uses and implications of an online Fast Friends procedure.

Contemporary prejudice research focuses primarily on people who are motivated to respond without prejudice and the ways in which unintentional bias can cause these people to act inconsistent with this motivation. However, some real-world phenomena (e.g., hate speech, hate crimes) and experimental findings (e.g., Plant & Devine, 2001; 2009) suggest that some expressions of prejudice are intentional. These phenomena and findings are difficult to explain solely from the motivations to respond without prejudice. We argue that some people are motivated to express prejudice, and we develop the motivation to express prejudice (MP) scale to measure this motivation. In seven studies involving more than 6,000 participants, we demonstrate that, across scale versions targeted at Black people and gay men, the MP scale has good reliability and convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity. In normative climates that prohibit prejudice, the internal and external motivations to express prejudice are functionally non-independent, but they become more independent when normative climates permit more prejudice toward a target group. People high in the motivation to express prejudice are relatively likely to resist pressure to support programs promoting intergroup contact and vote for political candidates who support oppressive policies. The motivation to express prejudice predicted these outcomes even when controlling for attitudes and the motivations to respond without prejudice. This work encourages contemporary prejudice researchers to broaden the range of samples, target groups, and phenomena that they study, and more generally to consider the intentional aspects of negative intergroup behavior.