Prejudice and stereotypes at regional and individual levels: Related but distinct.

Exploring how psychological constructs and their outcomes vary across geographic regions is a rapidly expanding area of research, yet fundamental questions remain. Can constructs designed to describe individual variation in attitudes be interpreted in the same way when aggregated to regional levels? To what extent are they related or distinct? We tested the relationship between individual and regional attitudes across four studies in the domain of intergroup attitudes. Participants reported explicit prejudices and stereotypes toward 14 different social groups, and incorporating data from Project Implicit, we compared the characteristics of regional and individual operationalizations of prejudice. Further, we tested whether attitudes related to one another in the same way across levels using representational similarity analysis. Drawing from construct validity theory, we find evidence that regional prejudice is an emergent property of individual attitudes, to which it is related but distinct. These findings contextualize stereotype and prejudice constructs in regional analyses in psychology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).