El estudio de las teorías laicas: una pieza importante del rompecabezas para comprender el prejuicio

“Lay” theories are the theories that people use in their everyday life. They not only serve people's epistemic needs to understand and make predictions about their social world but also serve their social needs to form and maintain relationships as well as psychological needs to feel in control and good about themselves. Decades of findings from cognitive, cultural, developmental, and social psychological research involving children, adolescents, and adults across numerous cultures indicate that lay theories are powerful predictors of greater or weaker prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination toward numerous groups (gay men, overweight persons, people living with AIDS, poor persons, socially stigmatized racial/ethnic groups, women). This chapter examines how lay theories foster prejudice or tolerance toward social groups. It highlights some relevant findings on a prominent lay theory, the Protestant work ethic (PWE), which appears to have at least two intergroup implications: one for prejudice and one for tolerance. The tolerant implication of PWE seems to exist across age, cultural, and social status groups; whereas the intolerant implication seems to be culturally bound with children in those cultures first learning the tolerant implication and later learning the intolerant implication

La ética del trabajo protestante: una teoría laica con implicaciones intergrupales duales

The authors propose that, in the US, the Protestant work ethic (PWE) relates both to social tolerance and intolerance. PWE is proposed to have a surface meaning that relates to social tolerance, and also an associated meaning that relates to intolerance, which is acquired in part through social and cultural experience (e.g. PWE being used as a justifier of inequality). In correlational and experimental studies, PWE was related to greater egalitarianism and desired social closeness to African Americans among younger participants (9 to 12 and 14 to 16-year-olds) relative to older participants (college students). Subsequent experiments directly manipulated college students’ interpretations of PWE, showing that those experimentally led to focus on others' use of PWE in support of their arguments (associated meaning condition) endorsed egalitarianism to a lesser extent (Study 3) and donated less money to a homeless shelter (Study 4) than did those simply focusing on the definition of PWE (definition condition). In contrast to these findings, the authors showed that social dominance orientation has a unitary relation to social intolerance across the three age groups studied (Study 1). The implications of these findings and future work on the duality of lay theories are discussed