4 - Anger Penalty

Summary

Chapter 4 investigates if whites apply an “anger penalty” to a Black politician relative to a white politician. We examine if an angry Black Democrat politician is racially handicapped among racially prejudiced whites. We test our predictions using several survey experiments on adult national samples of whites. We uncover evidence of an anger penalty in that racially prejudiced whites evaluate an angry Black Democrat politician more unfavorably than a non-angry Black Democrat politician and an angry white Democrat politician. Additionally, we find a similar effect among whites oriented to supporting group-based social hierarchies (i.e., having a social dominance orientation). In another study, we examine if this anger penalty depends on the issue. We expect an anger penalty is greater when the issue implicates Black Americans than if it is unrelated to the group. The findings show that racially prejudiced whites penalize a Black politician only when the anger is related to a racialized issue and not when the issue is unrelated to race. In our final experimental study, we examine whether a Black female politician’s anger is treated differently than a Black male’s; the anger penalty does not appear to be conditioned on gender.