Motivational processes underlying both prejudice and helping.

Examined at the behavioral level, prejudice and helping appear as qualitatively different and perhaps mutually incompatible social behaviors. As a result, the literatures on prejudice and helping evolved largely independent of each other. When they are examined at the process level, however, underlying similarities appear. Furthermore, when anomalies are examined within each of these two separate literatures, similarities become more apparent. Finally, the personality dimension of agreeableness is systematically related to both prejudice and helping. The authors propose that many forms of prejudice and helping are expressions of underlying processes of self-regulation and social accommodation. After discussing several other social-cognitive approaches to self-correction, the authors offer a novel opponent process model of motivation that integrates the apparently exclusive processes of prejudice and helping into a single system.