Identifying and Reducing The Anti-Japanese Prejudice By Koreans In Job Hiring Decisions

We investigated the level of prejudice that contemporary Koreans hold toward contemporary Japanese because of the Japanese military’s victimization of Koreans during WWII and social psychological mechanisms that might alleviate the negative feelings and attitudes held by the contemporary Koreans toward the contemporary Japanese.  The Korean participants were asked to evaluate a pseudo-job candidate for a position at an IT company upon reading his resume and watching a video clip of his job interview. The ethnicity and language ability of the candidate were manipulated to see if these manipulations would affect the participants’ responses. Based on theories of intergroup conflict, social identity, and the collective guilt assignment, we hypothesized that: 1) the Korean participants would endorse the Japanese candidate more when he is portrayed as a trilingual (speak Japanese, English, and Korean) than when he is portrayed as a bilingual (speak only Japanese and English) and 2) the more collective guilt the Korean participants assigns to the Japanese candidate, the more negatively the candidate would be perceived in terms of his personality, which would result in less endorsement to hire the candidate. The results confirmed the hypotheses. Possible implications and suggestions for future studies are discussed.