Hansard

Positive and negative are in the eye of the beholder, so I will let the committee decide on that. However, I will bear in mind your request for me to talk about changes over time as well as the key points in the research.In most situations, but not all, only a minority of people expressed a discriminatory point of view about the various scenarios, options and groups that we asked them about. That was typified by a very general question: we asked whether Scotland should try to get rid of all kinds of prejudice, or whether sometimes there is a good reason for people to be prejudiced against a particular group. Only 29 per cent of people expressed the latter view. That is a typical figure from our research.That does not always hold, however, and it varies by group. For example, discriminatory attitudes were quite commonly expressed towards Gypsies/Travellers and transsexual people; such attitudes were also not that uncommon with respect to gay men and lesbians, and Muslims. In contrast, discriminatory attitudes were less likely to be expressed towards people with disabilities—we focused on learning disabilities—and in respect of women.There are some fairly typical, but not invariant, patterns about the kind of person who is more likely to express a discriminatory point of view. The first of the two most common patterns is that such attitudes seem to be more common among older people than among younger people. We are inclined to the view, although we cannot demonstrate it directly in our research, that that is undoubtedly a generational phenomenon. Older people were brought up when society was rather different; when they were children, different attitudes were expressed towards some groups and they were socialised with a rather different set of attitudes. Younger people might have experienced a more multicultural education, and they live in a society in which a diversity of groups is much more commonplace. The second pattern is that there are clear educational differences. Universities tend to produce people who are relatively liberal on such issues. In contrast, those with few, if any, educational qualifications are more likely to express discriminatory points of view.Perhaps unsurprisingly, we confirmed other research that finds that, for the most part, but again not invariantly, people who say that they know someone from a particular group—for example somebody who is Muslim, or somebody who is a gay man or a lesbian—are less likely to express discriminatory views.In the research, we tried to understand why people hold discriminatory attitudes. In particular, we considered the relative importance of two things, the first of which was the extent to which people are more likely to hold or express discriminatory attitudes if they express concern about what we call the cultural threat that they feel might arise through the arrival of new and different people in Scotland. We asked people whether, if more Muslims, people from ethnic minorities or people from eastern Europe came to Scotland, Scotland might begin to lose its culture. The people who hold that view and who feel that sense of threat, or who feel uncomfortable that the country and society that they think they know seem to be changing, are, generally, much more likely to express discriminatory attitudes.In contrast, the extent to which people feel uncomfortable seeing people engaging publicly in cultural practices that might be regarded as somewhat different or unusual seems to be rather less important. In the report, we said that it seems quite difficult to have a society with a low incidence of expressed discriminatory attitudes if people do not feel that they have something in common with members of other groups. That seems to be quite important.This is not invariant, but it tended to be true, and it is an obvious challenge for policy makers: people were more likely to express discriminatory attitudes in more intimate settings than they were in more public settings. For example, one question in our research was about attitudes towards people from a variety of groups and whether people would feel happy or unhappy if a close relative of theirs married somebody from such a group. In general, people were more likely to express discriminatory attitudes in answer to that question than in answer to a question about whether somebody from a certain group was suitable to be a primary schoolteacher. That raises issues for policy makers because, at the end of the day, the state probably does not think that it has the ability to pass legislation that says who people can or cannot marry.One thing that was somewhat tangential to the original research but which proved to be rather interesting is the work that we did on people's attitudes towards positive action, which uncovered two things. First, positive action can be quite controversial and can, in some circumstances—depending on the details—produce quite high levels of opposition. Secondly, the people who express concern about positive action are, typically, the opposite of the people who are likely to express discriminatory attitudes. In particular, those people who have degrees and are in relatively well-paid occupations make up the group who tend to be less keen on measures to, for example, give greater training opportunities to women or to people from ethnic minorities to ensure that they get adequate promotion opportunities. Of course, that might suggest that people in that group are concerned about their own interests, which they suddenly find to be at stake.