T1. Historical overview on prejudice research

Question 1

what is prejudice?

Answer 1

Prejudice is an individual-level attitude (subjectively positive or negative) toward groups and their members that creates or maintains hierarchical status relations between groups.

Question 2

what are stereotypes?

Answer 2

Stereotypes as associations and beliefs about the characteristics and attributes of a group and its members that shape how people think about and respond to the group.

Question 3

what is discrimination?

Answer 3

Discrimination by an individual as behaviour that creates, maintains, or reinforces advantage for some groups and their members over other groups and their members.

Question 4

what are the different levels of analysis (or explanation) in Social Psychology?

Answer 4

• Intra-individual: personality, attitudes, person perception
• Interpersonal: communication, cooperation, and competition
• (inter) group processes: social identity, intergroup relations, group dynamics.
• Societal/ideological: values and norms, general beliefs/ideology

Question 5

what was the main understanding of prejudice up to the 1920s?

Answer 5

• Prejudice not an issue
• White superiority accepted as natural – inferiority of Black or other colonial people.
• Intelligence testing: race differences
• “race theories”: evolutionary backwardness, limited intellectual capacity, more primitives in their drives
• Useful theories to justify the status-quo: European colonialism and American slavery/segregation.

Question 6

what was the main understanding of prejudice in the 1920s?

Answer 6

• After first world war: movements challenging European colonization and emergence of the Black civil right movement
• If other “races” are not inferior, how to explain stigmatization?
• Prejudice as an irrational and unjustified negative intergroup attitude
• Psychological measures of racial prejudice (Social Distance Scale, Bogardus, 1925) and stereotypes (Katz and Braly, 1933)

Question 7

what was the main understanding of prejudice in the 1930s/1940s?

Answer 7

• Prejudice as widespread phenomena .. why? How?
• Universal processes underlying prejudice: unconscious defence mechanism  tensions, frustrations, threats translate into prejudice against minorities
• Frustration-aggression theory (Dollard et al., 1939) and Scapegoating (practice of singling out a person or group for unmerited blame and consequent negative treatment)
• High and constant levels of racial prejudice from an early age onwards

Question 8

what was the main understanding of prejudice in the 1950s?

Answer 8

• After second world war: need to explain racial ideologies and the holocaust
• Prejudice as an expression of a pathological need, still based on psychodynamic theories but related to particular personality structures
• Authoritarian personality theory (Adorno et al., 1950)
• Assimilation (to the liberal and democratic values) as a strategy to reduce prejudice

Question 9

what was the main understanding of prejudice in the 1960s?

Answer 9

• US race relations in the South of the country 7 South Africa: institutionalized prejudice and segregation
• Difficulty to explain some issues based only on personality structure  shift to social and cultural factors
• Prejudice as a norm embedded in the social environment  socialization and institutional norms.

Question 10

what was the main understanding of prejudice in the 1970s?

Answer 10

• Prejudice rooted in power relations.
• Racial prejudice as expressing the interests of the dominant group (White in US) keeping minorities (Black in US9 as a disadvantaged, powerless, and impoverished underclass
• Affirmative actions as way to intervene.

Question 11

what was the main understanding of prejudice in the 1980s & 1990s?

Answer 11

• Studies with minimal groups
• Social categorization per se (belonging to two different groups) sufficient to trigger intergroup discrimination (Tajfel & Turner, 1979)
• Prejudice as a consequence of normal, natural cognitive processes that functions to simplify the complexity of social world (Hamilton, 1981)
• In US, decrease in the general level of prejudice (probably due to social norms) but not that much in discriminatory behaviour.
• More subtle form of prejudice that includes egalitarian beliefs (superficial?) at a conscious level with underlying covert feelings towards stigmatized minorities  socially acceptable form of racism
• Automatic vs. controlled responses
• Racial prejudice increases and then decreases.

Question 12

what was the main understanding of prejudice in the post 2000?

Answer 12

• Collapse of the bipolar world order (capitalism vs. communism); 9/11; globalization
• Prejudice as complex and multifaced: primarily affective, motivationally driven, rooted in ideological beliefs.
• Influenced by individual differences, intergroup social power relations (threat, competition, inequality)