In the literal sense of the word, prejudice means pre-judgement. Prejudiced individuals are people who have made up their minds about a certain topic before assessing the relevant information. This sense of pre-judgement has formed an important part of the social psychological concept of prejudice. In addition, social psychologists have tended to use the term prejudice to refer to particular sorts of pre-judgements. Although logically it is possible to be prejudiced in favour of a group or person, psychologists tend to reserve the term for judgements which are unreasonably negative evaluations against a social group. Thus racist, anti-Semitic and sexist attitudes would all be considered prime examples of prejudice. The prejudiced person is seen as someone who has pre-judged a whole group unfavourably and who is likely to be biased against individual members of that group simply because of their group membership. Prejudiced beliefs are assumed to be erroneous or likely to lead the believer into making erroneous judgements. Moreover, prejudiced beliefs are seen as being resistant to change. Thus, Allport (1958), in his classic discussion of prejudice, wrote that ‘pre-judgements become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge’.
Social psychologists have argued that the prejudiced person’s error derives, in part, from a tendency to think about social groups in terms of stereotypes. In one of the first psychological investigations of stereotypes, Katz and Braly (1935) found that White US college students had a widespread tendency to ascribe clichéd descriptions, or stereotypes, to social groups. Blacks would be classed as ‘superstitious’ and ‘lazy’; Jews as ‘mercenary’ and ‘grasping’; Turks as ‘cruel’ and ‘treacherous’, and so on. By thinking in terms of such stereotypes, prejudiced people not only entertain unfavourable views about groups as a whole, but also exaggerate the percentage of individuals who might happen to possess the stereotyped trait.
Some of the most famous psychological theories of prejudice have offered motivational or psychoanalytic explanations to explain stereotyped thinking. For example, Adorno et al. (1950) argued that prejudiced people tended to have an authoritarian personality. The authoritarian, according to Adorno, was motivated by an intolerance of ambiguity, which stemmed from childhood experiences of rigid, loveless parents. The intolerance of ambiguity was reflected in a need to think about the world in rigid, hierarchical ways. Authoritarians sought hero figures to whom exaggerated respect could be shown; also they needed ‘inferior’ groups, on whom their own repressed insecurities and fears could be projected. The result was a brittle, suspicious personality, driven to despise and stereotype outgroups.
There is a fundamental problem with motivational explanations of prejudice, such as the theory of authoritarianism. They have difficulty explaining widespread prejudiced beliefs. For example, studies showed that racist beliefs among White South Africans could not be fully explained in terms of the authoritarian personality. Whereas most Whites in South Africa held prejudiced beliefs about blacks, only about 10 per cent could be said to have full authoritarian personalities. Racist, sexist or xenophobic prejudices are frequently not held for deep-seated motivational reasons, but because they form part of the ‘common sense’ which is generally accepted in racist, patriarchal or nationalist societies.
Many social psychologists have concentrated upon examining what Henri Tajfel (1981) called the ‘cognitive aspects of prejudice’. This research has suggested that a considerable amount of prejudiced thinking is not the result of ‘abnormal’ psychological processes, but is a by-product of much more normal patterns of thinking. Thus, psychologists have sought to show how people’s presuppositions affect the ways in which new information is interpreted. They have suggested that the act of categorizing stimuli leads to errors of simplification, resembling the errors of stereotyping. Moreover, experiments have demonstrated the extent to which people tend to search for evidence which confirms their presuppositions and to ignore contradictory evidence; also there are findings about tendencies to overgeneralize, or draw confident conclusions from a small number of cases (Hamilton and Trolier 1986). For example, a person, who views a particular group as lazy, will often unconsciously interpret any ambiguous behaviour on the part of a group member as conforming to the stereotype of laziness. Similarly, the behaviour of the hard-working group member may pass unnoticed, or be discounted as ‘exceptional’. Since majority groups in a society have the power to disseminate stereotypes about minority groups, stereotypes will often pass as common sense and believers will constantly be finding confirming evidence. They will be unaware of the extent to which their own cognitive biases, and the power of the majority group, have helped to create such apparent evidence.
There has been growing recognition that prejudiced thinking may not be as cognitively simple as earlier investigators had assumed. In particular, people can express prejudices without making unqualified statements about all Jews, all Blacks, or all women, etc. In fact, prejudiced persons often protect their stereotypes by admitting exceptions. For these reasons, a number of social psychologists have been paying close attention to the discourse which is used to formulate prejudiced views (van Dijk 1993; Wetherell and Potter 1993). Discourse studies have revealed the subtleties of prejudice. In contemporary western societies, there is a general acceptance that prejudice is wrong. Many speakers, wishing to avoid being seen as prejudiced, will not use blatant stereotyping to the same extent that, for example, the subjects in the Katz and Braly study did. In consequence, speakers will adopt complex discursive strategies to make negative evaluations of minority groups; they will disclaim prejudice, while simultaneously expressing prejudice (Billig 1991). Phrases such as ‘I’m not prejudiced but…’ are typically used to preface condemnatory remarks against outgroups. These phrases illustrate how the notion of prejudice itself has become very much part of the discourse of prejudice.
Michael Billig
Loughborough University of Technology
References
Adorno, T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. and Sanford, R.N. (1950) The Authoritarian Personality, New York.
Allport, G.W. (1958) The Mature of Prejudice, Garden City, NY
Billig, M. (1991) Ideology and Opinions, London.
Hamilton, D.L. and Trolier, T.K. (1986) ‘Stereotypes and stereotyping: an overview of the cognitive approach’, in J.F.Dovidio and S.L.Gaertner (eds) Prejudice, Racism and Discrimination, Orlando, FL.
Katz, D. and Braly, K.W. (1935) ‘Racial prejudice and racial stereotypes’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 30.
Tajfel, H. (1981) Human Groups and Social Categories, Cambridge, UK.
van Dijk, T.A. (1993) Elite Discourses and Racism, Newbury Park, CA.
Wetherell, M. and Potter, J. (1993) Mapping the Language of Racism, London.
Further reading
Dovidio, J.F. and Gaertner, S.L. (eds) (1986) Prejudice, Racism and Discrimination, Orlando, FL.
