The Study ofPrejudice

Larry Stern, Professor of SociologyCollin County Community College

What is Prejudice?

The word prejudice is derived from the Latin noun praejudicium,which means a precedent, a judgment based on previous decisionsand experiences.

It then acquired the meaning of a judgment formed before dueexamination and consideration of the facts - a premature orhasty judgment.

Finally, the term acquired an emotional component - the favorableness or unfavorableness that accompanies the priorand unsupported judgment.

Thinking ill of others without sufficient warrant.

What is Prejudice?

Thinking ill of others . . . .

An aversion or hostile attitude toward a person who belongs to agroup, simply because he belongs to that group, and is thereforepresumed to have the objectionable qualities ascribed to the group.

Few if any human judgments are based on absolute certainty.The sufficient warranty of any judgment is always a matter ofprobabilities.

Prejudices are often based on overcategorizations - overblown generalizations.

. . . without sufficient warrant - lacks basis in fact.

What is Prejudice?

Not every overblown generalization is a prejudice. Some are simply misconceptions.

If a person is capable of correcting his misconceptions anderroneous judgments in the light of new evidence he is not prejudiced.

A prejudice, unlike a simple misconception, is actively resistantto all evidence that would challenge it.

Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversiblewhen exposed to new knowledge.

What is Prejudice?

Prejudice contains two essential ingredients:

1. there must be an attitude of favor or disfavor2. it must be related to an overgeneralized - and therefore erroneous - belief.

Beliefs, to some extent, can be rationally attacked and altered;Attitudes are ordinarily far more resilient and resistant to change.

Although both attitudes and beliefs are intertwined, it isnecessary to recognize the distinction between the two.

Stereotypes

Acting Out Prejudice

Antilocutions - ethnophaulisms - i.e., verbal slurs

Avoidance

Discrimination

Physical Attack

Extermination - lynchings, pogroms, massacres, genocide

The Separation of Attitudes from BehaviorPrejudiced?

No Yes

No

Discriminate?

YesThe Prejudiced Discriminator

The Prejudiced Non-Discriminator

The Unprejudiced Discriminator

The Unprejudiced Non-Discriminator

Antipathy between the races had long been explained by pointing to the natural differences between the races.

Whites would “naturally” dislike close contact with an inferior race.

Similarly, African-Americans would be uncomfortable with close contact with whites – with whom they could not possibly compete.

Once scientists rejected the notion of essential racial differences, the question immediately arose: If the races were not naturally different and unequal, why were African Americans, Native Americans, Chineseso despised in American society?

In the 1930s, a new explanation for racial antipathy emerged: what they began calling “race prejudice.”

Prejudice

Prejudice & Race RelationsThomas thought that prejudice was biological and instinctual in origin. In his view, prejudice, antipathy, and affection were found in groups which selectively noticed and remembered the characteristics of people close and familiar to them. Familiarity and similarity became associated with positive affection while hostility, antagonism, and dislike were connected to those who were unfamiliar and dissimilar. These feelings, then, became symbolically connected to physical appearance and social habits.

Nevertheless, Thomas argued that the prejudice process could be eliminated through contact and association, increased communication,similar systems of education, and equal access to opportunities.

W. I. Thomas1863 - 1947

Moreover, Thomas claimed that there were no basic differences in theminds, intelligence, or capabilities of different “races” and that therewas more variety within races then between them.

Prejudiceis a

Rational Responseto a

Changing World

Prejudice & Race Relations

Robert Park1864 - 1944

During the 1920s, the sociologist Robert Park developed a

race-relations cycle to explain the dynamics of racial change. Race prejudice was seen as one part of this larger

cycle of competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation.

The cycle followed a natural progression and was immune

to any attempts to modify it. As minority groups strove to

increase their status within society, the majority group

reacted against what they perceived as a threat to their higher

status. One aspect of this reaction was race prejudice, which

Park viewed as a relatively benign method to maintain the

“social distance” between different groups in society.

Prejudice & Race Relations

According to Park, race prejudice was a rational response to the social mobility of minority groups. It was a relatively benign way to keep the social distance between differentgroups in society.

“Prejudice is on the whole not an aggressive but a conservative force; a sort of spontaneous conservation which tends to preservethe social order and the social distances upon which that order rests.”

(“The Concept of Social Distance,” 1924)

Emory Bogardus

Emory Bogardus, like Park, saw race prejudice as a benignforce that served to preserve the present social order. His interest was in measuring and quantifying racial antipathy and created a “social distance” scale. Respondents are asked how willing they would be to interact with variousracial and ethnic groups in specified social situations withdifferent degrees of social contact.

The “Social Distance” Scale

People were asked whether they would be willing to admitmembers of other groups:

To close kinship by marriageTo my club as personal friendsTo my street as neighborsTo employment in my occupationTo citizenship in my countryAs only visitors to my countryOr would exclude from my country

Prejudice is AcquiredThrough

Conditioning

Goodwin Watson was one of the first psychologists to attempt to measure racial prejudice. He measured the extent to which respondents agreed with various stereotypes – i.e., “all Jews would cheat,” “all Roman Catholics are superstitious” – and how strongly they agreed with statements such as “Colored people should go to schools, hotels, theaters, etc., patronized exclusively by colored people, thus preventing some inter-racial contact.”

Watson assumed that race prejudice arose out of some real-world experience: specifically, from unfriendly encounters with membersof the race in question. He argued,

“It has been rather clearly demonstrated by the testimony of a number of individuals that they acquired some of the race-prejudice in a single instance, or two, and afterwards reacted to all members of the race in terms of the [nb] conditioning of the single experience.” (The Measurement of Fair-Mindedness, NY: Columbia University, 1925, p.23)

Goodwin Watson

Prejudice is Inherently Irrational

andPsychological

Daniel KatzRace prejudice as a fundamentally irrational attitude

In 1933 Daniel Katz, based at Princeton University, had subjects matcha list of adjectives to a list of ethnic minorities. After analyzing the

results, Katz argued that race prejudice was a matter of stereotypes rather than a reasoned response to any real attribute shared by the members of a group.

Prejudice was inherently irrational because no group’s members could possibly share all traits. People were prejudiced toward an entire group based merely on the cultural stereotypes of that group, rather than onany experiences of the prejudiced individual.

Prejudice, according to this view, was, in essence, a psychological phenomenon – basically, a problem with people’s internal mental states.

Frustration-aggression hypothesisScapegoat Theory

John Dollard1900 - 1980

1. Frustration generates aggression

2. Aggression becomes displaced upon relatively defenseless ‘goats”

3. This displaced hostility is rationalizedand justified by blaming, projecting, and stereotyping the “others.”

Prejudiced individuals believe that they are the victims.Rather than accepting guilt for some failure, responsibilityis transferred to some vulnerable group.

Prejudical IndividualsAre Aberrant

Personality Types

American Jewish CommitteeDepartment of Scientific Research, 1945Sponsored the five-volume Studies in Prejudice Series

Two of the volumes were “social studies”:

Paul Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany and

Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Gutterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (employing the method of content analysis to explain the success of demagogues such as Gerald L.K. Smith and Father Coughlin).

Three were “psychological”:

Theodore W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, Brunno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz, Dynamics of Prejudice and Nathan Ackerman and Marie Jahoda, Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder: A Psychoanalytical Interpretation.

While it focused on anti-Semitism, the research indicated that people whowere prejudiced against one ethnic, racial, or religious group tended to be prejudiced against others.

The Authoritarian Personality, 1950Theodore Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, & R. Nevitt Sanford

Theodore Adorno

Else Frenkel-Brunswik

Individuals with high levels of prejudice possessed adistinctive cluster of personality traits. They were foundto be

rigidly conventional, submissive, uncritical of and deferential toward authority, preoccupied with power and toughness, sexually inhibited, intolerant of ambiguity andintolerant of people who are members of out groups.

Rational arguments cannot be expected to have deep orlong-lasting effects because prejudice is essentiallyirrational and rigid.

Prejudice is Learnedand is

Psychologically Damaging

Psychological HarmThe Doll Tests

Kenneth Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark

The Doll Tests

Overall, 253 African American children - 134 in segregated southern schools and119 in integrated northern schools - werepresented with two black dolls and two white dolls that were otherwise identical.

Using a “projective” test, the Clarks asked thechildren a series of eight questions concerningthe dolls.

The first four questions were designed to reveal racial preferences -“Give me the doll that you like best” of “Give me the nice doll.”

The next three were designed to discover racial identification - “Give Me the doll that looks like a [white, colored, Negro] child”

The final question revealed self-identification - “Give me the doll that looks like you”

Psychological HarmThe Doll Tests

The majority of these Negro children prefer the white doll and reject the colored doll.

Two-thirds of the children consistently wanted to play with the white doll and claimed that it was the “nice” doll.

Three-quarters of the children who identified a doll thatwould “act bad” chose the brown doll.

During and after World war II Jewish agencies founded in-house research departments, formedpartnerships with social scientists in universities, and commissioned major studies.

The American Jewish Committee (AJC)The Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith (ADL)

American Jewish Congress (AJCongress)

These agencies collaborated closely with the NAACP, ACLU, National Council of Churches, National Catholic Welfare Conference, Catholic Interracial Councils, National Conference of Christians and Jews, the anti-communist unionsof the Congress of Industrial organizations (CIO), and a host of other civic, professional, and educational groups.

Strategies tended to fall into one of two general categories: (1) those aimed at modifying prejudiced attitudes and (2) those designed to eliminate discriminatory practices.

The American Jewish Committee (AJC)The Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith (ADL)

American Jewish Congress (AJCongress)

Beginning in the late 1930s all three built a professional staff trained in fields such as social work, social science, journalism, advertising, public relations, and the law.

All three adopted the theory of the “unitary characterof prejudice;” all forms of bigotry are inseparable parts of the same phenomenon. The fortunes of all American minority groups were interrelated.

Cyrus Adler1863-1940

Jacob H. Schiff1847-1920 Oscar S. Straus

Mayer Sulzberger1843-

The American Jewish Committee, the oldest existing Jewish defense agency in the U.S., was established in 1906 by a group of wealthy acculturated members of the German Jewish elite.

American Jewish Committee

Sigmund Livingston -ADL

In 1913 the B’nai B’rith founded its Anti-Defamation League, which was dedicated exclusively to the battle against domestic anti-Semitism.

Under the leadership of Sigmund Livingston, ADL members conceived of anti-Semitism largely as a problem of public relations.

Anti-Defamation League

AJC & ADL

In the same way that they had envisioned anti-Semitism as an outgrowth of unfamiliarity with Jews and Judaism, leaders of the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League initially understood prejudice as the product of ignorance.

According to this view, prejudiced individuals accepted derogatory stereotypes of Jews and other minorities because they lacked reliable information about, or first-hand experience with, members of those groups.

Thus, they concluded that they could help to eliminate prejudice by teaching members of the “majority” about the various racial, ethnic, and religious groups in the U.S.

AJC & ADL

They spread their anti-prejudice message through

radio film television, pamphlets posters billboards, comic books cartoons print advertising

and other media of mass communication.

The main objectives of this propaganda crusade were to combat negative stereotypes of minority groups, to demonstrate the harmful consequences of prejudice, and to emphasize the importance of intergroup harmony to the advancement of American interests at home and abroad.

AJC & ADL

Lest We Forget, comprised of fifteen-minute episodes celebrating the contributions made by members of minority groups, aired on radiostations. By 1950 it aired on approximately one thousand stations with an audience in the tens of millions.

RADIO

EDUCATION

With the aid of the AJC and ADL the Bureau of Intercultural Education worked with public school teachers to ensure that children were taught to respect cultural differences.

Curricular materials, including teaching plans, were developed and distributed. Summer workshops, seminars and institutes were sponsored.

AJC & ADLTELEVISION CARTOONS

The AJC produced and provided cartoons free of charge to all television stations in the U.S. for broadcast.

Snigglegrass, produced in cooperation with the Advertising Counciland shown on nearly every television station in the country during 1950, conveyed the message that America’s way of life is rooted inthe contributions of its immigrants.

Here’s Looking At You, which stressed the uniqueness of each human being and the importance of respecting differences, was a collaborative effort of the AJC and the National Conference of Christians and Jews.

Baseball explained that “only when people of all races and religionsteam up can the USA roll up a winning score.”

Sweet ‘n Sour compared positive intergroup relations toharmonious music.

Shortly after World War II a number ofcommercial motion pictures dealing with prejudice appeared. The determination by Hollywood filmmakers to address these issues added fuel to the debate among Jewish intergroup relations workers and their advisors over the impact of the mass media on prejudice.

The Movie Industry

In the Oscar winning film Gentleman’s Agreementa reporter, played by Gregory Peck, pretends tobe Jewish in order to cover a story on anti-Semitism, and personally discovers the true depths of bigotry and hatred.

Crossfire, RKO Studios,1947

One of the first major Hollywood films to explore the subject of American anti-Semitism. In the film the Jewish victim is murdered by a demobilized soldier whose only motive is his acute anti-Semitism. This character was described as “the kind of person who fell victim to the Hitlers in the modern world and became an instrument in bringing about the recent holocaust.

In the course of Investigating the murder thepolice detective - played by Robert Young - givesvoice to the film’s anti-prejudice moral andemphasizes the connection between anti-Semitismand other forms of intolerance, includinganti-Catholicism and nativism.

Crossfire, RKO Studios,1947

One month before the film’s premiere a group ofnearly forty social scientists met for a preview andcritical discussion of the film

Most expressed serious doubts as to whether the film could actually diminish anti-Semitism; a single-shot could not be reasonably assumed to change such deeply seated attitudes.

Some were concerned that the film might have unintended negative effects - that it would “boomerang.”

The anti-Semitic character might be seen by some as a “hero-victim,” while the Jewish murder victim, who appeared as a civilian and a “wise guy” with an “obviously Gentile” girlfriend, might be found objectionable.

Crossfire, RKO Studios,1947

The chief concern was that well-intentioned films,thrown hastily together by Hollywood filmmakers without the benefit of scientific research, could easilycatalyze the powerful anti-Semitism that was latenteverywhere in the country.

Supporting these criticisms was new research thatquestioned the effectiveness of mass mediatedprograms aimed at changing attitudes.

American Jewish CommitteeDepartment of Scientific Research, 1945

By the late 1940s researchers began to seriously question the effectivenessof anti-prejudice messages to change people’s attitudes.

Marie Jahoda

Paul Lazarsfeld

According to a number of studies conducted in collaboration with Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research,

1. Anti-prejudice messages reached a self-selectedaudience that tended to be more educated andtolerant than average (“preaching to the choir”)

2. Bigots, if exposed to the messages, generally evaded them through the process of selective perception or simply misconstrued the point of the message.

3. Anti-prejudice messages often have a “boomerang” effect on intolerant individuals.

The Effects ofMass

Communication

WHO says

WHAT

to WHOM

in what WAY

through which CHANNEL

with what EFFECT?

Attributes of the “source,” ie. credibility

The content of the message: levels of meaning;Differential & selective perception

The target audience

Formal; mass mediaInformal; interpersonal

Rhetorical Strategy: Logic, Emotion

Reinforcement; Conversion“The Popeye Effect”

The Communication Process

The “Popeye Effect”

Messages “sent” are not necessarily the same as messages “received.”

WHY???

Messages often contain multiple levels of information and meaning.

Through the operation of “selective perception,” the particular

aspect of the message one “plugs into” or is most attentive to -

and the interpretation one gives to a message, often depends

upon the social background - the social status - of the receiver.

Messages are often misperceived or have a “boomerang effect”because the source of the information is not believed to be credible.

Prejudice andDiscrimination are

Situational and Dependent on Groups

Louis Brandeis

The American Jewish Congress was initially convened at the end of 1918. Whereas the AJC was conservative and elitist, AJCongress advocates – spearheaded by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and Zionist leader Louis D. Brandeis – called for an inclusive, democratically elected body to represent all American Jewry.

The original Congress was dissolved in 1920, then re-established under the leadership of Wise.

Rabbi Stephen S. Wise

The American Jewish Congress

Unlike the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) who focused on attitude change as the means to reduce prejudice and then discrimination, the AJCongress believed that attacking discrimination through legal means was the key to

reducing prejudice.

American Jewish CongressCommission on Community Interrelations

Kurt Lewin

The AJCongress had earmarked $1 million for the creation of a research center for the study of intergroup relations. In 1945 AJCongress president Rabbi Stephen Wise announced that the AJCongress would fund the CCI under the direction of Kurt Lewin for five years and that its purpose was to investigate scientifically the causes and cures of anti-Semitism and race prejudice.

Lewin and his staff of social scientists devised two lines of research to investigate prejudice and discrimination:

1. research conducted on the separation of attitudes from behavior and

2. research on the effects of interracial contact.

The Separation of Attitudes from Behavior

CCI researchers built on the work of Richard T. Lapiere who, in the 1930s, traveled through the U.S. with a Chinese couple, staying in hotels and eating in restaurants. Except in one hotel, they were served without incident. Six months after returning, Lapiere sent a questionnaire to these establishments asking if they served members of the Chinese race. Over 90 percent of those responding indicated that they would not, despite the fact that they had done so six months earlier.

Bernard Kutner successfully duplicated Lapiere’s research when he sent two white women into New York restaurants. They were later joined by an African American woman, who was seated without incident. When Kutner inquired as to the policies of the restaurants

he was informed that they did not serve African Americans.

The Separation of Attitudes from BehaviorPrejudice

No Yes

No

Discriminate

Yes

The Prejudiced Discriminator

The Prejudiced Non-Discriminator

The Unprejudiced Discriminator

The Unprejudiced Non-Discriminator

Supports discriminatory practices when it is the easier or more profitable course;The liberal who hesitates to speak up against discrimination for fear he mightlose esteem or be otherwise penalized by his prejudiced associates and/or friends.

The person of prejudice who does not actively discriminate in practice due tothe fear of sanctions.The most effective tactic is the institutionof legal controls administered with effectiveness

He is as much a conformist as is theunprejudiced non-discriminator. He is merely conforming to a differentcultural and institutional pattern that is centered, not on the creed, but on a doctrine of essential inequality ofstatus ascribed to those of diverse ethnic and racial origins. The local mores, the local institutions, and the local power structure support hisprivate attitudes and practices.

Interracial Contact

CCI social scientists envisioned a vicious circle of discrimination and prejudice: because discrimination seemed to teach people that minority groups were inferior, it led to prejudicial attitudes; these attitudes, in turn, led to the erection of more discriminatory barriers preventing minorities from fully entering society. CCI saw interracial contact as the point at which the cycle could be broken.

What CCI and other researchers on interracial contact attempted to discover were the specific conditions under which interracial contact would decrease prejudice.

The abolition of segregation was a necessary rather than a sufficient step toward bettering race relations.

Social scientists were arguing NOT that all that was required to reduce prejudice was to eliminate legal segregation but, rather, that nothing could be done to reduce prejudice until legal segregation was eliminated.

Interracial Contact the “contact hypothesis”

CCI researchers concentrated on interracial public housing and employment. In one of the first studies of interracial housing two CCI staffers – Morton Deutsch and Mary Evans Collins – conducted interviews with families living in two desegregated and two segregated housing projects. The researchers found that white prejudice was much higher in the segregated projects. They posited that the contact possible in integrated neighborhoods gave individuals the opportunity to realize that their prejudices had no basis in reality.

A parallel set of studies explored the effects of interracial workplaces. John Harding and Russell Hogrefe polled the white workers on a newly integrated sales floor and found that while basic attitudes of whitestoward their black co-workers may not have changed significantly, they could nonetheless work peacefully side by side.

Gordan Allport1897-1967

The Nature of PrejudiceThe Contact Hypothesis

“Prejudice (unless deeply rooted in the character of theindividual) may be reduced by equal status contact between majority and minority groups in the pursuit ofcommon goals. The effect is greatly enhanced if thiscontact is sanctioned by institutional supports (i.e., bylaw, custom or local atmosphere), and provided it isof a sort that leads to the perception of common interests and common humanity between members of the two groups.”

Equal-status in the situation

Common goals

Supported by local authority and milieu

Common interests - no inter-group competition

Beliefs &

Behavior

Robert K. Merton1910 - 2003

The Self-fulfilling Prophecy

“In the beginning, a false definition of a

situation that is socially shared and leads

to new behavior that makes the initially

false definition come true.”

Socially shared false definition of the situation [Subjective]

Socially Patterned Behaviors Consequences[Objective]

Robert K. Merton1910 - 2003

The Self-fulfilling Prophecy

“As a result of their failure to comprehend the

operation of the self-fulfilling prophecy, many

Americans of good will retain enduring ethnic

and racial prejudices.”

False definition: “Negroes” are strikebreakersand no friend of unionists.

Behavior: As “traitors” to the working-class they areexcluded from unions.

Consequence: Out of work after World War I and kept outof unions, Negroes accept jobs as “scabs.”

Robert K. Merton1910 - 2003

The Self-fulfilling Prophecy

“In the beginning, a false definition of a

situation that is socially shared and leads

to new behavior that makes the initially

false definition come true.”

False definition: People of African-Americandescent are intellectually inferior.

Behavior: withhold/reduce funding for inner-city schoolsand compensatory education programs.

Consequence: Test scores of African-American studentsare lower.

Pluralistic Ignorance

Floyd Allport1890 - 1978

Pluralistic ignorance, a concept first coined by Floyd Allport (1924, 1933), refers to the pattern in which individual members of a group assume that they are virtually alone in holding the social attitudes and expectationsthey do, all unknowing that others privately share them.