Prejudice

Prejudice as a Product of Psychodynamic and Personality Factors

Although topics related to prejudice have been of longstanding interest to psychologists, research in prejudice came to the fore in social psychology in the buildup to and aftermath of World War II. The horrors of the Holocaust fueled a desire to understand the psychological basis of the Nazis' views about, and treatment of, the various social groups that they vilified and persecuted: Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, the disabled.

Much of this early theorizing was heavily influenced by Freudian psychoanalytic theory because of its prominence as a theoretical approach before the war. In the first instance, researchers argued that prejudice was a product of hostility and frustration that was displaced or projected onto members of particular groups that then functioned as scapegoats. According to this model, the behavior of the Nazis was explained by the humiliation that Germany had experienced after World War I and the economic turmoil of the early 1930s.

Among the most influential ideas of this form were those of John Dollard and colleagues, who argued that intergroup hostility and aggression could be understood as an outpouring of the built-up psychic energy produced by frustration. In line with Freudian theory, their model argued that an individual's expression of prejudice had an important cathartic function in releasing pent-up energy and restoring the individual to a state of equilibrium.

Refinements of this idea argued that prejudice reflected the operation of a general process whereby individuals feel frustration toward individuals and groups with power over them and displace those frustrations onto members of other groups that are visible, identifiable, and vulnerable. In this way, [Page 656]groups resolve conflict that they cannot deal with through the creation of conflict with a third party.

Other research in this tradition sought to explain why particular groups are selected as scapegoats. Projection theorists suggested that targets are chosen on the basis of characteristics that they are seen to possess and that prejudiced individuals also see in themselves but disapprove of or seek to draw attention away from. In these terms, prejudice is a defense mechanism and a form of denial: People are most prejudiced toward those who are similar to themselves and who remind them of their own limitations and failings.

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