Prejudice

Key Developments in the Social Scientific Study of Prejudice

Several major recent trends have been noted in the research literature. Perhaps the greatest change in the study of prejudice has been a shift in the usual conceptualization of prejudice. Early researchers focused their models on extreme cases of prejudice, with the goal of understanding the “bigot” or prejudiced individual. The underlying model, usually implicit but sometimes explicit, was that prejudice should be considered a pathology, the source of which can be understood and ferreted out. Contemporary researchers, in contrast, suggest that prejudice is a natural—if oftentimes deleterious—by-product of normal patterns of human thinking. Accordingly, the social cognition literature is replete with evidence that human memory systems rely on social categories largely because such organization of information is particularly efficient. For example, individuals often use categorical thinking because they are “cognitive misers.” Upon encountering an individual from a given category, we can “know” quite a bit about him or her simply by accessing the many rich associations (i.e., schemas) we already have with that social category, saving a great deal of time and effort. This approach largely reconceptualizes prejudice from the extraordinary and deviant to the ordinary and normal. A problem arises, however, when a schema about a group is biased, not fully representative (i.e., weighted toward negative information about the group), inaccurate (i.e., based on myths about the group rather than facts), or—perhaps most damagingly—when the perceiver's schema does not accurately depict a given individual.

The literature on prejudice has changed from an earlier viewpoint that prejudice is volitional. More recent research shows that attitudes toward outgroups can operate unconsciously or outside of a perceiver's awareness, a result that illuminates the robust finding that reductions in conscious or expressed prejudice do not necessarily coincide with reductions in discrimination. That is, although an individual may resist the expression of prejudice consciously, he or she may harbor unconscious prejudice and consequently behave in discriminatory ways. The scientific study of such “implicit prejudice” is yielding interesting insights into the relationship between implicit and explicit prejudice and the behaviors that each one uniquely predicts.

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