Prejudice and stereotyping

SIGNIFICANCE: Prejudice consists of negative attitudes toward certain groups and members of groups based on classifications such as gender, race, and religion. Stereotyping is rigidly believing that individuals have certain traits simply because they belong to a particular group. Discrimination, often fueled by prejudice and stereotypical thinking, is behavior that leads to the denial of basic rights and opportunities.

Prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination are three closely related but distinct phenomena. Prejudice is literally a “prejudgment”—a belief about something or someone that is based on assumptions rather than on actual experiences. Strictly speaking, a prejudice may be either for or against something, but in common usage it refers to a dislike of all the members of a particular group, such as a racial, ethnic, religious, gender, or age group. Sociologist Gordon Allport defined prejudice as “an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization.” A crucial point is that a prejudice is an attitude, not a behavior.

A stereotype might simply be defined as one of the “inflexible generalizations” to which Allport referred. Stereotyping is the attributing of certain characteristics to people based on their membership in a group. Stereotypes are oversimplified and rigid mental images; they may contain a “kernel of truth,” but that kernel is overwhelmed by the false generalization that has grown around it. One of the interesting things about stereotypes is that people tend to continue to believe them even when they are presented with evidence that refutes them. People often discount their own observations, shrugging them off as “exceptions to the rule.” Stereotypes therefore can be extremely persistent.

Prejudice and Discrimination

Discrimination, in contrast to prejudice, refers to behavior: the denial of basic rights and/or opportunities to members of certain groups based on such surface variables as race, age, gender, religion, or disability (Merton's paradigm). An interesting finding of a number of studies of prejudice and discrimination—and one that surprised the researchers who first noted it—has been that prejudicial attitudes do not necessarily result in discriminatory behavior. Many people who state their dislike of a particular ethnic group, for example, in practice treat them with equality and civility. Moreover, discrimination can have causes other than prejudice; institutional discrimination (direct institutionalized discrimination) may be unwittingly practiced by people working for institutions who are unaware that their policies and actions are discriminatory. Nevertheless, prejudice and the stereotyping that helps reinforce it can lead to discriminatory behavior as well as to the commission of hate crimes and other harmful, violent, and even fatal acts.

Prejudice and stereotyping have led to the sociological phenomena of exclusion and, in some cases, elimination of certain groups from “mainstream” society. In the United States, for example, a combination of prejudice and economic greed led to the near extinction of the American Indian population, the previous mainstream culture of the Americas, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Other groups, such as women, African Americans, Latino/Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, European immigrants, Jews, and Muslims have also felt the brunt of prejudice at various times in the history of the United States. The effects of prejudice are destructive both to the individuals who suffer violence or psychological harm as a result of discrimination and to the integrity of society as a whole.

Causes of Prejudice

A number of sociological theories have speculated about the causes of prejudice. Socialization—the process of teaching people (particularly as children) the knowledge and attitudes of a group or society—has been implicated as a cause of prejudice. Adults in society pass on their prejudicial beliefs to impressionable children. Thus, prejudicial attitudes are learned. Another theory on the cause of prejudice involves the principle of relative deprivation; relative deprivation is the gap between people’s expectations and their actual condition or situation. When people see themselves as relatively deprived, they experience frustration and may look for scapegoats (frustration-aggression theory) on which to blame their situation (a situation that is usually a result of a number of interrelated, complex causes). Historically, marginalized groups such as women or ethnic minorities have been “scapegoated,” or blamed for someone else’s economic or social misfortunes. A number of sociologists have also observed that competition increases prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination. Muzafer Sherif, a sociologist, conducted studies showing how boys at a boys’ camp could learn prejudice very quickly. The boys became biased and hostile when they were divided into groups and intergroup competition was introduced into their activities.

Social conformity is another concept that has been used to explain the cause of prejudice. Social norms— the expectations for behavior in a culture—define what kinds of behaviors or attitudes are acceptable. Thomas F. Pettigrew demonstrated this idea in the 1950s when he found that people from the South became less prejudiced toward African Americans when they were in the Army. The Army had norms that accepted Black service members, so prejudice and discrimination were reduced in that social context. Robert A. Baron, a social psychologist, has written about theories that hypothesize conditions in which prejudice may occur. Baron (as well as many others) believes that periods of economic hardship and scarce resources can contribute to the occurrence and intensity of various types of prejudice. In the field of social psychology, this premise forms a part of what is known as “realistic conflict theory.”

A growing body of research illustrates that class status has a profound effect on both influencing and buffering prejudicial beliefs and expectations. The interdisciplinary text Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology (1992), by Margaret Andersen and Patricia H. Collins, contains articles that illustrate the intricate interplay of race, class, and gender in human experience. The text notes, for example, that racial and ethnic bias has been found to exist even among mental health professionals, a group of professionals who should be objective and neutral in their work.

There is no one single cause for the perpetuation of prejudice. Rather, sociologists believe that prejudice and stereotyping are socially determined and that multiple methods of transmission are involved.

Context

Social psychologist Gordon Allport and the book he wrote, The Nature of Prejudice, is considered a classic book on prejudice. It elaborates Allport’s approach to prejudice, an approach consistent with contemporary perspectives because of the emphasis on cognitive factors such as categorization and cognitive bias. According to Allport, there are two forms of prejudice, personal prejudice and group prejudice. Allport’s model involves in-group and out-group distinctions. In 1979, Pettigrew proposed the “ultimate attribution error,” an extension of Allport’s theory. Pettigrew suggests that people tend to look favorably on the actions of people in their in-group (those whom they perceive to be like them) and attribute negative motives to the same actions by out-group members. If an in-group member observes an out-group member committing a negative act, the in-group member is likely to attribute the action to a concrete factor, such as genetic makeup. If, on the other hand, an in-group member observes an out-group member doing something positive, they may attribute it to luck, the individual’s being an exception to the rule, the particular situational context in which the behavior occurred, or a high level of individual motivation and effort.

Bibliography

Allport, Gordon W. The Nature of Prejudice. 25th Anniversary ed., Addison-Wesley, 1980.

Bar-Tal, Daniel, et al. Stereotyping and Prejudice: Changing Conceptions. Springer, 1989.

Hill, Robert Bernard. Merton's Role Types and Paradigm of Deviance. Arno Press, 1980.

McLeod, Saul, and Olivia Guy-Evans. "Prejudice vs. Discrimination in Psychology." Simply Psychology, 30 Sept. 2023, www.simplypsychology.org/prejudice.html. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.

Stuck, Mary Frances. Issues in Diversity: Voices of the Silenced. Copley, 1990.

Thomas, Gail E. US Race Relations in the 1980s and 1990s: Challenges and Alternatives. Hemisphere, 1990.