Prejudice Theory: Realistic Conflict Theory

Psychological, social, and cultural theories of the development of prejudice emerged in the early twentieth century with a focus on individual psychopathology. Arguing that only a few, disturbed individuals could be guilty of war crimes, social scientists were reluctant to consider the wider significance of prejudice. By the mid-1950s, scholars recognized the pervasiveness of prejudice and began to look at intergroup dynamics in terms of attitude formation and discrimination. Realistic conflict theory focused on competition between groups over actual or perceived scarce resources, but more contemporary theorists believe that prejudice is more systemic and does not require actual competition.

Keywords Cognitive; Ethnicity; Genocide; Institutional Discrimination; Race; Racism; Scapegoating; Stereotypes

Race & Ethnicity > Prejudice Theory: Realistic Conflict Theory

Overview

Conflict between groups has been studied for centuries, especially in terms of war, economics, and governmental clashes. However, there was very little sociological or psychological analysis concerning prejudice and conflict between different racial and ethnic groups until the horrors of World War II affected the world. In light of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust, social scholars began to try and understand what would make one group devalue the humanity of another group of individuals and commit such heinous acts of torture and murder. These horrible acts prompted a new subdiscipline in sociology that focuses on theories of prejudice, discrimination, and stigma as they relate to intergroup conflict.

Prejudice is defined by Weinberg as the "systematic and durable assessments of groups, or members of those groups, in unfavorable terms" (2006, p. 470). In fact, prejudice, or prejudgments, can be positive or negative, but because unfavorable stereotypes can lead to hostility and discrimination against another group, they tend to hold the greatest interest for scholars. Prejudices are attitudes and beliefs, either conscious or unconscious, and interventions focus on attitudinal change as the key to mitigating hostility between groups and their members. Interwoven with the concept of prejudice are those of discrimination and stigma. Discrimination is "prejudicial or injurious behavior" that occurs because of hostile attitudes towards others (Weinberg, 2006, p. 470). Stigma, on the other hand, entails the "experiences and behaviors of those who are victimized" by prejudice and discrimination (Weinberg, 2006, p. 470). Scholars focusing on discrimination look at the institutional and structural aspects of society which reinforce its prejudicial attitudes, while those who study stigma look at the individual's experience of prejudice and discrimination. One can see that the focal point of inquiry provides differing perspectives on the characteristics and causes of prejudice and discrimination, so this article will focus on theories of prejudice.

One early look at the role of prejudice in intergroup dynamics was set forth by Durkheim in his 1895 study of crime entitled The Rules of Sociological Method. Durkheim argued that there was a "certain social functionality in explicitly designating and discriminating against groups other than one's own" (Weinberg, 2006, p. 470). Durkheim then went on to consider group solidarity as it related to crime, but ultimately he was more interested in group social cohesion than he was in inter-group conflict. It was not until 1939, and John Dollard's book Frustration and Aggression that serious analysis commenced on prejudice theory. Weinberg and others have argued that the impetus for the development of prejudice theories was the Nazi German atrocities of the Holocaust. But since World War II did not commence until 1939, it may be the case that it was the Armenian genocide prior to World War II that served as Dollard's focus. Subsequent scholars, of course, were influenced by the death of over 17 million individuals in the Holocaust.

Dollard observed the harsh treatment of Germany and Eastern European countries by the Allies after World War I, and argued that "an agent frustrated at the hands of a more powerful actor will sublimate the sentiments of aggression created by the frustration by focusing them on less powerful scapegoats" (Weinberg, 2006, p. 470). All of the theories which suggest that frustration leads to prejudice can be categorized as scapegoat theories of prejudice. Scapegoating is an important tool of propaganda. Essentially, one group blames the other for any and all calamities or injustices that have occurred and seeks retribution for those harms, even if the targeted group is not actually at fault.

While sociologists were examining group dynamics, Freudian psychoanalytic theories were also being set forth which focused on the childhood development of personality traits. Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, for example, argued that an "authoritarian personality" was the cause of the development of prejudicial feelings. In early childhood, a "highly regimented, strictly disciplined household" caused children to learn propensities toward "rigid, inflexible, and prejudicial attitudes towards certain minority groups and their members" (Weinberg, 2006, p. 470). This, in turn, created a person who was "highly submissive to the dictates of established authority figures and intolerant of people(s) who do not conform to those dictates" (Weinberg, 2006, p 471). Through this analysis, Adorno explained both how a person can act upon inhumane orders from authority figures and this process can reinforce intolerance towards specific minority individuals and groups through the development of a personality trait. Simply stated, "extreme prejudice is a personality trait linked to personas who conform rigidly to cultural norms and values" (Macionis, 2007, p. 359). According to Weinberg, most of the theoretical analysis of prejudice up to this point focused on the psychopathology of a few deviant individuals who were able to influence others to commit terrible acts of genocide (2006). Thus, feelings of prejudice were presented as rare and extreme until Allport argued it was more commonplace and universal in 1954.

In The Nature of Prejudice, Gordon Allport argued that a "routine and pervasive learning process" was the cause of prejudicial feelings (1954; Wienberg, 2006, p. 471). Allport believed that "categorical thinking," or stereotypical thinking as it is now called, was a mechanism by which the mind processed complex sensory and cognitive materials in a simple and systematized manner. Prejudice was based upon "faulty and inflexible generalizations," according to Allport, but it was the mind's way of organizing information efficiently (Weinberg, 2006, p. 471). Allport believed that individual prejudices were learned from cultural, social, economic, and psychodynamic influences, but that correcting the harm done by prejudice and discrimination should focus on restructuring the individual's learning process. Little attention was paid to the overall failings of a given social structure.

A similar phenomenon occurred in other cultural theories of prejudice set forth in the first half of the twentieth century. Simmel, Park, and Bogardus, for example, all believed that prejudice was learned from one's culture, but to assess this view, they looked at individual experiences in relation to racial attitudes. Simmel introduced the concept of "social distance" to understand both the geometric relationships between people of different races and their metaphorical distances. Focusing on community and the processes of conflict, reciprocity, and interaction, Simmel tried to understand the actual interactive processes between individuals of differing racial backgrounds. Following Simmel's framework, Bogardus developed the Borgardus Social Distance Scale, which remains the most widely used measure of interpersonal psychological interactions in sociology today (Ethington, 1997). In addition to actual interpersonal distance, the Bogardus Scale looks at psychological distance as seen from the actor's point of view and the subjective distances as evidenced by the actor's motivations and temperament. In his essay "Understanding Conflict," Rummell elucidated four types of distances (material, psychological, social, and cultural) and eleven subtypes, although he acknowledges significant overlap for each conceptually (2008). Throughout these methods of analysis, however, the focus remains on the individual actor's experience and attitudes. It was not until Sherif introduced realistic conflict theory that a group-level or macrostructural view of group prejudice began to emerge.

Viewpoints

Realistic conflict theory is a social psychological analysis of prejudice, discrimination, and stereotyping. It is based upon the premise that conflict over materials goods and resources leads to ethnocentrism and hostility towards other groups competing for those same resources. In 1954, Muzafer Sherif and Carolyn Sherif created an experiment to test realistic conflict theory. Known as the "Robbers Cave Experiment," Sherif posed as a camp janitor and had two busloads of eleven-year-old boys brought to different remote campsites; each group was unaware of the other. Within about three days, both groups had developed a hierarchical internal group structure, and individuals showed a strong loyalty to their specific ingroups. During the "Friction Phase" of the experiment, Sherif introduced the two groups to each other and engaged them in competition, especially athletic events. In many ways, the experiment worked too well, as the groups became so hostile to each other that Sherif concluded that the experiment needed to end for the safety of his subjects. Rather than leave the boys with hostile feelings, however, the Sherifs engaged them in joint tasks and created "false" emergencies that required the two groups to work together in order for them to succeed. One such task, for example, was to tell the youth that the camp truck had broken down on the road and needed to be towed back to camp, requiring the labor of all camp participants. By giving the twenty-two boys a superordinate task to accomplish jointly, Sherif's experiment also became famous for providing one mechanism to reduce intergroup conflict through joint efforts and shared goals.

Sherif concluded from the study that newly constituted groups will adopt a hierarchical internal structure and that members will show heightened loyalty to their ingroups. When competition is introduced, those groups will show heightened hostility to the each other, develop stereotypes about the other group, and overvalue the performance of the ingroup relative to the outgroup. For Sherif, the key to eliciting these feelings and behavior in each group was competition over actual or perceived scarce resources.

In his group position model, Blumer argued that prejudice is based upon perceptions and its development does not require the impetus of competition for tangible scarce resources. Blumer believed that four elements were needed for one group to become prejudiced against another:

a feeling of superiority;

a belief that the outgroup is intrinsically different and alien;

a sense of proprietary claim to certain privileges and resources; and

a sense of threat from members of the subordinate group upon the dominant group's prerogatives

(Weinberg, 2006, p. 471).

Since all individuals have a sense of the "color line," as Blumer called it, or a sense of their position relative to other racial groups, Blumer believed that it would be very difficult for the civil rights movement to succeed. Not only would there have to be profound efforts to change the public layers of the color line, but until that was accomplished, it would be hard to change the private feelings of exclusivity and entitlement. Blumer's work launched discussions about both the emotional qualities of prejudice and their instrumental functions in intergroup conflicts.

Also, in contrast to realistic conflict theory, Henri Tajfel argued in his social identity theory that competition is not necessary for prejudice to occur. Tajfel believed that individuals desire a "psychological distinctiveness" in which our identity is differentiated from and positively compared to other groups. According to him, the psychological manner in which one's social identity is formed has four elements and occurs in the following manner:

• First, the individual puts himself or herself and everyone else he or she encounters into categories and labels those categories.
• Second, the individual identifies and associates with certain groups in order to bolster self-esteem.
• Third, the individual engages in comparisons between groups with a favorable bias towards their own group.
• Fourth, the "psychological distinctiveness" emerges, making the ingroup the most desirable for membership at the expense of the outgroup.

Tajfel also believed that individuals gain emotional satisfaction and tangible benefits from self-identifying with their ingroup at the expense of an outgroup. In fact, in his studies, Tajfel demonstrated that individuals would work hard to outdo the outgroup even if there was no benefit to them personally for their own group to succeed. He argued, then, that our self-esteem is generated from the group with which we identify, and that we overvalue our group in order to enhance our group's status and, thereby, our own status. Rather than being motivated by a real or potential threat from the outgroup, individuals are compelled by a "sense of entitlement felt by in-group members to dominance" (Weinberg, 2006, p. 472). This model is also the "social dominance model" of prejudice.

Goffman, in his major work, Stigma, also focused on the process by which an individual is "disqualified from full social acceptance" (1963, p. i). According to Goffman, as socialized individuals we constantly categorize people in terms of attributes we expect them to exhibit. This "social identity" allows us to anticipate human interactions without excessive conscious thought and nervous confusion, since we expect and demand very specific behaviors in terms of an individual's social identity. An internal conflict arises, however, when the outgroup individual expresses incongruous attributes from those that we anticipate and thus frustrates our expectations and demands. Quite often, our response to these unanticipated attributes is to further categorize the individual as less desirable than those individuals who conform to our social identity stereotype. The individual "is thus reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one" (Goffman, 1963, p. 2-3).

Goffman grouped these negative characteristics into three types:

• The various physical abnormalities.
• The character disorders such as dishonesty, weakness, or evilness, which are perceived to be expressed through behavior such as prostitution, homosexuality, drug addiction, alcoholism, unemployment, welfare dependency, and political radicalism.
• The group stigmas based upon race, color, religion, ethnicity, and gender, which are usually transmitted through familial lineages and affect all members of the family group.

Because of these perceived negative characteristics, we "tend to impute a wide range of imperfections on the basis of the original one" (Goffman, 1963, p. 4-5). If an ethnic or racial group does not speak English in the same way as the ingroup, for example, intellectual inferiority, laziness, carelessness, and divisiveness can be attributed to the group and compound the ingroup's impression of them. Our beliefs about the original characteristic, plus the imputed additional negative images, allows us to self-righteously exclude and discriminate against stigmatized people, thus further reducing their chances of full participation in normative social dynamics. Having been pushed to the negative fringes, individuals suffer from the lack of access to more traditionally available resources, and they may adopt the negative societal context into which they are thrust. A young, African American male from the inner city, for example, may engage in crime because it is expected of him and he has few other alternatives. Racial profiling by the police would enforce this disesteemed situation. Thus, the cultural stereotype takes on a larger power that reinforces the discriminatory process.

Modern theorists interested in personality theories of prejudice, like Stephen and Rosenfield, believe that experiences of interracial or interethnic contact are more likely to influence feelings of prejudice than early childhood psychodynamics related to parenting processes (1978). The more positive the interactions between racial and ethnic groups the less likely the individual is to exhibit negative prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behaviors.

Two other similar models of prejudice theory deserve mention: the paternalism model and the ideological control model. Both of these models build on the sense of intergroup superiority noted above, but they also focus on the process by which the ingroup devalues the abilities and nature of the outgroup, much like the discussion concerning Goffman's theory. These models explain racism and classism by arguing that the ingroup sees outgroup members as less intelligent, less capable, and less compelled to work for a living, and that it is the ingroup's obligation to "look after" the outgroup members. These models do not focus on conflict, and they add the emotional dimensions of caretaking and warmth to the paternalistic mix concerning prejudicial affect.

Some scholars like to focus on the cognitive or information processing details of prejudice formation. In terms of the development of stereotypes, the "illusory correlations" factor is often cited. In illusory correlations, as Hamilton and Gifford have argued, make individuals prone reading the correlations that they expect into sets of data, even when the actual correlation is much smaller than the expected one or nonexistent (1979). This is because individuals tend to remember unusual events and people much more readily than they do everyday events and people, leading them to develop of generalizations and stereotypes that are based on rare rather than common events. Individuals in a suburb, for example, having seen stories about African American criminals in the news, may see an African American male on the street and assume that he is pursuing some criminal purpose. With our culture's intense mass media, people's stereotypes are influenced by nondirect experiences more than ever before.

Two other cognitive processes maintain the existence of stereotypes: encoding bias and recall bias. In encoding bias, the individual takes in objective sensory data, like sights and sounds from an outgroup member. The ingroup member then begins the complex mental process of converting that objective data into a subjectively meaningful experience. Because of prior experiences and developed stereotypes, though, the ingroup member fails to take in this new, unique experience and thus maintains his or her prejudices. The same phenomena occurs in recall bias, or reporting bias, which is most often related to survey studies. In this case, the individual maintains a systemic bias to such an extent that, when asked a question, they are not only influenced by the possible correct answer but also by their memory and stereotypical thinking. Thus, regardless of the "truth" of a given situation, the answer is colored by previous, deeply believed experiences, feelings, and beliefs. Obviously, given the profound influence of these affective and experiential opinions, it is difficult to change people's minds merely by pointing out the flaws in their thinking.

The very process of socialization instills in each of us a desire to be normal, to belong. This power to define normalcy is the basis of the success of stigmatization, since all persons go through the cultural process. In his contact hypothesis, Stephen argued that sustained, repeated, frequent, and non-stereotypical interactions between members of the ingroup and outgroup will reduce prejudice and discrimination (1978). As more and more members of the ingroup encounter the nonstereotypical members of the outgroup, the whole normative belief system about the entire class of people is challenged.

In all of this discussion of norms and power, however, it must be remembered that the contest is not merely an intellectual conflict over ideology. Social control and the power to define normalcy have as their extension the power to control personal actions, determine access to employment and financial security, regulate the rights to have intimate relationships legitimized and supported by the government, and the power to intrude into a person's very sense of self-worth and self-respect.

Terms & Concepts

Cognitive: Of or related to the processes through which individuals perceive experience, reason through it, and learn from and about it.

Ethnicity: A shared cultural heritage.

Genocide: The systematic killing of a racial, ethnic, religious, or national group of people by another.

Institutional Discrimination: The bias inherent to any society's institutions, such as its legal, educational, medical, or political systems.

Race: A category comprising people who share biologically transmitted traits that members of a society deem socially significant.

Racism: The belief that one racial category is innately superior or inferior to another.

Scapegoating: The act of holding a person, group of people, or thing responsible for a multitude of problems.

Stereotypes: Prejudicial views or descriptions of some category of people, often based upon strong emotions and misinformation.

Bibliography

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Suggested Reading

Binning, K. R., & Sherman, D. K. (2011). Categorization and communication in the face of prejudice: When describing perceptions changes what is perceived. Journal Of Personality & Social Psychology, 101, 321-336. Retrieved October 29, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=65118815

Brown, R. (2001). Group processes: Dynamics within and between groups. (2nd ed.). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Heatherton, T., Kleck, R., Hebl, M., & Hull, J. (Eds.). (2003). The social psychology of stigma. New York: Guilford.

Korstelina, K. (2007). Social identity and conflict: Structures, dynamics, and implications. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Moghaddam, F.; Harre, R.; & Lee, N. (Eds.). (2007). Global conflict resolution through positioning analysis. New York: Springer.

Pruit, D., Rubin, J., & Kim, S. (2003). Social conflict: Escalation, stalemate, and settlement. Columbus, OH: McGraw-Hill.

Ritzer, G. (Ed.). (2007). Classical sociological theory (5th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Ritzer, G., & Goodman, D. (2007). Sociological theory (6th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Rodenborg, N. A., & Boisen, L. A. (2013). Aversive racism and intergroup contact theories: Cultural competence in a segregated world. Journal Of Social Work Education, 49, 564-579. Retrieved October 29, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=90595313

Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (2001). Social dominance: An intergroup theory of social hierarchy and oppression. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Stinchombe, A. (1987). Constructing social theories. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.