GORDON W. ALLPORT ON THE NATURE OF PREJUDICE SUMMARY:
The composition of political attitudes suggested that political character and behavior are bound with attitudes and generic traits in personality. Allport pointed out that there are correlations among political convictions, prejudice, and scholarship
High-achieving students may have radical political views and low prejudice, low-achieving students tend to be conservative and high in prejudice.
He argued that a riot is like a disease, it can be prevented if its pathology is known. World War I1 placed a heavy demand on social psychology.
In 1956, two years after the publication of The Nature of Prejudice, Allport and Thomas Pettigrew studied race relations in South Africa. They concluded that the same personal forces active in the making of prejudice were present in both continents thereby alluding to their possible universality. His studies distinguished between discrimination and prejudice. While discrimination refers to oppressive social practices, prejudice refers to the attitudinal structure of personality
A category enables a quick identification and interaction with phenomena while at the same time saturating the contents of the phenomena
If the individual is intropunitive, it leads to neuroticism, to self-denial as a member of one's group, self-hate, split personality, passivity, withdrawal from public life, and clowning. However, if the individual is extropunitive, victimization leads to hyper- sensitiveness, obsessive concern, suspicion, revolt, aggression, and prejudice against out-groups. Members of in-groups, for example, employ the term "we" with a common meaning. They develop group partisanship and ethnocentrism that imply a way of living with characteristics, habits, codes, and beliefs that keep the members unified.
There are different types of rejection of out-groups. There is verbal rejection discrimination segregation and violence in the form of riots.
Individuals with certain personality traits have more potential to develop prejudice. In general terms, the prejudiced person is insecure, anxious, lacks a secure and affectionate relationship with the parents, and craves for authoritarian human relationships
Allport also explored associations between religion and prejudice. He believed that religion was paradoxically responsible for prejudice and tolerance and for brotherhood and bigotry. He argued, while some pious churchgoers were saturated with racial, ethnic, and class prejudice, many more were also ardent advocates of racial justice. Intolerance, on one hand, relates to extrinsic religion, which is a self-protective form of religious outlook that provides the believer with comfort and salvation at the expenses of out-groups. Tolerance, on the other hand, arises from intrinsic religion, a kind of religion in which the individual incorporates the prescripts of his faith. They serve religion rather than being served by it.
Reducing Implicit Prejudice Summary
Implicit prejudices are social preferences that exist outside of conscious awareness or control.
Presented participants with positive images and words paired with Black faces, and negative images and words paired with White faces.Exposure to these pairings reduced implicit racial prejudice immediately
White students were randomly assigned to live with a Black roommate or a White roommate. After one semester, they found that Whites assigned to live with a Black roommate exhibited less implicit prejudice than Whites assigned to live with a White roommate.Notably, some evidence suggests that intergroup contact affects explicit and implicit prejudice differently. Intergroup contact’s effect on explicit prejudice is mediated through increasedself-disclosure and reduced intergroup anxiety, suggesting that quality of contact is important for reducing explicit prejudice. In contrast, the quantity of intergroup contact has a direct effect on implicit prejudice, suggesting that mere exposure to
