Invitation to Psychology

368 ChapteR 10 Behavior in Social and Cultural Context

are responsible for all the wars in the world!”), yet

later denied being prejudiced. Should the public

have accepted these people’s claims that they aren’t

“really” racist or anti-Semitic?

And what about people who say they are not

prejudiced but then make remarks that suggest oth-

erwise? Marilyn Davenport, a member of the Orange

County Republican Party Central Committee, sent

out a nasty e-mail depicting President Obama and

his parents as chimpanzees. She was surprised by

the outcry. “Oh, come on! Everybody who knows

me knows that I am not a racist. It was a joke. I

have friends who are black,” she said. When Mel

Gibson was arrested for drunk driving, he spewed

anti-Semitic insults to the arresting officer (“Jews

the Many targetS of Prejudice

prejudice has a long and universal history. Why do new prejudices

keep emerging, others fade away, and some old ones persist?

Some prejudices rise and fall with historical events such as war or conquest.

anti-Japanese feelings in the United States ran high in the 1920s, and again in

the 1940s (World War II) and 1990s (economic competition); Irish immigrants

in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also endured extensive

discrimination; and prejudice

against american Indians was

widespread for three centuries.

today, prejudices against the

Japanese, Irish, and Native

americans have faded. In

contrast, some hatreds, notably

homophobia and anti-Semitism,

reflect people’s deeper anxieties

and are therefore more

persistent.

Gordon Allport (1954/1979) observed that

“defeated intellectually, prejudice lingers emotion-

ally.” Although many kinds of explicit, conscious

prejudices have declined and it is no longer fash-

ionable in most circles to admit one’s prejudices,

some social psychologists are using ingenious

measures to see whether implicit, unconscious