508 Prejudice, Racism, and Discrimination
The extant literature on prejudice is also so vast and di-
verse that one chapter cannot realistically suffice to capture
it all. Accordingly, this chapter’s goal is to survey major
perspectives and research foci on the aforementioned two
themes underlying the psychology of prejudice at the turn of
the twenty-first century. The amount of psychological re-
search on prejudice has, to some extent, waxed and waned
over the last five decades of the twentieth century. The preju-
dice literature has also been characterized by different em-
phases or waves, such as whether prejudice is conceptualized
as a form of psychopathology or is instead viewed as being
the product of normal cognitive processes (Duckitt, 1994).
The present chapter focuses on the historical continuity of
key ideas and psychological explanations about prejudice
over the past several decades and emphasizes links between
classic and contemporary research on prejudice.
We begin, then, with the psychology of bigotry. Under this
principal theme, the classic perspectives of authoritarian per-
sonality, just world, and belief congruence theories are con-
sidered first. Though proposed in the 1950s and 1960s, these
perspectives are still with us and remain important to our
contemporary understanding of prejudice. For example, by
focusing on beliefs and values, belief congruence theory
presaged and anticipated more recent theories of racism (con-
sidered later under the rubric of ambivalence approaches to
prejudice) and also has links to more recent perspectives on
prejudice and impression formation. After considering am-
bivalence approaches, our focus shifts to automatic and con-
trolled processing approaches to prejudice, especially the
dissociation model and recent innovations in measuring prej-
udice with automatic activation procedures. The final sec-
tion under the psychology of bigotry highlights integrative
approaches (viz., social dominance theory, integrated threat
theory, and the multicomponent approach to intergroup atti-
tudes), each of which incorporates insights from multiple
perspectives in seeking to understand prejudice better.
The psychology of the victim of prejudice and
discrimination—the second principal theme of this chapter—
begins with a consideration of attributional ambiguity per-
spectives, focusing on the complex but important issue of
whether and when attributing a rejection or failure to preju-
dice can buffer one’s sense of well-being and self-esteem.
Following that, the stressfulness of perceiving oneself to be a
target of prejudice or discrimination and the consequences of
stereotype threat for task performance, respectively, are con-
sidered. Finally, the relationship of relative deprivation and
perceived discrimination to protest and desires to take
corrective action is considered. I begin, though, with the
psychology of bigotry.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BIGOTRYAuthoritarian Personality Theories
The Original Theory of the Authoritarian PersonalityThe original theory of the authoritarian personality (OTAP),
proposed by Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and
Sanford (1950), was the first comprehensive and systematic
attempt by psychologists to understand theoretically the roots
of prejudice and to link ethnic, racial, religious, and ethno-
centric prejudices to personality. Adopting the research
methodologies of mid-twentieth-century social and clinical
psychology along with a guiding psychoanalytic theoretical
perspective, Adorno et al. (1950) postulated that the origins
of the prejudice-prone authoritarian personality stemmed
from a particular pattern of childhood influences and parental
practices (see Brown, 1967, for an excellent in-depth analysis
of the OTAP). Specifically, the authoritarian personality was
the presumed result of an upbringing by parents who, among
other things, (a) disciplined their child harshly, (b) empha-
sized duties and obligations instead of affection in child-
parent relations, (c) made their love dependent on the child’s
unquestioning obedience, and (d) were status-oriented by
being ingratiating toward those of higher social status but
contemptuous toward those of lesser social status.
According to the OTAP, the child in such a family devel-
ops hostility but cannot express it toward the harsh, frustrat-
ing, but feared parents. This submission leads the child to
develop a sense of itself as dependent upon its parents and
unable to defy their authority. Moreover, the child in an au-
thoritarian family presumably deploys an array of defense
mechanisms to deal with the repressed hostility felt toward its
parents. By identifying with the aggressor and following a
strategy of “if you can’t beat them, join them,” the child
comes to idealize its parents and to identify with established
authority in general. Repressed hostility and other impulses
unacceptable to its parents, such as aggression and sex, are
displaced and projected by the child onto minority and subor-
dinate groups as safe, alternative outlets. As a result, the child
in an authoritarian family presumably develops a rigid per-
sonality organization characterized by a moralistic attitude
toward unconventional people and practices, prejudice to-
ward minority and other out-groups, and a tendency to ideal-
ize power, status, strength, and toughness but to disdain
tenderness, weakness, and self-introspection.
The OTAP has several implications flowing from the cen-
tral idea that prejudice toward ethnic and racial minorities
and other target groups reflects an underlying, deep-seated
personality structure in the bigot. First, prejudice should