Allport’s prejudice definition misses groups discrimination harms without antipathy

Evidence

The study of prejudice owes a great debt to Gordon Allport, who insightfully outlined the field’s major issues in 1954. Although Allport’s definition of prejudice (ch. 1, “What is the Problem?”) as “an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization” (1954/1979, p. 9) drew attention to troubling social problems, it did not account for the complexities of the prejudices that social scientists have since contemplated. The particular complexity that we analyze first in this chapter is that many groups that experience discrimination are not the targets of generalized negative attitudes – the “antipathy” of Allport’s definition. Our second focus is accuracy – the “faulty generalization” of Allport’s definition; we propose a dialectical principle whereby the stereotypes that underlie prejudice may typically be accurate at the group level but inaccurate in relation to individuals in the role-incongruent contexts that elicit prejudiced actions. Finally, we will show that prejudices are not necessarily inflexible but depend fundamentally on social context and slowly yield to changes in groups’ positioning in the social structure. — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 173

The study of prejudice owes a great debt to Gordon Allport, who insightfully outlined the field’s major issues in 1954. Although Allport’s definition of prejudice (ch. 1, “What is the Problem?”) as “an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization” (1954/1979, p. 9) drew attention to troubling social problems, it did not account for the complexities of the prejudices that social scientists have since contemplated. The particular complexity that we analyze first in this chapter is that many groups that experience discrimination are not the targets of generalized negative attitudes – the “antipathy” of Allport’s definition. Our second focus is accuracy – the “faulty generalization” of Allport’s definition; we propose a dialectical principle whereby the stereotypes that underlie prejudice may typically be accurate at the group level but inaccurate in relation to individuals in the role-incongruent contexts that elicit prejudiced actions. Finally, we will show that prejudices are not necessarily inflexible but depend fundamentally on social context and slowly yield to changes in groups’ positioning in the social structure. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 173

Categorization

• DEFINE: Directly unpacks and then challenges Allport’s core definition of prejudice as antipathy based on faulty and inflexible generalization — the anchor definition the reader’s vault claims rest on.
• SEED: The claim that stereotypes are accurate at group level but inaccurate at individual level in role-incongruent contexts is exactly the kind of dialectical principle worth testing against Islamophobia and antisemitism vault claims.
• XREF: This frames the Allport reassessment thread at the heart of the present reading purpose — the challenge to antipathy-based and inflexibility-based accounts of prejudice.
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years…, 173; , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 173