Allport arranged rejection into escalating stages from talk to violence

Evidence

Allport delineated three incremental stages of “rejecting” behaviors toward outgroups: verbal rejection (or “antilocution”), discrimination (including segregation), and physical attack (including lynching, riots, and genocide), arranged in a continuum of increasing severity and animosity but decreasing incidence. He argued that “people’s bark (antilocution) is often sharper than their bite (actual discrimination)” (Allport, 1954/1979, pp. 55–6), but each successive stage was dependent on the previous one for its genesis. He saw purely verbal expressions of hostility and rejection as the most common, and in themselves the least harmful, although these too were graded from mild to severe expressions of animosity, with jokes and derision seen as less serious, and name-calling and persistent invectives as more serious (see also Mullen & Leader, ch. 12 this volume). Such verbal negativity provided the breeding ground for some individuals – those with higher levels of animosity – to discriminate against the target group. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 642

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concise statement of Allport’s incremental rejection-stage framework that the chapter will critique.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 642