Allport identified learning, conformity, and contact as routes to prejudice in children

Evidence

Allport began his chapter on “The Young Child” (chapter 18) by asking: How is prejudice learned? Allport’s readers might have expected to hear about the common mechanisms of learning: paired association, reinforcement, observational imitation. Indeed, Allport emphasized what he called the direct “transfer” of parental words, emotions, and ideas to children through learning and conformity. He also described how a child-rearing environment that promotes insecurity and hatred provides fertile ground for prejudicial emotions. Because Allport wrote during a time when it was the norm for White Americans to express prejudice openly, most of his proposed routes led to prejudice toward, rather than respect for, minorities. However, he also wrote that prejudice was “not merely a matter of specific parental teaching … blind imitation, or mirroring the culture” (1954/1979, p. 318). Allport was referring to influences internal to the child, specifically emotional/cognitive stages of development and internal motivational influences such as the need for status and identity. These two processes were less well formulated but foreshadowed current research and theory. Thus, Allport described many routes to prejudice, learning being only one. … Allport most convincingly argued for three social mechanisms of acquisition: learning, conformity, and contact. He proposed that parents were most influential as children learned and conformed to societal rules, yet peers were most likely to provide contact in biracial schools. Although Allport touched on the more psychological processes of identity and developmental sequencing, the cognitive revolution that gave full force to such constructs was a decade away. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1973

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to vault claims on Allport’s contact hypothesis and its learning routes to prejudice.