Cold War social psychology aimed to fight unreason without any theory of the unconscious.
Evidence
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, as a new postfascist and postimperial world order began to dawn in the West along with the Cold War against communism, a new discipline developed in the USA aiming to provide a rational scientific basis upon which the forces of unreason in society could be combated, and the world made safe for democracy. The foundations for a social psychology of prejudice were laid by Gordon Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice (1954), a project designed from the outset to eliminate the need for a special theory of the unconscious and a specific theory of racism. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1315
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: how far did the Cold War framing determine which theories of prejudice got funded and canonized, and what got suppressed with them?
Related
- Allport’s prejudice framework centered anti-Semitism and took psychodynamic projection seriously. (similarity 0.81)
- Allport wrote prejudice theory from anti-Semitism and psychodynamic thinking (similarity 0.79)
- Allport’s pre-empirical intuitions anticipated modern prejudice research remarkably well (similarity 0.78)