Prejudice against one group predicts prejudice against all groups

Evidence

We come now upon a very important fact: People who are antagonistic to Jews are likely also to be antagonistic to Negroes and to “Japs,” “Okies,” foreigners in general. “Of course,” one says at first, but there is no logical necessity in the fact. If the reputation of an ethnic group with a particular man were dependent on that man’s personal experience with members of the group it is not clear why a man who thinks ill of one minority would think ill of the others nor why a man who thinks well of one should think well of all. Because this is the case it seems likely that neither the behavior of minorities nor our acquaintance with a sample of that behavior is the critical determinant of our attitudes toward them. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 453

Allport therefore concluded: “One of the facts of which we are most certain is that people who reject one out-group will tend to reject other out-groups. If a person is anti-Jewish, he is likely to be anti-Catholic, anti- Negro, anti any out-group” (1954/1979, p. 68). He also went on to assert that this “generality of prejudice” constituted a strong argument for saying that “prejudice is basically a trait of personality” (1954/1979, p. 73; italics in the original). — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 2427

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A foundational insight: since disliking one minority predicts disliking unrelated others, prejudice cannot stem from actual experience with those groups’ behavior — it must arise from something in the prejudiced person. This is the core empirical evidence that launched the authoritarian personality research program.
• SEED: Angle: the correlational cluster of out-group hostility as evidence that prejudice is a personality trait in the subject, not a response to the target — and what it means for interventions aimed at exposure or education.
• XREF: Connects to Allport’s contact hypothesis and later work on generalized prejudice, plus modern intergroup threat theory. — connects to: the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: Ours, True, and the Identity That Defends Both”
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 453; John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years…, 2427