Prejudice is deliberately mobilized by elites for strategic gain, not merely implicit cognition

Evidence

As Reicher argues, ‘wherever we fi nd prejudice, it has been mobilized, it has been mobilized deliberately and it has been mobilized for gain’ ( 2012 , p. 30). Prejudice is mobilized by elites, through legal systems, the media, etc. When one considers examples of ethnicization and de-ethnicization, one comes to appreciate perhaps more clearly the limitations of a perspective on prejudice that considers prejudice as a feature of implicit, unconscious or automatic individual cognition. These examples show that the classic prejudiced mind is a social mind; it is not just the mind of ordinary members of society ‘perceiving’ negative qualities in others, but also the mind of an elite that mobilizes prejudice for strategic social and political gains. — Cristian Tileagă, The Nature of Prejudice, 414

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the implicit-bias/implicit-association framing prominent in contemporary psychology discourse that this reader follows. — connects to: Ethnopopulism frames elites as colluding with ethnic others to justify hardline measures. — Erin K. Jenne and Promise Frank Ejiofor, Ethnopopulism and genocidal…, 41
• DEEPTHINKING: Positions prejudice as strategic elite machinery rather than individual cognitive error, reframing where anti-prejudice interventions might actually target.

Related

• Elites deliberately mobilize prejudice to enforce majority social order and transform people’s worth. (similarity 0.86)
• Prejudice research cannot be reduced to individual psychology (similarity 0.82)
• Prejudice arises from group identities rather than individual psychology (similarity 0.80)
• Prejudice is public harm to esteem, not merely private attitude (similarity 0.80)
• Prejudice gains power from shared identity, leadership, and politics, not individual bias (similarity 0.80)
• Prejudice is an interpretive concept lacking fixed definition (similarity 0.80)
• All prejudice involves intergroup relations with a built-in ingroup preference (similarity 0.80)
• Understanding prejudice requires locating attitudes in collective symbolic contexts (similarity 0.80)
• Anti-Roma prejudice resists explanation as individual psychological bias (similarity 0.79)
• Prejudice should be studied as collective societal thinking rather than only individual psychology (similarity 0.79)
• Understanding prejudice requires cultural, not merely psychological, analysis (similarity 0.79)
• Culture’s competing prejudiced and anti-prejudice norms drive bias into subtle forms. (similarity 0.79)
• Prejudice provides authoritarians a sanctioned outlet for aggression (similarity 0.79)
• Prejudice is explained by societal characteristics, not only individual traits (similarity 0.79)
• Discriminatory acts rest on shared mental representations even when unintentional (similarity 0.78)