Prejudiced people’s disowned traits get relocated onto outgroups

Evidence

Both prejudiced and unprejudiced subjects seem to have aggressive feelings about themselves and their parents but in the former subjects these feelings are ego-alien which means that they are repressed, denied, or isolated while in the latter subjects these feelings are integrated into objective conceptions. What difference does it make whether a feeling is ego-alien or integrated? Are there differential consequences? The first thing to note is that the subjects for whom negative feelings are ego-alien are the prejudiced subjects, the subjects who attribute undesirable characteristics to outgroups. The sins and weaknesses we miss in their self-descriptions and in their descriptions of their parents turn up in what they say about minority groups. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 546

Categorization

• XREF: This is the classic Authoritarian Personality displacement/projection mechanism; connects to social identity theory and scapegoating literature.
• DEEPTHINKING: The core psychodynamic move — disowned self-traits surface as outgroup attributes — is the load-bearing mechanism of the whole Adorno project and resists one-line summary.