Prejudices cannot be understood apart from a society’s history and contradictions

Evidence

Allport also recognized that prejudices, although psychological in origin, have a history. Without understanding the history of societies, their social and political organization, their intrinsic contradictions, both subtle and blatant forms of prejudice would be ‘almost unintelligible’ (Allport, 1950 , p. 21). When Allport wrote his Nature of Prejudice , he wrote it not only as a social psychologist with an interest in prejudice, but perhaps also as an American citizen pained by his own country’s burden of historical prejudice. — Cristian Tileagă, The Nature of Prejudice, 59

Categorization

• XREF: Underlines that prejudice has a history — echoes the reader’s interest in historically grounded claims about social phenomena.

Related

• Prejudice arises from multiple interacting levels, not any single cause. (similarity 0.86)
• Understanding prejudice requires cultural, not merely psychological, analysis (similarity 0.85)
• Allport himself saw society and culture as shaping moral worth (similarity 0.84)
• Modern research weights social processes in prejudice even more than Allport did (similarity 0.84)
• Allport wrote prejudice theory from anti-Semitism and psychodynamic thinking (similarity 0.84)
• Prejudice is multidetermined with no single variable explaining it (similarity 0.84)
• Allport’s prejudice framework centered anti-Semitism and took psychodynamic projection seriously. (similarity 0.84)
• Prejudice is explained by societal characteristics, not only individual traits (similarity 0.84)
• Prejudice combines cognitive, motivational, and socialized causes (similarity 0.84)
• Understanding stubborn prejudice requires turning to sociology, history, and anthropology (similarity 0.83)
• Allport’s antipathy definition fails to capture modern complexities of prejudice. (similarity 0.83)
• Allport’s book organized the scholarly study of prejudice for 50 years (similarity 0.83)
• Pervasive prejudice still takes distinct forms across different societies (similarity 0.83)
• Allport’s book chapter structure set the field’s research agenda for fifty years (similarity 0.83)
• Allport held people rarely know the true source of their prejudice (similarity 0.82)