The cognitive revolution redefined prejudice as an attitude, sidelining emotion

Evidence

It is a story that is told many times in the chapters in this volume: the cognitive revolution of the 1960s and 1970s in North American psychology (especially social psychology) changed everything. In the area of prejudice and intergroup relations, the most prominent change was an intense focus on the nature of perceivers’ beliefs about outgroups (i.e., their stereotypes) and on the consequences of those beliefs for prejudice and discrimination. Research in this tradition has led to great advances in psychology’s understanding of how stereotypes and prejudice are acquired, activated, applied, and (sometimes) altered. In many ways, the focus on such processes in this approach reflected Allport’s allusion to the resource “economy” of categorization and generalization. Attitude theory proved a natural source of conceptual tools and research methods to investigate these issues, and so “prejudice” came to be defined as an attitude – the perceiver’s evaluation, positive or (more often) negative – of a group as a whole or of its members. Although attitude theory is flexible enough to accommodate emotions as determinants of attitudes, research on stereotyping and prejudice clearly shifted away from emotion. — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 2251

Cognitive information-processing approaches freed social psychology from sovereign motivational theories (e.g., Freudian theories). The new challenge was to push cognitive mechanisms as far as possible, to discover the limits of their potential for explaining social phenomena, including intergroup biases. The resulting focus naturally was stereotypes, the cognitive aspect of intergroup biases. Categorization approaches found a ready inspiration in Allport’s precedent for blaming bias on normal human cognition. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 291

It is a story that is told many times in the chapters in this volume: the cognitive revolution of the 1960s and 1970s in North American psychology (especially social psychology) changed everything. In the area of prejudice and intergroup relations, the most prominent change was an intense focus on the nature of perceivers’ beliefs about outgroups (i.e., their stereotypes) and on the consequences of those beliefs for prejudice and discrimination. Research in this tradition has led to great advances in psychology’s understanding of how stereotypes and prejudice are acquired, activated, applied, and (sometimes) altered. In many ways, the focus on such processes in this approach reflected Allport’s allusion to the resource “economy” of categorization and generalization. Attitude theory proved a natural source of conceptual tools and research methods to investigate these issues, and so “prejudice” came to be defined as an attitude – the perceiver’s evaluation, positive or (more often) negative – of a group as a whole or of its members. Although attitude theory is flexible enough to accommodate emotions as determinants of attitudes, research on stereotyping and prejudice clearly shifted away from emotion. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2251

Categorization

• XREF: The emotional-to-cognitive shift in prejudice research parallels similar turns in other fields, e.g., the cognitivist turn in anthropology and the decline of psychodynamic approaches generally. — connects to: Early-century concepts like cathexis and ego defense anticipated implicit attitudes — Anthony G. Greenwald and Mahzarin R. Banaji, Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes,…, 270
• DEFINE: Documents how the operational definition of prejudice shifted from emotional to attitudinal.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years…, 2251; , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 291; , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2251