John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman — On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years after Allport

330 published claims from this book.

• A concept lacking mechanistic process descriptions cannot progress scientifically
• A dominant theorist’s blind spots can propagate through an entire field
• A New Yorker cartoon sparked the founding study of gender prejudice research.
• A researcher’s blindspots propagate through the field they dominate
• A single Allport chapter anticipated decades of victimization research.
• A stigmatized group’s collective history stays psychologically active in every situation.
• A theory’s longevity measures its original intellectual merit
• A world civilization was defined out of existence by the standard scholarly definition.
• Accuracy was dropped from prejudice definitions in favor of pure negative attitude
• Activists’ attacks on stereotypes led theorists to wrongly call stereotypes necessarily inaccurate
• Admitting one’s own value-action conflict is prerequisite to reducing prejudice.
• African American coping patterns originated in African culture, not just reactions to racism
• All thought requires forcing new experiences into preexisting categories
• Allport claimed prejudice is normal cognition, not pathology
• Allport defined stereotypes as inherently inaccurate partly to side with activists.
• Allport deliberately excluded positive prejudice from his definition.
• Allport denied rational or economic motives even behind self-serving discrimination
• Allport grounded prejudice in genuine material and symbolic clashes
• Allport held people rarely know the true source of their prejudice
• Allport held that elites propagate prejudice to secure exploitative gains
• Allport noted contextual prejudice but never theorized its underlying logic.
• Allport omitted sexism, the prejudice targeting half the population, from his analysis
• Allport organized prejudice around cognitive, motivational, and sociocultural processes.
• Allport over-prioritized individual personality, missing later group-level and ideological explanations of prejudice.
• Allport ranked antilocution, discrimination, and attack on one escalation continuum
• Allport reframed stereotypes from group descriptions into cognitive structures actively shaping thought
• Allport rejected instinct theories of conflict as tautological reasoning
• Allport simultaneously held contradictory cognitive and psychodynamic theories of prejudice
• Allport treated only inaccurate generalizations as prejudiced, excluding accurate risk aversion
• Allport’s antipathy definition excluded positive sentiments from prejudice
• Allport’s antipathy-based definition cannot capture sexism, which lacks pure hostility
• Allport’s bipolar religion model was empirically dismantled into multiple independent dimensions
• Allport’s four contact conditions work best integrated together, not separately
• Allport’s individualist account of prejudice overlooked the coming group-level turn
• Allport’s precedent located intergroup bias in ordinary cognition, not pathology
• Allport’s prejudice definition misses groups discrimination harms without antipathy
• Allport’s single chapter on victimization anticipated decades of research on prejudice targets
• Allport’s theory breadth let generations of researchers mine his ideas for divergent claims
• Allport’s threat-activation insight survived while the single-personality model failed
• Americans internalize contradictory prejudice and egalitarian norms and feel the conflict
• An ideology treats racial inequality as blacks’ fault while viewing opportunity structures as fair.
• Antipathy alone cannot explain how sexism operates
• Antipathy is not required for prejudice
• Armed conflict can erupt without prior group animosity
• Assertive women face backlash that identical men do not
• Attributing disadvantage to structural causes boosts self-esteem in Blacks
• Authoritarian prejudice stems from fear not displaced aggression according to Allport
• Authoritarian threat orientation is learned belief, not personality maladjustment.
• Authoritarianism is a learned ideology, not a personality pathology
• Authoritarianism is an ideological belief system, not a psychodynamic disorder.
• Authoritarianism is operationalized through childrearing values rather than politics
• Authoritarianism reflects a personality pattern of dutifulness, order, and low openness
• Authoritarians match others on problem solving until ego is involved
• Authoritarians show normal adjustment; their threat orientation is learned, not ego weakness.
• Automatic stereotypic associations operate preconsciously and independently of self-reported prejudice
• Awareness of group membership differs from desire for that membership
• Being the only minority member impairs concentration and invites stereotyping
• Belief in individual mobility suppresses victims’ perception of discrimination.
• Belief in zero-sum competition sustains group hierarchies
• Benevolent paternalism operates as a subtle mechanism of prejudice that antipathy-based accounts miss
• Bias awareness alone does not change behavior and can backfire
• Blacks show higher self-esteem than Whites, contradicting Allport
• Bogus peer consensus durably shifts racial attitudes via conformity, not accuracy motives.
• Brown v. Board outlawed separate-but-equal schooling as inherently unequal
• Categorical perception of outgroups triggers amygdala vigilance, individualization relaxes it
• Categories require an implicit theory of why members belong together
• Categorization both enables perception and systematically destroys perceptual accuracy
• Categorization that grounds prejudice is normal and unavoidable mental functioning.
• Changing negative stereotypes without changing hostility will fail because stereotypes are consequences, not causes
• Changing stereotypes without changing underlying hostility fails because stereotypes follow from prejudice.
• Child behavior toward outgroups is emotionally controlled, adult behavior cognitively controlled
• Children adopt prejudice via parental identification and status comparison.
• Children infer ingroup preferences merely from observed social regularities without explicit teaching
• Children infer outgroup avoidance from mere observed segregation patterns
• Chronic targets of prejudice develop vigilance and deep distrust of the dominant group.
• Close intergroup contact breeds paternalistic reward of compliant subordinates
• Cognitive approaches to prejudice pushed out the unconscious and motivation after 1954
• Cognitive approaches to stereotypes treated the mind as a conscious information processor.
• Coldly instrumental violence needs no emotional distress to occur.
• Common group membership is a consequence, not merely a catalyst, of favorable contact
• Complementary stereotypes that pair poverty with virtue increase endorsement of the status quo
• Conformity is normal rather than a psychological weakness
• Consensual beliefs gain perceived validity and social connection from being shared
• Contact changes outgroup attitudes but not stereotype content unless specific conditions hold
• Contact reduces prejudice least effectively toward stigmatized disability groups
• Context-specific prejudice can coexist with neutral overall attitudes
• Conversation magnifies stigma-consistent stereotypes when people seek consensus
• Core questions about categories and prejudice remain unresolved decades after Allport
• Counterexamples get fenced off as exceptions rather than revising stereotypes
• Deep-seated fairness values create inner conflict with prejudice
• Defining prejudice solely as antipathy blindspots subtler forms of domination
• Demagogues channel authoritarian insecurity into hatred of outgroups
• Demagogues exploit anxious followers by externalizing hatred onto outgroups
• Denying or concealing a stigma is psychologically costly yet commonly attempted
• Derogatory labels predict how immigrants appear in children’s literature
• Dialogue programs often fail to improve relations between groups in protracted conflict.
• Different negative emotions drive distinct types of prejudice and responses
• Discourse gives ingroup problems less detail than outgroup ones
• Discussing prejudiced views with likeminded peers intensifies rather than moderates them.
• Diversity programs are evaluated mainly on attitudes, not on behavior or institutional change
• Dominant groups switch from paternalism to reason-based ideology when segregation replaces personal control
• Downward social mobility drives displaced aggression onto weak minority groups.
• Egalitarian values clash internally with prejudice, producing conflicted rather than pure attitudes.
• Eliminating group salience backfires because identity is meaningful and perceptually unavoidable
• Emotions can be felt on behalf of one’s ingroup, not only as individuals
• Emotions fluctuate over time while stereotypes remain stubbornly stable
• Endorsement of a stereotype is unnecessary for it to impair performance
• Envious stereotyping precedes and predicts scapegoat selection
• Equal stereotype inaccuracy can rest on opposite causal attributions
• Equal-status group contact reduces prejudice when institutions sanction it.
• Equality for groups wins more White support than individual equality
• Ethnophaulisms are slurs distinct from self-given group names
• Ethnophaulisms, ethnonyms, and antilocutions are distinct linguistic categories of prejudice
• Even arbitrary group divisions trigger in-group bias and out-group derogation that harm cooperation
• Even experts apply lazy stereotyping outside their own domain of expertise.
• Even ingroup members are seen more stereotypically than their self-reports justify.
• Even prejudice researchers essentialize the bigot, mirroring how bigots essentialize their targets.
• Everyday racism responses split into self-protective and self-enhancing motivational drives.
• Exaggerated stereotypic difference arises from either mean overestimation or dispersion underestimation.
• Expecting to be disliked by minorities lowers self-esteem and worsens interaction
• Extreme ideologies arise from normal processes, not inherent malice
• Extrinsic religion is compatible with prejudice; intrinsic rules it out
• Female agency is expected but punished in leadership roles
• Frustration functions like physical pain as an adaptive signal to diagnose problems
• Genocidal scapegoating requires widespread life crises that frustrate multiple basic needs, not mundane frustrations.
• Group identification amplifies the effect of perceived deprivation on hostility
• Group identification is strongest at intermediate group sizes balancing distinctiveness and belonging.
• Group prejudice collides with deeply socialized fairness values, exposing holders as hypocrites
• Group role-transitions make latent prejudice into a recognized social issue.
• Group status and competition determine which traits get projected onto which groups
• Group-based emotions arise only when shared membership is salient
• Groups are scapegoated for perceived power and malevolence, not vulnerability.
• Groups can be discriminated against without being disliked
• Guilt over prejudice arises only in people who internalize egalitarian standards
• Harmonious intergroup relations require deliberate programs rather than emerging naturally.
• Hate speech can both escalate and discharge hostility toward outgroups
• Higher moral development correlates with lower prejudice
• Holding conflicting values in tension drives more complex political thinking
• Hostility toward a group comes first and negative stereotypes follow to justify it
• How and what one believes are inextricably entwined, contra Allport’s separation
• Identical behaviors are remembered abstractly for outgroups and concretely for ingroups
• Identical behaviors of outgroup members are encoded as abstract traits
• Implicit measures reveal biased feelings people consciously disavow
• Implicit stereotypes are controllable and shaped by context
• In-group preference and out-group prejudice have distinct origins and consequences
• Individual frustration and organized persecution are distinct phenomena.
• Individual self-esteem and emotions depend on the standing of one’s social groups
• Individual-level frustration theories cannot explain why mass scapegoating spreads consensually across a whole society.
• Individuals who contradict stereotypes get subtyped so the overall stereotype survives intact
• Ingroup cohesion can occur without producing outgroup hostility or prejudice.
• Ingroup favoritism usually lacks explicit hostility toward outgroups
• Ingroup membership is a shifting, context-dependent subjective construction, not a fixed category.
• Inner conflict between values and prejudice generates guilt that motivates change
• Insecurity and ego weakness generate seven surface traits of authoritarianism.
• Interdependence motives make people perceive outgroup members accurately
• Interest in emotions waned as prejudice research turned from bigots to normal people
• Intergroup anxiety narrows thinking and worsens intergroup judgment
• Intergroup anxiety produces information biases, defensiveness, and avoidance of future contact
• Intergroup attitudes are constrained by relationship structure, not free-floating sentiment.
• Intergroup programs yield modest but enduring effects on behavior
• Internal motivation to suppress prejudice reflects conforming to a new group’s norms.
• International instability can unify factions within a nation while internal instability divides them
• Intra-group colorism among minorities correlates with lower self-esteem in darker-skinned members
• Intrapsychic theories cannot explain why stereotypes are consensual and specific
• Intrinsic religiosity correlates with appearing unprejudiced rather than being tolerant
• Intrinsic religiosity predicts impression management rather than genuine tolerance
• Intrinsic religious devotion may heighten rather than reduce prejudice through a sense of chosenness.
• Irrelevant details conveniently explain away deviant cases that threaten stereotypes
• Keeping subgroup identity salient aids generalization of contact benefits
• Learning and conformity are distinct processes, not interchangeable ones
• Learning and conformity are distinct psychological processes, not synonyms.
• Legal desegregation rulings, not Allport, drove modern prejudice research
• Legislation can itself educate and convert a public that did not change beforehand
• Low mental energy increases reliance on stereotypes for judgment
• Low-prejudice people are less susceptible to stereotype rebound effects
• Loyalties of different scopes do not conflict, only same-scope ones do
• Mere intergroup contact without equal status worsened racial prejudice
• Mere labeling of category membership exaggerates perceived differences between groups.
• Mere labeling of groups distorts perceptual estimates of their differences
• Merely overhearing ethnic slurs makes bystanders devalue the targeted group.
• Merely reading gender stereotypes boosts support for the status quo
• Minimal ingroup identification is necessary for intergroup favoritism.
• Minorities internalize majority-group stereotypes, producing self-directed racial bias
• Moderate mismatches channel group members into stereotypic role subtypes as preemptive discrimination
• Modern prejudice definitions dropped the accuracy criterion
• Modern prejudice fuses moral values with anti-outgroup affect
• Moral education programs reduce prejudice indirectly through justice emphasis
• Moral reckoning with racism emerges from hybridity, not manifestos
• Most multicultural education studies show positive or partially positive effects on intergroup relations.
• Most people do not fit neatly into the personality Types taxonomy
• Most White respondents refuse or fail to differentiate Blacks from Whites on survey measures
• Motivated observers replace exception-fencing subtypes with variable subgroups
• Motivated observers replace subtype exclusion with subgroup diversity perception, loosening categories
• Normal cognitive processes can still generate morally unacceptable prejudice
• Normal group bias runs on liking one’s own group, not hating others
• One psychology book on prejudice remained the field’s most cited work for fifty years
• Online multimedia polish lets hate groups recruit through mainstream appearance
• Open research questions remain on how categories guide prejudiced behavior
• Others’ nonprejudiced views may be the strongest cues for controlling prejudice
• Overhearing an ethnic slur only fuels bias when the target fits the stereotype.
• Overt racism faded but reemerged as subtler symbolic and modern racisms.
• Paternalistic affection conceals dominance and suppresses subordinate resistance
• Pathbreakers are atypical group members whose competence goes unrecognized
• People act to preserve a decent self-image above all
• People evaluate women more positively than men overall despite sex discrimination.
• People report liking women more than men, a pro-female bias that persists implicitly
• People see outgroups as all alike but ingroups as varied
• People stretch old frameworks to fit new phenomena rather than abandon them
• Perceived justifiability of prejudice tracks cultural norms, not objective warrant
• Perceived partner expectation of prejudice leads the partner to try harder in interactions
• Perceived social consensus licenses people to express their biases
• Perceived status marginality drives authoritarian parenting more than objective class
• Perceived symbolic threats can convert into real material competition
• Perceived threat, not just difference, drives stigma toward varied outgroups
• Perceivers neutralize stereotype-disconfirming individuals by subtyping them.
• Perceiving a group as powerful and malevolent rationalizes extreme violence as self-defense
• Personalized positive contact fails to generalize because outgroup members get subtyped as exceptions
• Personalized positive encounters get discounted as exceptions rather than changing group attitudes
• Physical violence against subordinates is routine and institutionally shaped, not uncontrolled rage
• Pleasant personalized contact fails to generalize while salient group contact breeds anxiety
• Poles accused Jews of collaboration they themselves engaged in, as an act of projection
• Polish civilians themselves committed a significant share of Holocaust violence against their Jewish neighbors.
• Political threats endanger symbolic worlds, not physical safety
• Positive emotions like pity can reinforce group inequality by casting groups as incompetent
• Positive self-illusions are linked to better health and longer life
• Positive stereotypes become evaluative liabilities when mismatched to a role’s demands
• Positively stereotyped traits become liabilities when mismatched to role requirements
• Post-9-11 religious-ethnic prejudice remains understudied despite its virulence
• Post-Allport research shows people can hold prejudice without conscious awareness of it
• Precarious status triggers reflexive disparagement of others to defend rank.
• Prejudice becomes publicly recognized only when role agitation spreads.
• Prejudice can operate as benevolence, not only antipathy
• Prejudice combines cognitive, motivational, and socialized causes
• Prejudice control begins preconsciously via the anterior cingulate cortex
• Prejudice emotions are distinct, not interchangeable products of one frustration pool
• Prejudice involves differentiated emotions, including subjectively positive ones
• Prejudice is a normal product of categorization, not sick motives
• Prejudice is a relative evaluative decrement against misfit role occupants, not blanket negativity
• Prejudice is a universal inheritance of normal cognition, not abnormal impulse.
• Prejudice is irrational antipathy rooted in ignorance, without political calculus
• Prejudice need not involve antipathy, inaccuracy, or inflexibility
• Prejudice reduction can work by changing sentiments without erasing group differences
• Prejudice serves dual functions of lowering outgroup worth and boosting ingroup entitlement
• Prejudice shapes behavior through situational context rather than requiring internalization
• Prejudice stems from an inability to tolerate ambivalent feelings
• Prejudice strikes groups entering roles incongruent with their stereotypes
• Prejudice surfaces as a social problem only when groups contest their roles
• Prejudice surges against group members who seek new social roles
• Prejudice targets cope either by externalizing or internalizing blame
• Prejudice theory that equates bias with antipathy cannot explain benevolent sexism.
• Prejudice toward different groups is driven by stereotypes or emotions variably
• Prejudice was reframed as a normal process, not pathology
• Prejudiced people project repressed self-criticisms onto outgroups
• Prejudiced rationalizations can be socially validated ideology rather than irrationality
• Prejudiced victims may either target weaker others or sympathize with fellow minorities
• Projected villains are always depicted as the opposite of a culture’s ideals
• Racialized interactions carry histories and stereotypes that shape their meaning
• Racism can operate through claims of developmental inferiority rather than fixed biological inferiority
• Racism is a chronically plausible explanation for negative experiences in stigmatized groups.
• Regional and national racial attitude differences stem from norms, not personality
• Regional racial differences defy personality-based explanations and track social norms instead
• Religion’s effect on prejudice depends on how it fits personality
• Religious esteem can heighten ethnocentric animosity rather than reduce it
• Repeated exposure to accusations can breed self-hate in prejudice targets
• Repressors project threatening traits onto others because they suppress unwanted thoughts
• Researchers and the prejudiced share essentialist explanatory patterns
• Rokeach studied belief structure independent of ideological content
• Rokeach’s dogmatism captured authoritarianism across both political poles
• Role incongruity provides raw material that motivates stereotype-based self-defense
• Role-change resistance is the core construct tapped by modern prejudice measures.
• Role-incongruity prejudice has a rational core; its unfairness lies in generalization
• RWA and SDO are the strongest individual-difference predictors of prejudice
• Scapegoat ideologies win because they offer simple, controllable explanations
• Scapegoat movements that improve conditions strengthen, not weaken, ideological commitment.
• Scapegoating stems from adaptive cognition, not psychopathology
• Scapegoats must be perceived as powerful and intentful, not merely weak.
• Science advances by revisiting earlier theorists’ ignored strands, not just new data
• Self-enhancement can reflect internalized worth, not just social comparison
• Simpler ethnic slurs predict immigrant segregation and hazardous-work assignments
• Slur simplicity predicts outgroup exclusion more strongly than slur negativity.
• Social categories carry emotion and resist contradictory evidence in the mind
• Social identity theory is a major advance beyond Allport
• Societies promoting equal opportunity paradoxically generate more intergroup competition and animosity.
• Some prejudice-induced defenses like ingroup solidarity protect mental health
• Spatial segregation weakens paternalism’s coercive power over subordinates
• Stable, stereotyped ethnic groups become the preferred all-purpose scapegoats.
• Status insecurity triggers reflexive disparagement of outgroups
• Stereotype content adapts to serve a resistant underlying attitude
• Stereotypes are attacked by groups when they mismatch emerging social roles.
• Stereotypes are both causes and consequences of prejudice, not either-or.
• Stereotypes can be after-the-fact rationalizations justifying pre-existing emotions
• Stereotypes can hold logically contradictory attributions against the same group
• Stereotypes exaggerate a real core of group differences into caricatures
• Stereotypes function simultaneously as both causes and consequences of prejudice
• Stereotypes justify existing social arrangements, enabling false consciousness.
• Stereotypes justify the status quo, not merely love or hate toward groups
• Stereotypes operate at every cognitive stage to self-confirm and preserve the status quo
• Stereotypes remain stable despite contradicting observations or even reversing
• Stereotypes shift to track the roles groups actually occupy
• Stereotyping increases when perceivers lack cognitive energy
• Stigmatized groups deny self-hate explicitly yet show outgroup favoritism on implicit measures
• Structural role changes in society can update stereotypes and reduce prejudice.
• Sumner saw outgroup hostility as a natural product of ingroup superiority
• Superficial intergroup contact reinforces rather than reduces stereotypes
• Suppressing unwanted traits causes people to project them onto others, relieving their own discomfort
• Survey measures understate White racial prejudice due to social desirability
• Symbolic and material conflicts reinforce each other rather than competing as explanations
• Symbolic racism frames opposition to welfare as moral defect rather than racial inferiority.
• Targets of prejudice often minimize or deny the discrimination they personally face.
• The brain’s amygdala vigilance toward outgroups relaxes when people are treated as individuals
• The first sexism scale grew from a New Yorker cartoon about liking stupid women
• The most loyal group members are least likely to feel collective guilt
• The Nature of Prejudice influenced the 1954 Brown v. Board ruling
• The rational kernel of role-incongruity prejudice gets co-opted by motivated reasoning
• There is no unbiased method for measuring true standing on trait dimensions
• Thought suppression ironically increases the accessibility of unwanted thoughts
• Trait valence is reversed by role context, not intrinsic to the trait.
• Two broad valenced dimensions, agency and communion, underlie all social perception.
• Unchecked intergroup contact allows glib we-they generalizations to persist.
• Victimization leads targets to either adopt more or less prejudice against weaker others.
• Victims of inequality can unknowingly adopt beliefs that perpetuate their own disadvantage
• Victims’ defenses against prejudice can protect rather than damage mental health
• Vigilance about bias can be adaptive and self-esteem protective
• Wartime nationalism drives renaming ordinary foods to purge enemy associations
• White Americans endorse individual hierarchy but reject group-based hierarchy
• White Americans now begin racial politics from near-universal group equality, not caste support.
• White identity has little political influence; anti-Black antagonism does the work
• White identity politics barely predicts policy preferences while antipathy toward Blacks strongly does.
• Whites holding contradictory egalitarian and racist beliefs feel little psychological tension about it
• Working harder against stigma can physically harm the striver