# The Nature of Prejudice [[Gordon Allport]]'s 1954 book is the founding text of the psychology of prejudice — still assigned, still cited, and still the spine on which the twelve Subjects pages that link here hang. It was written in the decade after the Holocaust, in the year of *Brown v. Board*, by a psychologist who had spent the war working with refugees and studying rumor, and its central move was to take prejudice out of the category of moral failure or pathology and put it inside ordinary cognition. ## The argument **Categories are unavoidable.** The mind cannot function without sorting; categories about people are formed the same way as categories about anything else, and they resist correction because they save effort. [[Stereotyping]] is the category applied to a person; prejudice is "an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization." **In-groups come first.** Loyalty to one's own group is prior to, and does not require, hostility to others — but hostility is the cheapest way to strengthen it. [[Scapegoating]] is displaced aggression toward an out-group that cannot retaliate. **Prejudice escalates.** Allport's Scale: (1) *antilocution* — talk, jokes, slurs; (2) *avoidance*; (3) *discrimination* — exclusion from jobs, housing, rights; (4) *physical attack*; (5) *extermination*. Each rung normalizes the next; the vault's [[Dehumanization]] page is a study of the transition from rung 1 to rung 5. **Contact can undo it — under conditions.** The [[Contact Hypothesis]]: intergroup contact reduces prejudice when the groups meet with equal status, pursue common goals, cooperate rather than compete, and have the support of authorities, law or custom. Contact without those conditions can make prejudice worse. Pettigrew and Tropp's 2006 meta-analysis of 515 studies confirmed the effect and found the conditions helpful but not strictly necessary. ## Where it sits in the vault The book is the *cognitive* explanation of prejudice; its contemporaries offer the alternatives the vault reads it against. *[[The Authoritarian Personality]]* (1950) and the [[F-Scale]] locate prejudice in a personality type; [[Muzafer Sherif]]'s [[Realistic Conflict Theory]] locates it in competition over real resources; [[Henri Tajfel]]'s [[Social Identity Theory]] and [[Minimal Group Paradigm]] show it appearing with no resources and no personality type at all, from a bare label; [[Social Dominance Theory]] adds hierarchy-legitimizing myths; [[Infrahumanization]] and [[Crowd Psychology]] describe the group-level mechanics. Allport anticipated most of these and is the reason they share a vocabulary. For the knowledge base's purposes — a movement that manufactures out-groups as a matter of strategy — the book's uncomfortable point is that the manufacturers are working with material every mind already contains. ## See Also - [[Gordon Allport]] · [[Contact Hypothesis]] · [[Scapegoating]] · [[Stereotyping]] · [[Prejudice]] - [[The Authoritarian Personality]] · [[F-Scale]] · [[Realistic Conflict Theory]] · [[Social Identity Theory]] · [[Social Dominance Theory]] - [[Dehumanization]] · [[Infrahumanization]] · [[Psychology Hub]] · [[Anthropology Hub]]