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John Duckitt
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Historical Analysis
From a historical perspective, seven distinct periods in
the way in which prejudice has been understood by psychologists can be identified. Each of these periods will be
briefly discussed. It will be shown how social circumstances and historical events, interacting with the evolution of knowledge and techniques, focused attention on
different issues and questions in each period. Each question was associated with a particular image of prejudice
and generated a distinctive theoretical orientation and
research emphasis. The overall analysis is summarized
in Table 1.
Before considering these stages, several points should
be made. First, identifying distinct periods necessarily
involves some oversimplification. Each period represents
only the main thrust of theoretical and research attention
and is not intended to exhaustively subsume all thinking
October 1992 American Psychologist
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This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
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and faith in democracy was at no time greater than in the immediate postwar period. It was not a time when social scientists
were prompted to question the social system or look to institutional explanations of prejudice and discrimination. (Fairchild
&Gurin, 1978, p. 760)
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During the 1950s, therefore, the fundamental explanatory problem confronting psychologists appeared to
be that of identifying the prejudice-prone personality or
bigot. The dominant image of prejudice was in terms of
the expression of an inner need stemming from underlying pathology in the personality. Certain serious limitations of this individual-differences orientation to prejudice, however, became apparent later when the problem
of racism in the U.S. South became the salient issue.
Culture and Society: The 1960s and 1970s
At the end of the 1950s, the emphasis in explaining prejudice moved away from individual-level psychological
factors to broad social and cultural influences. This sociocultural perspective was clearly dominant during the
1960s and extended into the 1970s. It was associated with
a marked decline in psychological interest in the causes
of prejudice, particularly in comparison to the enthusiasm
of the 1950s. This decline was especially notable by the
late 1960s and 1970s, as the issue of explaining prejudice
came to be regarded as a primarily sociological enterprise.
Two distinct phases can be distinguished within this
overall period of sociocultural emphasis. These can be
seen as representing different responses to the distinctive
historical contexts and explanatory problems generated
by American race relations, first in the early 1960s and
then later in the 1970s. The general lack of psychological
interest during this period as a whole, and the fact that
these two phases share basically similar sociocultural assumptions, means that the difference between them is
easily obscured. Nevertheless, two quite different questions about the causation of prejudice can be distinguished
that, it will be pointed out later, are of crucial analytic
significance for the development of an overall integrative
framework for explaining prejudice. For this reason the
differences between these two phases, rather than the
similarities, will be accentuated, and they will be treated
as two distinct stages. The distinction between these two
phases is similar to one made by Ashmore and DelBoca
(1981) between consensus and conflict versions of the sociocultural perspective. In the present account it will be
suggested that the essential distinction between the two
periods is an emphasis on normative influence during the
early 1960s that later shifted to a preoccupation with intergroup dynamics and conflicts of interest during the
1970s.
The shift away from an individual-differences paradigm for explaining prejudice is usually attributed to
the limitations of this approachparticularly its inability
to account for the extremely high levels of prejudice in
social settings such as in the U.S. South or in South Africa
(cf. Pettigrew, 1958, 1959). These limitations, however,
had been empirically demonstrated long before this shift
occurred (e.g., Prothro, 1952; Prothro & Jensen, 1950;
October 1992 American Psychologist
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Table 2
Integrative Framework for Conceptualizing the Causation of Prejudice
Causal process
Psychological fundamentals of
prejudice
Social transmission of
prejudice
Individual differences
Nature of the
process
Universal psychological
processes underlying an
inherently human potential
for prejudice
Conditions of
intergroup contact
and interaction
that elaborate this
potentiality into
normative patterns
of prejudice
Transmission of
normative influences
to the individual in the
form of prejudiced
attitudes
Modulation of social
influence by
individual
differences in
susceptibility to
prejudice
Level of analysis
Psychological process
Social group
Interpersonal
Individual
Theories
Displacement
Belief similiarity
Projection
Social categorization
Social identification
Sociobiological
Realistic conflict
Social competition
Domination
Intergroup
differences
in status, power,
roles
Convergent group
boundaries
Conformity pressure
Socialization
Social perception and
attributions
Interpersonal contact
Authoritarianism
Frustration
Adjustment
Cognitive factors
Political ideology
Self-esteem
Note. From The Social Psychology of Prejudice by J. Duckitt, 1992, New York: Praeger. Copyright 1992 by John Duckitt. Adapted by permission of the Greenwood
Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT.
1190
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