ON THE NATURE OF PREJUDICE

Rejection or Inclusion of Outgroups? 91provided for the outgrowth of physical violence, the rarest and mostvitriolic expression of intergroup animosity. Intergroup violence eruptedfrom the gradual build-up of animosity, the first key step of which was thecategorical prejudgment of a group.Allport made two key arguments about these behaviors. First, they weredriven by animosity, and the extremity of the behavior was a directindicator of the degree of hatred felt by the perpetrator. Second, he wasemphatic that there was no rational or economic basis to these behaviors –even discrimination (which does bestow social and economic advantageson one’s own group) was motivated solely by irrationally founded, individuallygenerated hatred for the target group. Although he acknowledgedthe role of “facilitating” factors in the social environment, their effectwas to reinforce individual animosity and/or to release individuals frominhibitions about expressing their hatred. The most egregious examplesof intergroup violence represented explosions of hatred too intense to berestrained by normal social inhibitions against aggressive behaviors.Developments since AllportAllport’s analysis of prejudice and its behavioral manifestations did notshock his contemporaries. Indeed, it was consistent with the emphasis ofthose who preceded him (e.g., Deutsch & Collins, 1951; Myrdal, 1944;Williams, 1947), and The Nature of Prejudice loosely synthesized extantresearch. His homey, lucid exposition quickly became the reigning view(e.g., Duckitt, 2003; Stephan, 1985). Numerous revisions have been profferedto accommodate changes in racial attitudes since 1954 (Krysan,2000; Gaertner & Dovidio, ch. 5 this volume), but Allport’s emphasis ona naively founded, irrational, individual-level hostility as the essential coreof the problem has continued to hold sway among prejudice scholars.Consistent with Myrdal’s (1944) earlier lament that prejudice was a painfulanachronism that clashed with the democratic principles undergirding otherfacets of American life, scholars hoped to facilitate social progress by findingthe cure for democracy’s anomalous, festering sore – intergroup animositybased on ignorant, derogatory stereotypes. A vast literature on stereotypeswas spawned (e.g., Hamilton, 1981; Tajfel, 1969). Whites’ attitudes towardAfrican Americans were the focal concern, and theories concentrated onindividual-level factors such as personality, upbringing, or experiences suchas education and intergroup contact that were hypothesized to break downignorance and/or socialize individuals into enlightened, democratic norms