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Prejudice
Racism
Roots of Racial Attitudes
Aversive Racism
Supremacy
Ethnocentrism
Stigma
  • William Graham Sumner
  • Bruno Lasker
  • Ruth Horrowiez 
  • Kenneth Clark 
  • Mamie Clark
  • Marie Jahoda
  • Gordon Willard Allport  
  • Erving Goffman
  • Marjorie Mcdonald
  • Joel Kovel 
  • Howard J. Ehrlich 
  • Phyllis A. Katz 
  • Frances Aboud
  • Frances Cress Welsing 
  • Goldberg and Hodes
  • William A. Spriggs
  • Sami Timimi, M.D.
  • Howard Fishbein
  • James M. Jones
  • J. M. Casas
  • Ponterotto, Utsey, Pedersen
  • Fein and Spencer 
  • John Duckitt
  • Werner Bohleber
  • C. Daniel Batson
    E. L. Stocks

Pioneer

Areas of Research

Seminal Works
Friedrich Tiedemann 
1781 – 1861
German anatomist and physiologist.
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1820
Tiedemann devoted himself to the study of natural science, and, upon moving to Paris, France, became an ardent follower of Georges Cuvier. On his return to Germany he maintained the claims of patient and sober anatomical research against the prevalent speculations of the school of Lorenz Oken, whose foremost antagonist he was long reckoned. His remarkable studies of the development of the human brain, as correlated with his father's studies on the development of intelligence, deserve mention.

Tiedemann was one of the first persons to make a scientific contestation of racism, in his article entitled "On the Brain of the Negro, compared with that of the European and the Orang-outang" (1836) he argued based on craniometric and brain measures taken by him from Europeans and black men from different parts of the world that the then-common European belief that Negroes have smaller brains and are thus intellectually inferior is scientifically unfounded and based merely on the prejudice of travelers and explorers.
Tiedemann, Friedrich (1836). "On the Brain of the Negro, compared with that of the european and the orang-outang". Phil. Trans 126.
The Great Physiologist of Heidelberg - Friedrich Tiedemann by Stephen Jay Gould
William Graham Sumner
1840-1910
Early sociologist
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Coined “Ethnocentrism”
Assumed that ingroup love was correlated to outgroup hostility
Developed ideas on diffusion an folkways. 
Bruno Lasker
1880-1965
  • Race attitudes in children
  • Psychology of racism
Lasker considered racism to be innate, later studies showed that animosity toward particular groups is taught, but that people have a natural tendency to categorize.
Race Attitudes in Children, by Bruno Lasker, The Nation, June 26, 1929
Ruth Horrowiez 
From a Freudian viewpoint, Horrowiez argued that beginning of race consciousness could be seen as a function of ego development.
Kenneth Clark 
1914–2005

Mamie Clark
1917–83
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The Clarks’ doll experiments (1930s to 1940s) 
Suggested that US Black children preferred to play with White dolls. U.S. Supreme Court later cited findings as evidence that segregation “generates a feeling of inferiority... that may affect the childrens’ hearts and minds.” Kenneth was first African American to be elected President of the American Psychological Association. 

Focused on alienated youth in the 1950s. Racism research was turned into the study of prejudice, “social scientists are now convinced that children learn social, racial and religious prejudices through the course of observing and being influenced by patterns in the culture in which they live.”

(In 2006 Kiri Davis recreated the doll study in film A Girl Like Me. Despite societal changes, results were same as the Clarks.)
Prejudice and Your Child

Clark, Kenneth B. & Clark, Mamie K. (1939). The development of consciousness of self and the emergence of racial identification in negro preschool children. Journal of Social Psychology, S.P.S.S.I. Bulletin, 10, 591-599.

Clark, Kenneth B. & Clark, Mamie K. (1940). Skin color as a factor in racial identification of negro preschool children. Journal of Social Psychology, S.P.S.S.I. Bulletin, 11, 159-169.
Marie Jahoda 
(1907-2001)
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In 1958 Jahoda developed the theory of Ideal Mental Health. Through her work she identified five categories which she said were vital to feelings of well-being (1982, 87). These were: time structure, social contact, collective effort or purpose, social identity or status, and regular activity. She maintained that the unemployed were deprived of all five, and that this accounted for much of the reported mental ill-health among unemployed people.

Jahoda founded the Research Center of Human Relations, and was recruited by the University of Sussex in 1965, where she became Professor of Social Psychology. Later at Sussex University she became consultant, and then Visiting Professor, at the Science Policy Research Unit.
Studies in Prejudice
  • Christie, Richard, and Jahoda, Marie, eds. Studies in the Scope and Methods of the Authoritarian Personality. Glencoe, IL: 1954
  • Jahoda, Marie, and Cooper, E. The Evasion of Propaganda: How Prejudiced People Respond to Anti-prejudice Propaganda. Journal of Psychology 23 (1947): 15–25
  • Jahoda, Marie, Deutsch, Morton, and Cook, Stuart W. Research Methods in Social Relations. New York: 1951.
Gordon Willard Allport 
(1897 –1967)
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Highly influential Social Psychologist
  • Defined prejudice as negative bias toward a particular group of people. 
  • Developed Trait Theory 
  • Advanced concepts of Genotypes and Phenotypes.
  • The Nature of Prejudice. (1954; 1979). Addison-Wesley Pub. Co. 
  • Psychology of Rumor. [with Leo Postman] (1948). Henry Holt and Co. 
  • Attitudes. In A Handbook of Social Psychology, ed. C. Murchison, (1935). Clark University Press, 789–844.
  • Personality: A psychological interpretation. (1937) New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.
Erving Goffman
(1922 – 1982)
Canadian Sociologist and Writer
Identified 3 main ways that people respond to stigmatizing social labels

  • Physical defects
  • Personal weaknesses or character blemishes
  • Social: member of undesirable group 
Marjorie Mcdonald
Theorized an instinctive, unconscious reaction to different colors of skin, but later changed her view:  “all forms of prejudice have certain common characteristics in the mechanisms which form and maintain them.” Realized a pattern to all forms of prejudice. Children can recognize color differences at early age but only becomes anxiety or prejudice after conditioning, such as seeing parents react to difference “he’s not our kind.”
Not by the Color of Their Skin; The Impact of Racial Differences on the Child's Development. New York: International Universities Press, 1970. 
Joel Kovel 
(Born 1936)
Psychiatrist
Social critic
Eco-activist
Coined concept of “aversive racism.”
Found white individuals who publicly advocated egalitarian principles may tacitly believe in their racial superiority. 

Controversial figure for views on Israel-Palestine, Marxism 
and globalization.
White Racism: A Psychohistory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984

Recent Research

Howard J. Ehrlich 
Posits that prejudice is based on the child’s assignment of 
stereotypes to self and to other racial/ethnic children. 
Currently Director of The Prejudice Institute.    
The social psychology of prejudice: a systematic theoretical review and propositional inventory of the American social psychological study of prejudice. Wiley, 1973
Phyllis A. Katz 
Studied children’s development of racial attitudes. In 1997, she showed 6-month-old infants several pictures of African Americans and then showed the infants a picture of a white American. Babies looked at the last picture for a significantly longer time, suggesting they were aware of the difference. Conducted study on 100 white infants and 100 African American infants, with the same results. “infants as young as 6 months old recognize racial cues, even before they develop language skills.”
Acquisition of racial attitudes in children

Racists or Tolerant Multiculturalists? How Do They Begin?American Psychologist, Vol 58(11), Nov 2003, 897-909.


Eliminating Racism: Profiles in Controversy, Plenum Press, 1988
Frances Aboud 
Developmental social psychologist
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Social psychology of prejudice 
Developed McGill Friendship Questionnaire with Morton Mendelson to study how children develop friendships and classify others.  Found that less prejudiced children can influence racist children to have cross-ethnic friendships.
Aboud, F.E. & Amato, M. (2001). Developmental and socialization influences on intergroup bias

Children and Prejudice
Frances Cress Welsing 
(born 1935 in Chicago)  Psychiatrist  
Cress Theory of Color

Defined White supremacy as “a system of power and domination, determined consciously or subconsciously, and embedded in the logic, thought, speech, action, perceptions, and affective response of people who classify themselves as White.” 

Sees White supremacy as a factor underlying various forms of racism found in contemporary U.S. society.
  • Made controversial statements discounting black homosexuality as not being an authentic orientation, but imposed by the envy of white males.

Frances, Cress Welsing (1990). The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors. Third World Press.
Goldberg and Hodes
Goldberg, D., & Hodes, M. (1992). The Poison of Racism and the Self-Poisoning of Adolescents. Journal of Family Therapy, 14(1), 51-67.
William A. Spriggs
Evolutionary Psychology and The Origins Of Bigotry And Prejudice
Sami Timimi, M.D.
Using an object relations framework, posited that racism is driven by the underlying anxiety (fear and apprehension) associated with a person’s difficulty in tolerating people who are racially different from themselves and the inability to resist attempts at controlling or dominating those persons. 
His views have evoked debate and controversy.
Howard Fishbein
University of Cincinnati
Maintains that from infancy human beings are naturally predisposed to recognize differences. The ability to discern difference served ancient societies by helping them keep their guard up against outsiders who might hurt or kill them. 

Research indicates that by the age of 3, children develop a sense of “outsiders”-people who are different from themselves-and because of societal influence, may target those outsiders for prejudicial behaviors.
James M. Jones
Racism scholar
University of Delaware 
Described racism as “resulting from the transformation of race prejudice and/or ethnocentrism through the exercise of power against a racial group defined as inferior, by individuals and institutions with the intentional or unintentional support of the entire culture.” 

Distinguished forms of individual, institutional, and cultural racism. Individual racism occurs when individuals discriminate against members of another racial group because they believe that their own group is superior. Overt racial slurs and hate crimes are examples of individual racism.
From his web page:
Cultural psychology, temporal orientation; prejudice & racism, coping and stress
Professor Jones' major interests concern psychosocial mechanisms for adapting to and coping with the chronic accessibility of racism as a potential explanation for life’s experiences. This “Universal context of racism” (UCR), has motivational consequences that include both self-protection (reducing the negative effects of stigma and discrimination) and self-enhancement (social comparative and individual mechanisms for maintaining self-worth). Research in our lab focuses on the cognitive, emotional and behavioral responses to activation of the UCR for both targets of racism and members of groups historically viewed as the perpetrators of racism.
Google Books: Prejudice and racism - James M. Jones
  • Brown, W.T. & Jones, J.M. (2004) The substance of things hoped for: A study of the future orientation, minority status perceptions, academic engagement, and academic performance of Black high school students. Journal of Black Psychology, 30(2), 248-273.
  • Jones, J.M. (2003) TRIOS: A Psychological Theory of African Legacy in American Culture. Journal  of Social Issues, 59, 217-241.
  • Jones, J.M. , Lynch, P.D., Tenglund, A.A. & Gaertner , S.G. (2000) Toward a Diversity Hypothesis: Multidimensional Effects of Intergroup Contact. Applied and Preventive Psychology, 9(1), 53-62.
  • Lasane, T.P. & Jones, J.M. (2000) When socially induced temporal myopia interferes with academic goal-setting. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 15(5), 75-86.
  • Jones, J.M. (1998) Psychological Knowledge And the New American Dilemma of Race.Journal of Social Issues, 54, 638-652.
J. M. Casas
Racism is “based on beliefs and reflected in behaviors that accept race as a biological entity and maintain that racial groups, other than one’s own, are intellectually, psychologically, and/or physically inferior”
Ponterotto
Utsey
Pedersen
2006
Manifestations of racism are direct and indirect, blatant and subtle in contemporary society.
Fein and Spencer
1997 
Insecure people boost self-esteem by denigrating others
John Duckitt
1998:  
  • Social psychology of prejudice, intergroup hostility
  • Helped develop Subtle Racism scale
Werner Bohleber
The Presence of the Past--Xenophobia and Rightwing Extremism in the Federal Republic of Germany: Psychoanalytic Reflections
C. Daniel Batson
E. L. Stocks
  • Religion and Prejudice
  • Prosocial behavior and altruism
Batson, C. D. (1998). Altruism and prosocial behavior. In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, & G. Lindzey, (Eds.). The handbook of social psychology. New York: McGraw Hill.