What is prejudice?

Throughout my research two words kept recurring: Stigma and prejudice, see Summary of findings of the Uganda Disability Review Part 1 of 2. I have discussed stigma in three previous blog posts: What is Stigma? Stigma and Disability: Stereotypes and Reducing the Stigma of HIV/AIDS in Uganda. This blog will ask what is prejudice? Wikipedia says:

Prejudice is prejudgement or forming an opinion before becoming aware of the relevant facts of a case. The word is often used to refer to preconceived, usually unfavorable, judgments toward people or a person because of their gender, beliefs, values, social class, age, disability, religion, sexuality, race/ethnicity, language, nationality, beauty, occupation, education, criminality or other personal characteristics. In this case, it refers to a positive or negative evaluation of another person based on their perceived group membership.

Wikipedia also notes that:

Prejudice can be a central contributing factor to depression. This can occur in someone who is a prejudice victim, being the target of someone else's prejudice, or when people have prejudice against themselves that causes their own depression.

In his 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice Gordon Allport theorizes that we form opinions and make assumptions using stereotypes. Allport suggests decisions are made using the path of least resistance, making the quickest and simplest choice. For instance when selecting an employee for a job there are severe time constraints so it is important to consider all the things the candidate presents before and during their interview. A well presented resume may indicate a tidy methodical approach. The way the person is dressed, may cause the interviewer to assumed they will be untidy if the interviewee is scruffy. Or again again if a person arrives late for the interview it may be assumed they will always be late. These shortcuts of course are flawed. The late applicant may have been late because of no fault of their own, or the tidy dresser may be untidy. Prejudice uses stereotypes without thinking and therefore leads to discrimination.

More recent theories of prejudice tend to focus on ingroups/outgroups. The human mind likes to categorize, it tends to place people in different categories. Taking for example sexism, men (the ingroup) tend to be more favorable to other men than women (the outgroup), this is called ingroup bias. It happens with all groups where there is a perceived difference, the ingroup discriminates against the outgroup.

The integrated threat theory (ITT) takes the ideas from all the theories of prejudice and it shows how threats combine to produce prejudice. The theory is supported by research and identifies four threats from an outgroup to an ingroup. These four threats are, (see WOMEN’S ATTITUDES TOWARD MEN: An Integrated Threat Theory Approach):

1. Realistic threats: come from a tangible source, like competition for natural resources.
2. Symbolic threats: Are a perceived threat based on an an imbalance of power, like for instance an ingroup seeing an outgroup's religion as incompatible.
3. Inter group anxiety: Is the feeling of uneasiness that is felt when an ingroup and an outgroup meet each other.
4. Negative stereotypes: We have seen how negative stereotypes operate in Stigma and Disability: Stereotypes. 

Let us all rise up against discrimination and stigma.

Considering all these ideas it seems that prejudice and stigma overlap and operate in similar ways. The 2008 report Stigma, prejudice, discrimination and health addresses this very issue. The report says, two lines of study have informed us about discrimination they are the work of Erving Goffman in his 1963 book Stigma: notes on the management of spoiled identity and the work of Girdon Allport in The Nature of Prejudice. The authors of this editorial continue:

We believe the differences between the research traditions of stigma as compared to that of prejudice and discrimination have more to do with different subjects of interest rather than any real conceptual difference. Stigma research has traditionally emphasized studying people with “unusual” conditions such as facial disfigurement, HIV/AIDS, short stature and mental illness. By contrast, researchers focused on prejudice and discrimination tend to focus on the far more ordinary, but clearly powerful implications of gender, age, race and class divisions. The article in this Special Issue by Phelan, Link, and Dovido (2008) supports this contention. The authors conclude that the social processes of stigma and prejudice are quite similar, but that the historical reasons underlying why societies stigmatize or are prejudicial tend to vary. They show how research in the prejudice tradition grew from concerns with social processes driven by exploitation and domination, such as racism, while work in the stigma tradition has been more concerned with processes driven by enforcement of social norms and disease avoidance...
The point is, when prejudice researchers focus on forms of discrimination to the exclusion of stigma-related stress processes they are missing important dimensions of the stress process likely contributing to poor health outcomes. When stigma researchers focus on internalizing or vigilance behavior to the exclusion of interpersonal and structural forms of prejudice and discrimination, they too are missing important dimensions of the stress process. We argue that health researchers from each tradition should incorporate the dimensions of stress processed emphasized in the other’s approach. Because such a rich conceptual scheme is rarely deployed, we suspect, the health impacts of discrimination and stigma have been ill-defined and minimized. Furthermore, without such a rich conceptual scheme, the ability to examine interactions among the various forms of stress is compromised.

This 2007 editorial Stigma: ignorance, prejudice or discrimination? raises similar issues. Stigma, they say is all about problems with knowledge not being processed properly. The knowledge is stereotypical and is really ignorance. The resulting attitudes which come from this ignorance are prejudice and the behavior this creates which is discrimination. Stigma research is complex the authors argue and should focus on the resulting discrimination. Increasing knowledge does not improve the understanding of stigma. They then turn to prejudice:

Although the term `prejudice' is used to refer to many social groups that experience disadvantage, for example minority ethnic groups, it is employed rarely in relation to people with mental illness. The reactions of a host majority to act with prejudice in rejecting a minority group usually involve not just negative thoughts but also emotions such as anxiety, anger, resentment, hostility, distaste or disgust. In fact, prejudice may more strongly predict discrimination than do stereotypes.

Research, they conclude, should focus more on discrimination than stigma or prejudice, because discrimination is the final result of stigma and prejudice:

Finally – and most importantly – such a shift of focus would make it possible for people with mental illness to expect to benefit from relevant anti-discrimination policies and laws in their country or jurisdiction, on a basis of parity with people with physical disabilities (Thornicroft, 2006). In sum, this means sharpening our focus upon human rights, upon injustice and discrimination as actually experienced by people with mental illness, and upon adding to our knowledge about interventions that society should undertake to reduce both stigmatisation and its consequences.

In summary, prejudice is related closely to stigma. When someone acts on prejudice they discriminate against someone or something. Perhaps, as suggested, studying discrimination would yield more information than study of either stigma or prejudice. Any work that seeks to reduce prejudice and/or stigma is possibly missing the point. The focus focus of research should be on the outcome of stigma and prejudice, discrimination.