People and dogs are social creatures. We and they may be able to survive individually on our own, but we’d both rather not. In our case, it is doubtful how long most of us would be able to do so successfully.
Both dogs and people can be predators. We can be ready, willing, and able to hunt down and kill other creatures. In our case, those we kill (and, yes, sometimes eat) may even be others of our own kind (Siefkes 2022). Just as notably, we are also willing to kill as a form of entertainment. Whether dogs take pleasure in the act of killing is unknown, but certainly some people do find killing both thrilling and enjoyable. Unlike dogs, we are known to display the heads of those we kill as public witness to our evident prowess and worldly skill.
Furthermore, despite being remarkably social creatures, both dogs and people can develop personal likes and dislikes, fears , and avoidances. Yet despite their striking physical differences, dogs and people are not only able to get along well with one another, but may even develop deep affection for one another that we humans speak of as love.
If two creatures who are in many ways so different in their physical appearance and behavior can get along so famously, why are we as a species evidently so willing not only to favor our own likes and dislikes, fears and avoidances, but also act upon them in ways that can trivialize, demonize, exploit, and even lead to the death of others?
Dictionaries generally agree on what the English word prejudice means. This is the term to use to talk about an unfair and unreasonable opinion or feeling, especially when formed without enough thought or knowledge (“prejudice”).
Figure 0.1. Ten women and a little girl lined up for a bathing beauty contest, USA, 1920. Unnamed photographer for National Photo Company. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
The German word for prejudice is Vorurteil. According to the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, this word in German means “an unreflective judgment or over-hasty reasoning, resulting in bigotry of purely subjective opinion or the unreflective parroting of purely received wisdom” (Lawn and Keane 2011: 115). Similarly, back in 1764, the famous French philosopher Voltaire defined prejudice as “an opinion without judgment” in his Philosophy Dictionary (Cushing 2020: 27). Voltaire’s definition, however, did not imply that prejudice is always a negative judgment, nor should this word only be used when you are talking about people.
Nowadays, according to Charles Sibley and Fiona Kate Barlow in The Cambridge Handbook of the Psychology of Prejudice (2017), it is conventional to think of prejudice as disliking whole groups or kinds of people. Given this, the social psychologists Robin Bergh and Mark Brandt (2022) have classified prejudice in the United States under three headings, or categories: “prejudice against marginalized groups, prejudice against privileged/conservative groups, and prejudice against unconventional groups.” These bigoted or prejudiced hatreds of the “other” seem to be the contemporary, mainstream understanding of the word prejudice.
In 1954, the Harvard University professor Gordon Allport in The Nature of Prejudice—a book now widely recognized as a classic in the field of social psychology—focused attention on prejudice seen as a normal and understandable outcome of how we generally think about things and events as human beings. In particular, he defined ethnic prejudice as “an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization. It may be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group as a whole, or toward an individual because he is a member of that group.” He then added: “The net effect of prejudice, thus defined, is to place the object of prejudice at some disadvantage not merited by his own misconduct” (1954: 9).
In 1995, Stanley O. Gaines Jr. and Edward S. Reed critically observed that prejudice seen Allport’s way “has its roots in the fallibility of the human perceptive or cognitive process that leads to ‘thinking ill of others without sufficient warrant’” (1995: 97). They argued that prejudice viewed this way underplays the self-serving and intentional motivations that can be part of why we develop the prejudices we may act upon to the detriment of others.
Allport died in 1967. We cannot know how he would have replied to what Gaines and Reed wrote about his approach to understanding the roots of prejudice. In The Nature of Prejudice, he had been careful to offer several possible definitions of what this word means, starting with the one Gaines and Reed used in their critique: “Perhaps the briefest of all definitions of prejudice is: thinking ill of others without sufficient warrant” (Allport 1954: 6). He tells us that this definition, however, is too brief, although it includes what he saw as the two essential ingredients of all definitions of this word: “reference to unfounded judgment and to a feeling-tone.”
Contrary to many definitions of this word—including the one by Allport just given—that are about negative prejudices, he was careful to note that our personal biases (he uses this word rather than prejudice) can be pro as well as con. Therefore, he suggested a better definition would be: “A feeling, favorable or unfavorable, toward a person or thing, prior to, or not based on, actual experience.”
Allport emphasized that both of these definitions imply that our judgmental feelings are unwarranted whenever they lack a basis in fact. This may sound reasonable, and indeed many today would undoubtedly agree with the now-popular saying “facts matter.” But what is a fact? And as he acknowledged: “It is not easy to say how much fact is required in order to justify a judgment. A prejudiced person will almost certainly claim that he has sufficient warrant for his views” (1954: 7).
Allport also observed that few if any human judgments are based on absolute certainty. Even so, he made a point of saying that a judgment is unwarranted whenever it lacks factual support. And it is precisely such judgments, he wrote—particularly those made about ethnic groups—that are rightfully labeled as prejudices rather than merely as opinions, biases, or what he favors calling “prejudgments”:
Here we have the test to help us distinguish between ordinary errors of prejudgment and prejudice. If a person is capable of rectifying his erroneous judgments in the light of new evidence he is not prejudiced. Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge. A prejudice, unlike a simple misconception, is actively resistant to all evidence that would unseat it. We tend to grow emotional when a prejudice is threatened with contradiction. Thus the difference between ordinary prejudgments and prejudice is that one can discuss and rectify a prejudgment without emotional resistance. (1954: 9)
Simple Definitions of Prejudice
(following Gordon Allport)
1. Thinking things that aren’t true about other people.
2. Believing things that aren’t true about groups of people.
The Nature of Prejudice was published early in the Cold War following the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. Gordon Allport begins by first looking back briefly at what the world had then just been through less than a decade earlier. Despite our obvious mastery over energy, matter, and inanimate nature, he says, we are still living in the Stone Age when it comes to handling our human relationships. As prejudice in the United States alone shows unmistakably, although some of this endless antagonism may be based on genuine conflicts of interest, “most of it, we suspect, is a product of the fears of the imagination. Yet imaginary fears can cause real suffering” (Allport 1954: xiii).
Allport reassured his readers that not all is lost. “Especially encouraging is the fact that in recent years men in large numbers have become convinced that scientific intelligence may help us solve the conflict” between our human desires for peace and friendship, and our capacity for hatred, cruelty, and violence. “Let us make an objective study,” therefore, “of conflict in culture and industry, between people of different color and race; let us seek out the roots of prejudice and find concrete means for implementing men’s affiliative values.” It took years of labor and billions of dollars, he reminds us, to crack the secret of the atom. “It will take a still greater investment to gain the secrets of man’s irrational nature. It is easier, someone has said, to smash an atom than a prejudice.”
Allport’s enthusiasm seven decades ago for what the social sciences could do to save us from ourselves is unmistakable, although in this famous book his sights are only on clarifying the nature of prejudice. “But this issue is basic, for without knowledge of the roots of hostility we cannot hope to employ our intelligence effectively in controlling its destructiveness” (1954: xv).
Back then it certainly may have seemed reasonable and even self-evident to equate prejudice with ignorance and the worst characteristics of human nature. But what about our likes as well as our dislikes of people, things, and events? If liking vanilla ice cream or the music of Mozart rather than Bach aren’t displays of prejudice, what then are such enthusiasms, biases, and predilections? Are our likes somehow fundamentally different from our dislikes? Are our predilections different from our prejudices? Are love and hate just two sides of the same coin, or are they really two fundamentally different ways of responding to people, and events . . . not to mention to dogs, cats, and other creatures?
We have more to say in the rest of this book about what Allport and others have said about dealing with the challenges of prejudice and human suffering. Before doing so, we want to offer you three examples showing that despite what has been written since the appearance of The Nature of Prejudice, the social sciences have not succeeded in doing what Allport forecast they would be able to do about the realities of prejudice.
As we will discuss again in Chapter 1, Allport mostly limited the scope of his study by focusing on prejudice defined as believing false claims about particular groups of people—he calls them “ethnic groups”—or individuals seen as belonging to such groups. He rejected the alternative claim that our attitudes about people are only to be seen as prejudiced if they violate local norms or values: “there is not the slightest justification for confusing the objective facts of prejudice with cultural or ethical judgment of these facts.”
Having come down decidedly on the side of seeing prejudice as wrongfully judging other people, he confidently explains: “Some cultures, like our own, abjure prejudice; some do not; but the fundamental psychological analysis of prejudice is the same whether we are talking about Hindus, Navahos, the Greeks of antiquity, or Middletown, U.S.A. Whenever a negative attitude toward persons is sustained by a spurious overgeneralization we encounter the syndrome of prejudice. It is not essential that people deplore this syndrome. It has existed in all ages in every country. It constitutes a bona fide psychological problem. The degree of moral indignation engendered is irrelevant” (1954: 12).
If the word prejudice, however, just means having “a negative attitude toward persons” based on “spurious overgeneralization,” so what? What is the problem? More to the point, what should we make of the following examples of attitudes and practices, all of which have consequences that are real enough even when they are not seen as reprehensible?
To those of us who dearly love our furry companions, the idea of eating them instead of pampering them is unthinkable. Not all of us, however, are vegans or vegetarians. Most of us have no trouble eating a pork chop, or a dish of creamy chicken pasta made with diced chicken, thick-cut bacon, artichoke hearts, and spinach. Such seemingly contradictory facts may not add up to what Allport called prejudice, but they do qualify as personal or ethical judgments. Moreover, pigs and chickens confined to a barnyard might noisily disagree if they had the power of speech and knew they were destined for the dinner table.
This is not a contrived (or cooked-up) example. It has been estimated that as many as thirty million dogs are killed for human consumption each year. Trade today in dog meat is widespread, particularly in China, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, and northern India. As reported by the Humane Society International, this trade is well organized. Dogs are often stolen or taken off the streets, transported over long distances, and brutally slaughtered (“Asian Dog Meat Trade”).
Calling this trade a form of prejudice may seem farfetched. Looking more closely at the consequences suggests otherwise. According to FOUR PAWS, a global animal welfare organization founded in Vienna in 1988:
Aside from the obvious animal welfare issues, the trade also poses a significant health risk to both animals and humans. There is an undeniable link between the dog meat trade and rabies, and it is simply incompatible with regional and global rabies elimination strategies. In many cases, the trade and slaughter of dogs and cats for consumption also operates in breach of existing national disease control and prevention legislation, and encourages other illegal activities such as pet theft, which is a growing societal problem in the region (“Dog Meat Market” 2020: 4).
Figure 0.2. Dogs destined to be eaten. © FOUR PAWS Organization, used by permission.
Western biblical traditions of our Creation in the Garden of Eden tell us we are not like other creatures on Earth. We are uniquely different. We alone have souls and are capable of rational thought (Hatfield 2007, 2017). This helps explain why the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) found it so meaningful to declare in 1637: “je pense, donc je suis” (I think, therefore I am). Since then, these words have been one of the foundational ideas of modern Western philosophy, although his declaration is usually rendered not in French but rather in Latin as cogito, ergo sum (Holyoak and Morrison 2011: 1).
Others, too, have done their best to draw a clear boundary line between us and other earthly life forms. According to the historian Esther Cohen at Hebrew University of Jerusalem: “Perhaps the most extreme expression of this approach was Descartes’s idea, that animals are automata possessing neither sense nor feelings. Within this framework it was inconceivable that a beast should be placed in a human situation and treated as a human being” (1986: 16).
Descartes did not invent the idea of the soul, nor was he the first to grapple with the problem of how it is we are able to think about things that are not right there in front of us, to plot, to connive, and to wish even for unachievable rewards (Dennett 1988). To anyone, however, who has a much-loved family pet, the claim that animals other than ourselves cannot be thoughtful, loving, or hateful is incomprehensible. You might think, therefore, that favoring the companionship of family pets would mean being prejudiced also against eating other sorts of animals. Yet for many of us around the world, of course, this is not true, as a visit to any barnyard or slaughterhouse will attest. It may come as more of a surprise, however, that there is also no universal prejudice against the consumption of human flesh.
A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland, from Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick is a satirical essay written by Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) and first published anonymously in 1729. He suggests in this essay that those in Ireland who are poor should seriously consider selling their children to the rich to be eaten:
I am assured by our merchants, that a boy or a girl, before twelve years old, is no saleable commodity, and even when they come to this age, they will not yield above three pounds, or three pounds and half a crown at most, on the exchange; which cannot turn to account either to the parents or kingdom, the charge of nutriments and rags having been at least four times that value.
I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee [sic], or a ragoust. (Swift 1729)
Swift himself may not have wanted his proposal to be taken seriously. Rather, his intent was to ridicule those who were prejudiced in his day against the Irish and the poor of Ireland, who were predominantly of the Catholic faith. As Christian Siefkes (2022) has recently documented in much detail, however, history shows that human cannibalism—for instance, the capture and consumption of unwanted strangers and enslaved people—was decidedly a part of the slave trade in the colonialist history of Africa.
Seven months before the First World War ended when Germany surrendered to the Allied Powers on November 11, 1918, a German American named Robert Paul Prager was hanged from a tree shortly after midnight on April 5, 1918, in Collinsville, Illinois, while two hundred or so people watched (Schwartz 2002/2003). Born in 1886, Prager had immigrated to America in 1905. He was still a bachelor when he died. He had no relatives in the United States.
According to one commentator: “Shortly before his death he decided to become a miner, but his efforts to join the miners’ union were unsuccessful, probably because he was an active socialist (it seems likely that his German birth was not the reason for his rejection since there were many German-Americans in the Collinsville area who were union members)” (Hickey 1969: 118). Apparently the union president had accused Prager of being a spy and a liar, charges he strongly denied. Nonetheless, on Thursday, April 4, he was seized by a group of miners and forced to kiss an American flag. Luckily, he had gotten away thereafter and was able to go back to his lodgings. But his luck soon turned. As this same historian relates: “This security was short-lived, however. In the evening a group of miners gathered at a saloon on the outskirts of Collinsville. They discussed the events which had occurred earlier in the day and the accusations which had been made against Prager. Most of the miners were foreign-born and spoke little English, and it is believed that comments imputed to Prager were magnified completely out of proportion. The result was that the miners decided Prager was disloyal to the United States and must be punished” (1969: 119).
There is apparently little doubt drinking far too much alcohol by those who finally lynched him is part of the explanation for what happened. Nevertheless, when American newspapers got word of this appalling event, editorials demanded that those responsible should be punished to the full extent of the law. As one editorial insisted, mob violence is “a species of collective criminality for which there is just one cure: punishment.” The governor of Illinois at the time was also forthright in his condemnation of mob violence: “The action of the mob at Collinsville was as much an assault on the principle of democracy as the treasonable practices with which Prager was charged, even if that charge was true” (Hickey 1969: 123).
The leaders of the mob were arrested and held without bail pending grand jury action. Eleven men were finally brought to trial on May 13. The trial took three weeks. Seven hundred fifty men had been interviewed during the selection of the twelve men who were to finally determine the outcome. Those accused all denied responsibility for what had happened. They also did all they could to convince the jury that they were 100 percent American patriots.
After deliberating for just forty-five minutes, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty largely on the grounds that the lynching had been in a dark place, and hence ascertaining the identity of the actual perpetrators of the crime could not be done “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Major newspapers around the country condemned this outcome as a gross miscarriage of justice.
Why did this lynching happen? The historian Earl Schwartz has a fairly convincing answer. “Prager unquestionably died at the hands of drunken, hysterical men because he was German. But when they killed Prager, they were also killing their own fears of being accused of disloyalty, fears rooted in a bitter and divisive labor struggle” (2002/2003: 414). Seeing this lynching as an example of the power of prejudice may seem too obvious to need mention. As noted earlier, Prager’s execution was witnessed by at least two hundred people that night in 1918. If Schwartz is right, were they all experiencing more or less the same fear of being seen as unpatriotic during a time of war and labor unrest? Or were they seeing the event unfolding before their eyes through their own personal concerns, fears, and hatreds?
Popular synonyms for prejudice suggest there is substantial agreement on the meaning of this everyday word (see box). When it is taken to mean self-serving thought and behavior that is often, but not always, ignorant and harmful to others, then the three examples just given can all be seen as differing illustrations of what is often labeled in this way. What is more debatable, however, is why anyone would act in such judgmental, prejudiced ways.
Synonyms for the word prejudiced
righteous, dogmatic, pigheaded, biased, bigoted, hostile, unfair, partisan, discriminatory, partial, one-sided, jaundiced, unjust, intolerant, narrow-minded, inequitable, nonobjective, distorted, unobjective, blinkered, partisan, predisposed, warped, loaded, weighted, chauvinistic, chauvinist, sexist, racist, opinionated, intolerant.
Perhaps the most popular explanation for why people can be prejudiced is indeed that we are all too willing to jump to conclusions without careful observation and thought. In keeping with this conventional idea, we were often told while we were writing this book that there is no mystery about why people are prejudiced: Just look at the word itself. Break it apart, and there you have the answer. Prejudice is prejudgment. As we will be discussing throughout the rest of this book, however, pulling this word apart does not explain why anyone would behave in such a fashion. And looking up dictionary definitions of the word judgment offers little useful help in unraveling why we can all be prejudiced from time to time—for example, judgment: the ability to form valuable opinions and make good decisions (“judgment”).
The three historical and contemporary examples just given suggest a more useful explanation. As discussed in Chapter 3 using three case studies, it is possible to be prejudiced in astonishingly unpredictable ways. Nonetheless, there is something about human nature—about how we are naturally able to deal with the challenges of life—that can lead anyone to become prejudiced in one way or another. What we mean by the often-misunderstood phrase human nature will be discussed in some detail in Chapter 2.
The major conclusion about prejudice and human nature we offer you in this book is that prejudice should be defined in this way: only seeing people, things, and events from your own point of view. We have come to this conclusion for several reasons.
Saying that being prejudiced shows you suffer from something called prejudice is an example of the logical error called the “fallacy of reification” (also known as the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”). This fallacy is the blunder of mistaking something that is only a thought or an idea as something that is real, concrete, and even touchable. Classic examples would be the claim that someone does stupid things because they suffer from something called “stupidity.” Or the claim that how intelligent you are depends on how much of something called “intelligence” you were lucky enough to be born with—perhaps in such abundance you can even be called a genius and compared with Albert Einstein. Or sadly, something you do not have nearly enough of, and so find yourself being seen by others, at least behind your back, as silly, stupid, or plainly idiotic.
The human brain is not a computer, and prejudice is not a biologically inherited computer program lodged somewhere in your brain up there on your shoulders. As we discuss in some detail in the next two chapters, our prejudices are learned reactions and predilections. They are shaped and limited by how and what our senses are able to communicate to us. They are also shaped and honed by how we try to make sense of what we are picking up in this way from the outside world about people, things, and events happening around us. In this book, we call them personal prejudices. Furthermore, our prejudices are also informed by what others tell us about what is right or wrong, proper or improper, and so on. In this book, they are called social prejudices.
Both our own personal prejudices and our socially informed prejudices can have consequences for others if they lead us to act in ways that are either selfish or altruistic. If you hate someone, for instance, you may try to hurt or kill them. If you love someone, you may ask them to marry you.
As discussed in Chapter 1, our prejudices can also be institutional prejudices. As Stanley Gaines Jr. and Edward Reed wrote, despite Allport’s fairly benign understanding of prejudice as the fallibility of human awareness, our prejudices can lead us to be selfish and self-serving not just when acting on our own but by ganging up with others—informally or in some formal way (e.g., by referendum or a show of hands)—to the detriment and even the survival of others. Discrimination is a word for behaving in this prejudiced way.
What is discrimination?
An assumption, claim, interpretation, categorization, labeling, etc. that is self-centered, inconsiderate, thoughtless, uncaring, insensitive, tactless, uncharitable, unkind, grasping, greedy, mercenary, or opportunistic
As we have already said in this chapter, Western biblical tradition tells us we are uniquely different from other creatures. The philosopher René Descartes not only went along with this claim but told us in no uncertain terms that we are the only creatures who are lucky enough to have souls, and therefore are the only ones able to think in rational ways. However grand and wonderful such claims may sound, we are going to try to convince you that being prejudiced is a manifestation, a sign or symptom, of the fact that we are not as superior or godlike as we might wish to believe we are. In particular, and for understandable reasons, we have a hard time seeing things as other people see them, difficulty seeing things from their point of view. No wonder, therefore, we are sometimes—more often than we even realize—prejudiced to a fault.
Being so self-centered is not necessarily something we have to work at doing. Ironically, as highly social creatures, wanting to feel safe, secure, and in control can easily lead us to favor being with—or at least identifying with—others we believe are a lot like ourselves.
A fallacy is an idea, a mistaken belief, that is widely taken to be true but is simply a deceptively bad argument (“fallacy”). One of the unexpected results of writing this book was discovering how widely accepted as true is the common belief that there are things out there in the real world variously called groups, in-groups, out-groups, social groups, and the like (e.g., Duckitt and Sibley 2017; Fiske 2012). We hope to convince you that this conventional belief is an example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Groups can’t have prejudices because they don’t exist. As we explain in the Conclusion to this book, this does not mean that we cannot share our prejudices with others we live with, work with, or love. But there is a world of difference between using the little word group as a noun (as something in the real world) and as a verb (as in “to group” or “to create a grouping”—the latter confusingly also called “group”).
As we will be saying repeatedly in this book, the human brain “groups” what we are experiencing in life to keep things and events as simple as possible and as memorable as may be needed as time goes by. Another less conventional word meaning “to group” is the verb “to categorize.” This is a word we have already used in this chapter. We will be using it often in the chapters yet to follow.
Here is a brief look at what you will find in the rest of this book. Chapter 1 explores three ways in which all of us can be prejudiced. Chapter 2 sets out how to unravel and try to understand the reasons, motivations, and real costs of being prejudiced. Chapter 3 offers three case studies of being prejudiced drawn from different places around the world to show how challenging it can be to explain why people behave this way. In our Conclusion, we summarize the main issues we have discussed and offer practical suggestions on how to confront the social, economic, and practical costs of behaving in this way.