Prejudice vs. Discrimination In Social Psychology

Examples of Discrimination

Discrimination can manifest in various ways across different contexts. Here are some examples:

• Racial and Ethnic Discrimination: Refusing to hire someone because of their racial or ethnic background.
• Gender Discrimination: Paying a woman less than a man for the same job solely based on gender.
• Age Discrimination: Not hiring an older individual because of a belief that they might not be tech-savvy or adapt to change.
• Disability Discrimination: Not providing reasonable accommodations in the workplace for individuals with disabilities or treating them unfavorably because of their disability.
• Sexual Orientation Discrimination: Harassing someone or denying them services because they identify as LGBTQ+.
• Religious Discrimination: Not allowing an employee time off to observe a religious holiday or mocking them for wearing religious attire.
• National Origin Discrimination: Treating someone unfavorably because they are from a particular country or part of the world.
• Pregnancy Discrimination: Not hiring or promoting a woman because she is pregnant or might become pregnant.
• Socio-economic Discrimination: Treating someone unfavorably because of their social class or economic status.
• Language or Accent Discrimination: Mocking someone or denying them opportunities because of their accent or the language they speak.

Theories of Prejudice and Discrimination

Social Identity Theory

Developed by Henri Tajfel and John Turner, social identity theory proposes that people categorize themselves into in-groups (groups they belong to) and out-groups (groups they do not). This categorization boosts self-esteem.

The process of social categorization can lead to in-group favoritism and out-group derogation.

Consequently, to maintain positive self-worth and group identity, individuals may display prejudice towards out-groups and preferential treatment towards in-group members.

Key study: the minimal group paradigm (Tajfel et al., 1971).

Aim: To find the minimum conditions needed to produce discrimination between groups, stripped of competition, self-interest or prior contact.

Method: 64 British schoolboys were split into groups using a trivial, meaningless criterion, such as a stated preference for one painter over another. Working alone, each boy allocated points, convertible into real money, to anonymous members of his own group and the other group.

Results: Boys reliably gave more points to their own group. Many chose to maximise the gap between the two groups’ totals, even when this meant their own group received less overall.

Conclusion: Simply categorising people into ‘us’ and ‘them’ is enough to produce discrimination. No competition or prior conflict is required.

Realistic Conflict Theory

Realistic (group) conflict theory was proposed by Muzafer Sherif (1966), not Donald Campbell. Sherif argued that intergroup hostility arises from a real conflict of interests. When two groups want the same scarce goal, hostility follows. He claimed competition alone is enough to cause it.

Donald Campbell (1965) reached a similar conclusion from a different angle. He argued that ethnocentrism and intergroup hostility evolved as a group-level adaptation for competing over resources, arriving at the same idea through evolutionary theory rather than social psychology.

Key study: the Robbers Cave experiment (Sherif et al., 1961).

Aim: To test whether putting two groups into competition for scarce goals is enough to produce hostility, and whether cooperation can then reduce it.

Method: 22 boys attended a summer camp at Robbers Cave State Park, Oklahoma. Researchers split them into two groups, the Rattlers and the Eagles, then ran a tournament for a trophy only one group could win.

Results: Hostility escalated fast. Name-calling, flag-burning, cabin raids and food fights followed. When the researchers then gave both groups a task neither could finish alone, such as repairing the camp’s water supply, the hostility fell. By the end, most boys named friends from the other group.

Conclusion: The lesson was simple. Competition alone is enough to create intergroup hostility between strangers. Only cooperation toward a shared goal, not mere contact, reliably reduced it.

Scapegoating Theory

Scapegoating involves blaming an innocent person or group for problems or misfortunes. Dollard et al. (1939) proposed that frustration always produces aggression. When the true source of frustration cannot be attacked directly, people displace that aggression onto a substitute target instead.

The substitute target is not chosen at random. It is a group that is already socially stereotyped, so blaming them feels acceptable.

In the southern United States between 1880 and 1930, lynchings of black people rose as the price of cotton fell (Hovland & Sears, 1940). This tracked economic frustration, not anything the victims had done.

This results in undue prejudice and discrimination towards the scapegoated group.

Authoritarian Personality Theory

Adorno et al. (1950) proposed the authoritarian personality: a personality structure, shaped by a harsh and punitive upbringing, that predisposes a person to be hostile towards minority and outgroups. Individuals with an authoritarian personality tend to be rigid, conformist, and intolerant of ambiguity.

Adorno and colleagues studied over 2,000 white, non-Jewish, middle-class Americans using interviews and projective tests. They developed the F scale to measure it. Scores on the F scale correlated strongly with antisemitism and general hostility to outgroups.

These traits make an authoritarian person more susceptible to black-and-white thinking. They divide the world rigidly into ‘us’ (good) and ‘them’ (bad), leading to heightened prejudice against out-groups.

Conformity

Influences that cause individuals to be racist or sexist may come from peers, parents, and group members. Conforming to social norms means adopting the “normal” behaviour of a particular group or society.

Social norms are the behaviours considered appropriate within a social group. They can influence prejudice and discrimination.

People may hold prejudiced beliefs and act in a prejudiced way simply because they are conforming to what is regarded as normal in their social group.

Minard (1952) tested this directly. He observed black and white miners in a southern United States town, both above and below ground.

Below ground, where the norm was friendly behaviour towards colleagues, 80 of the white miners were friendly towards the black miners. Above ground, where the norm was prejudiced behaviour, this dropped to 20.

Same miners, different norms. Whether prejudice is shown depends on the social context, not fixed personal belief.

Pettigrew (1959) also studied conformity and prejudice. He found that more conformist people were also more prejudiced, and this held true for white South African students.

Conformity, not personality, explained a regional pattern too. Prejudice against black people was higher in the Southern United States than in the North because it was more socially acceptable there, not because Southerners had different personalities.

Rogers and Frantz (1962) found that immigrants to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) grew more prejudiced the longer they lived there. They gradually conformed to the local norm of prejudice against the black population.

Evaluation: Conformity to social norms can explain some prejudice. But norms themselves change over time, so this is only a partial explanation.

Critical Evaluation

Reading these theories together, rather than as separate demonstrations, exposes some real problems that no single theory solves on its own.

The Authoritarian Personality: An Individual Explanation

Adorno et al.’s (1950) scales have a basic flaw: every item is worded so that agreement signals prejudice. An acquiescent respondent scores as authoritarian regardless of their real beliefs.

Brown (1988) raised a bigger objection. Because the theory locates prejudice inside a personality formed over a childhood, it cannot explain population-wide shifts.

Prejudice can rise and fall much faster than personalities could plausibly change. Antisemitism intensified across Germany in barely a decade, and anti-Japanese prejudice in the United States surged within weeks of Pearl Harbor.

A second, separate critique follows.

Rokeach (1960) argued that every F-scale item is worded with right-wing content, so the scale cannot separate a generally closed-minded style from a specifically right-wing one.

In his own testing, Communist students scored low on the F-scale. Yet they scored highest on a content-neutral dogmatism measure. This suggests a rigid, intolerant style exists on the political left too, simply invisible to Adorno’s instrument.

Competition vs Categorization: Sufficient, But Not Necessary

Sherif’s (1966) claim that competition is enough to cause hostility is well supported by Robbers Cave. But sufficient is not the same as necessary.

Tajfel et al.’s (1971) minimal-group studies produced favouritism with no competition, no prior contact, and no material stake at all. Realistic conflict theory alone cannot explain that.

The reverse gap exists too. Tyerman and Spencer (1983) ran a similar competitive-camp design using boy scouts who already knew each other and were experienced campers, not strangers thrown together for three weeks. They found no rise in hostility during competition.

Read together, the two theories resolve each other’s gap. Competition intensifies hostility where it exists, but mere categorisation can produce a milder version of the same bias with no competition at all.

Contemporary Research

Two questions have shaped prejudice research since 2015: does reducing implicit bias change real behaviour, and does intergroup contact still work once publication bias is corrected for?

Does Reducing Implicit Bias Change Behaviour?

Aim: To identify which interventions durably reduce implicit racial bias, not just performance on a single test.

Method: Lai et al. (2016) randomly assigned participants across nine studies to one of nine bias-reduction techniques, or a control, then re-tested them after a delay of hours to days.

Results: Most techniques reduced bias immediately after the intervention. At the delayed re-test, none of the nine techniques produced an effect reliably different from zero.

Conclusion: Implicit bias can be shifted in a single session, but none of the leading 2016 techniques produced change durable enough to explain real-world discrimination reduction on its own.

Does Contact Still Reduce Prejudice?

Aim: To estimate the true effect of intergroup contact using only studies whose outcome measures were set in advance, to remove reporting bias.

Method: Lowe (2025) pooled 41 preregistered contact experiments, using only each study’s pre-registered primary outcome. He then tested whether Allport’s (1954) conditions for contact, such as equal status and common goals, made a difference.

Results: The effect was real.

It was about a tenth of a standard deviation, markedly smaller than Pettigrew and Tropp’s (2006) earlier estimate. Contact changed attitudes toward the people actually met, but this only weakly generalised to the outgroup as a whole.

Conclusion: Intergroup contact still helps. It remains a real, if more modest, tool for reducing prejudice. The bigger unsolved problem is generalisation: contact changes minds about people met, not reliably about groups.

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