The Nature of Prejudice

Allport's core argument is that prejudice is essentially a by-product of the normal, necessary cognitive shortcuts the human mind uses to manage informational overload. Because the brain cannot process every detail of every person and group, it relies on categories and generalizations; prejudice emerges when these ordinary categorizing processes become rigid, overgeneralized, and emotionally charged . This rejects earlier explanations that treated prejudice primarily as learned conditioning from negative experiences or as a rational response to real group differences. Allport does not deny that learning and group conflict matter, but he relocates the fundamental mechanism in the architecture of human cognition itself, making prejudice a universal human tendency rather than a pathology of the ignorant or the evil.

The most enduring contribution is the intergroup contact hypothesis. Allport proposed that contact between members of different groups can reduce prejudice, but only under specified conditions: equal status within the contact situation, common goals, intergroup cooperation, and support from authorities or custom. This was a decisive reversal of earlier assumptions that contact breeds conflict . Thomas Pettigrew and Kerstin Hammann later identified this as the book's most lasting contribution, noting that it is now supported by "literally hundreds of studies from dozens of nations" . The contact hypothesis remains the foundational framework for research on prejudice reduction, and contemporary work continues to test and refine Allport's original conditions.

The cognitive core of Allport's argument has been substantially vindicated and refined. Contemporary research on the need for cognitive closure (NFC) has provided strong empirical support for Allport's hypothesis that a general motivated cognitive style underlies prejudice. Arie Kruglanski and colleagues have shown that the need for closure—a desire for firm answers and aversion to ambiguity—predicts racism and sexism, and that this effect is mediated by essentialist thinking and authoritarian ideology . This research effectively translates Allport's somewhat impressionistic notion of the "prejudiced personality" into a measurable construct. However, later work has also complicated his pessimism: intergroup contact appears especially effective in reducing prejudice among people high in NFC, contrary to Allport's more fatalistic predictions about rigid personalities .

Allport's Scale is a five-point measure of the manifestation of prejudice, ranging from antilocution (casual talk among like-minded people) through avoidance, discrimination, and physical attack, to extermination. The scale's significance lies in its implication that even mild, seemingly harmless prejudice is on a continuum with the most extreme forms of violence and genocide; left unchecked, the argument goes, antilocution can escalate toward extermination . This framework gave researchers and policymakers a way to think about prejudice as a matter of degree rather than a binary attribute, and it reinforced the book's practical urgency. The scale remains a standard pedagogical tool in social psychology, though it is descriptive rather than predictive—it does not claim that every instance of casual prejudice inevitably leads to violence.

The Nature of Prejudice applies Allport's trait-based, individual-difference approach to a social problem. Allport is known for his three-tiered hierarchy of personality traits—cardinal, central, and secondary—and for championing an empirical psychology that takes conscious motivation and current context seriously without dismissing unconscious processes . In the prejudice book, this orientation manifests as a sustained interest in the "prejudiced personality": the idea that certain character structures are more susceptible to prejudice than others. Yet Allport also insists on sociocultural and situational factors, refusing to reduce prejudice to personality alone. The book thus sits at the intersection of his two major legacies—personality psychology and social psychology—and demonstrates his conviction that psychology's practical value lies in addressing real social problems .

The most persistent misreading treats Allport's contact hypothesis as a simple prescription: "just bring different groups together and prejudice will diminish." This ignores the four conditions he specified as necessary for positive effects. Without equal status, common goals, cooperation, and institutional support, contact can reinforce stereotypes or produce conflict. A second misreading treats the cognitive explanation as exculpatory—as if saying prejudice is "natural" means it is acceptable or unchangeable. Allport's point is the opposite: because prejudice is rooted in ordinary cognition, it is universal and requires deliberate structural remedies, not merely moral condemnation of individuals. The book's policy orientation, including its argument that law can curb discrimination, is lost when the cognitive argument is severed from its normative and practical context.