The ‘Complex Human Problem’ that is Prejudice: A Review of the Cambridge Handbook of the Psychology of Prejudice

Excerpt

Contemporary social scientists typically define prejudice as an evaluation, negative or positive, of a social group or its members. This conceptualisation can be contrasted with the definition offered by Allport (1954) in his seminal book The Nature of Prejudice: ‘an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization … [that] may be directed toward a group as a whole, or toward an individual because he is a member of that group’ (p. 9). Kenneth Clark credited Allport with ‘establish[ing] the parameters for a scholarly social science approach to the discussion and understanding of this complex human problem’ (Allport, 1979, p. ix). Sibley and Barlow’s (2017) Handbook of the Psychology of Prejudice follows this tradition, illuminating the necessity of diverse approaches for tackling this ‘complex human problem’ that is prejudice. …