Prejudice

The concept of prejudice emerged during the early twentieth century and soon became the most prominent social scientific and lay concept to describe antipathy for others based on their social group or category membership. Social scientists have typically defined prejudice as a negative intergroup attitude. Many, however, have added the rider that this negative intergroup attitude is bad or unjustified in some way, and it is this broader concept that has been entrenched in lay discourse. This conceptualization raises several issues. One is whether it is indeed possible to distinguish between negative intergroup attitudes that are prejudiced (that is, bad or unjustified) and those that are not. A second issue is that of the structure and dimensionality of these negative intergroup attitudes, a third is whether there are different types or kinds of prejudice, and a fourth is that of how prejudice has been explained and understood.