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Journal of Multilingual and

Multicultural Development
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Prej udice: its social psychology

a
John Duckit t
a
Depart ment of Psychology , Universit y of Auckland , Auckland ,
New Zealand
Published online: 06 Jun 2013.

To cite this article: Journal of Mult ilingual and Mult icult ural Development (2013):
Prej udice: it s social psychology, Journal of Mult ilingual and Mult icult ural Development , DOI:
10. 1080/ 01434632. 2013. 803723

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 Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2013

BOOK REVIEW

Prejudice: its social psychology, 2nd edition, by Rupert Brown, Oxford and Malden, MA,
Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, xiv353 pp., £72.50/$115.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-4051-1306-9;
£24.99/$55.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-4051-1307-6

The study of prejudice, or why certain groups or categories of persons experience systematic
dislike or devaluation, has been an important issue for the social sciences since the early
twentieth century. Anthropology, history, political science, sociology and psychology have
approached the topic from somewhat different perspectives and with somewhat different
emphases. Interestingly, this has also been the case for the various sub-disciplines that make up
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psychology. Most books on prejudice have tended to reflect these disciplinary or sub-
disciplinary foci, and this is the case here: the work considers prejudice from a specifically
social-psychological perspective. This second edition has been comprehensively revised,
substantially updating and extending the coverage of the first (published in 1995).
Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Sussex, Rupert Brown is eminently
well qualified to report on the social psychology of prejudice. For 30 years he has been
a prolific researcher on the topics pertaining to group and intergroup processes that have
preoccupied experimental social psychologists
and particularly, British experimental social
psychologists
over this period. The field’s most important features have been an almost
exclusive reliance on experimentation (mostly in the laboratory) and a virtually complete
rejection of the individual as the unit of analysis in favour of groups and group identities. This
approach derives largely from the thinking and influence of the late Henri Tajfel, the eminent
Bristol social psychologist.
Tajfel’s core interests were in the role of categorisation and identification in social
behaviour
that is, how people divide their social world into ingroups (us) and outgroups
(them) and how this biases their thinking and actions. His work was formalised in two theories
of social behaviour
Social Identity theory (SIT) and Self-Categorization Theory
which
were energetically propagated by his students, who themselves became influential. The theories
virtually dominated research in British social psychology during the last few decades of the
twentieth century, and for some time SIT attained virtual cult status. It also rapidly became an
influential theory in social psychology generally, providing a broad theoretical framework for
the already strong American emphasis on social categorisation and stereotyping in the study
of prejudice.
There have been few efforts to systematically review this research and assess its
contribution, and a major achievement of Brown’s book is its attempt to do so. The review
is not fully comprehensive, as this would be beyond the scope of a relatively short volume, but,
with the exception of one chapter on prejudiced individuals, it does cover the research in an
adequately representative and generally balanced manner.
The short first chapter discusses the definition of prejudice, and here Brown nails his
colours to the mast by explicitly characterising prejudice as an intergroup phenomenon; his
social-psychological perspective is, therefore, concerned not with individuals as such, but only
with individuals acting as group members. While standard within the field, those outside social
psychology may find that this approach largely or entirely ignores pervasive and stigmatising
social prejudices such as those involving differences in attractiveness, intelligence or skin
 2 Book review

colour (within the same ethnic group). This merely mirrors, however, their almost total neglect
in the social psychology of prejudice over the past 40 years.
The chapters on ‘Social Categorization and Prejudice’ and ‘Stereotyping and Prejudice’

together with two others, on ‘Prejudice and Intergroup Relations’ and ‘Prejudice Old and
New’
constitute the core of the book. Each provides a clear, well-organised and articulate
review of large and complex research literatures. Each manages to make sense of the research
and come to reasonably balanced and generally sensible conclusions. This is not a small
achievement.
This is not to say there are no problems in the treatment. Perhaps the major difficulty is
that, for half the book, bias indicators
reflecting the degree to which an ingroup person is
favoured, minus that to which an outgroup person is favoured
are treated as measuring
prejudice. Then, roughly midway through the book, good and important reasons why
ingroup bias cannot be an useful indicator of prejudice (defined as outgroup dislike or
devaluation) are noted, and the use of bias indicators abandoned in favour of direct measures
of outgroup dislike or devaluation. The basic problem with bias measures, of course, is that
they confound two indices (ingroup evaluation and outgroup evaluation) empirically shown to
be independent of each other. Ideally, this point should have been made initially, but this
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would have meant completely undermining the relevance of much of four decades of social-
psychological research on prejudice
something that social psychologists seem reluctant to
accept.
In ‘Prejudice Old and New’, Brown provides a reasonably thorough review of what has
been a major focus in social-psychological research. This is a demonstration that the marked
declines in expressed prejudice documented in many social surveys over the past half-century
are misleading and due to social-desirability pressures, and that while old-fashioned or
traditional varieties of prejudice have indeed declined, they have simply been replaced by more
modern, subtle or even entirely implicit forms. This conclusion is unwarranted, and the
research attempting to underpin it is seriously flawed. Empirical evidence does not support
the existence of a new, modern kind of prejudice that is distinctively different from an older
variety. There is no evidence that the major declines found in surveys of expressed prejudice
are due to social-desirability pressures and, indeed, the existence of such pressures would itself
be powerful testimony to major social changes. No evidence has yet been adduced to show
that the supposedly ‘modern’ measures or indices of discrimination are not declining as well as
the supposedly older measures. There is ample evidence that many behavioural indices of
prejudice for which there are systematic data over time (hate crimes, assaults, violence,
victimisation and so on) have been declining as dramatically as the expressed prejudiced
attitudes over the past 50 years, and this has been accompanied by equally dramatic increases
in the legal rights and protections for minorities and stigmatised groups generally. Moreover,
the supposedly ‘implicit’ measures of prejudice tend to be of highly dubious validity and are
often based on the flawed bias methodology (ingroup evaluation minus outgroup evaluation)
mentioned earlier. Many of these problems are pointed out in the chapter, though they are not
as clearly indicated in its concluding summary.
The one seriously problematic chapter is that dealing with prejudiced individuals. The
approach is dated, focusing entirely on the role of personality as a cause of prejudice, and
treated personality as a typological construct rather than a dimensional variable. Moreover,
recent evidence showing that stable differences in individuals’ ideological attitudes are very
powerfully related to them being generally prejudiced or tolerant is entirely ignored. The
weakness of this chapter is probably not surprising, however, as experimental social
psychologists have largely ignored the study of the role of individual differences in prejudice,
preferring (as noted above) to see prejudiced attitudes as largely or entirely determined by
social-situational factors.
The volume concludes with a chapter on reducing prejudice. This does not attempt to
comprehensively review prejudice-reduction strategies but, instead, focuses exclusively on
research and theory on the famous ‘contact’ hypothesis. Since contact is probably the issue
 Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 3

that social psychologists have most focused on, this seems justified. The chapter is well done,
providing a good overall assessment of the research, with clear descriptions of important
studies and generally well-balanced conclusions.
Overall, with the exception of the treatment of prejudiced individuals, this book provides a
very good overview of social-psychological research and theory on prejudice. It will make an
excellent resource for advanced students and provides useful synopses for researchers. It
inevitably reflects, of course, the emphases and biases characteristic of the field, and this will
probably limit its usefulness for the general reader or other social scientists. The overreliance
on experimental methods, to the detriment of naturalistic description, conceptual clarification,
adequate measurement and broad theory development has been noted already. Another issue
is the pursuit of well-intentioned and politically correct advocacy agendas. An example here is
the emphasis on theory, research, measures and procedures suggesting that prejudice is as
pervasive and powerful today as it ever was. As a result, social psychology has entirely missed
one of the more remarkable historical developments of the second half the twentieth century

what Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) has referred to as the ‘rights
revolutions’ epitomised by dramatic declines in discrimination, racism, sexism, violence and
prejudice, and an equally dramatic expansion in the legal rights and protections accorded to
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stigmatised groups. The general reader may thus find that treatments of prejudice and related
phenomena from perspectives other than social psychology are more useful.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2013.803723 John Duckitt

Department of Psychology
University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
j.duckitt@auckland.ac.nz
# 2013, John Duckit