Cognitive Aspects of Prejudice

/. biosoc. Sci,, Suppl. 1 (1969), 173-191

COGNITIVE ASPECTS OF PREJUDICE

HENRI TAJFEL Department of Psychology, University of Bristol

Introduction The diffusion of public knowledge concerning laws which govern the physical, the biological and the social aspects of our world is neither peculiar to our times of mass communications nor to our own culture. These public images are as old as mankind, and they seem to have some fairly universal characteristics. The time of belief in a 'primitive mind' in other cultures has long been over in social anthro- pology. For example, at the turn of the century, Rivers (1905) could still write about differences in colour naming between the Todas and the Europeans in terms of the 'defective colour nomenclature of the lower races' (p. 392). Today, Claude Levi-Strauss (1966) bases much of his work on evidence showing the conceptual complexity of the understanding of the world in primitive cultures rooted in the 'science of the concrete' with its background of magic. As he wrote: To transform a weed into a cultivated plant, a wild beast into a domestic animal, to produce, in either of these, nutritious or technologically useful processes which were originally completely absent or could only be guessed at; to make stout water-tight pottery out of clay which is friable and unstable, liable to pulverise or crack; to work out techniques, often long and complex, which permit cultivation without soil or alternatively without water; to change toxic roots or seeds into foodstuffs or again to use their poison for hunting, war or ritual—there is no doubt that all these achievements required a genuinely scientific attitude, sustained and watchful interest, and a desire for knowledge for its own sake. For only a small proportion of observation and experiments (which must be assumed to have been primarily inspired by a desire for knowledge) could have yielded practical and immediately useful results (pp. 14-15). At the same time, the new anthropological disciplines of ethnobotany and ethnozoology are concerned with the study of biological classifications developed in primitive societies, and with the principles underlying these classifications. We are very far indeed from Rivers's 'defective nomenclatures'. An image of man emerges from these considerations, and from very many others. When we think of human attempts to understand the physical or the biological environment, man appears essentially as an exploring and rational animal, 173

stumbling heavily on his way, pulled back by his insufficiencies and stupidities, but still imperfectly rational, still engaged in what Sir Frederick Bartlett (1932) called many years ago the 'effort after meaning'. This effort does not translate itself into some mystical concept of a 'group mind'. It works within the limits imposed by the capacities of individual human minds, and within the socially determined processes of the diffusion of knowledge. It is essentially a rational model, however imperfect the exploring rationality often appears to be. But there seems to be one exception to this model, one set of problems for the consideration of which we seem to have adopted a very different set of ideas. It is as if we were suddenly dealing with a different and strange animal that uses some of his abilities to adapt to some aspects of his environment, and is quite incapable of using them in order to adapt to others. The prevailing model of man as a creature trying to find his way in his social environment seems to have nothing in common with the ideas of exploration, of meaning, of understanding, of rational consistency. We have the rational model for natural phenomena; we seem to have nothing but a blood-and-guts model for social phenomena. In this new blood-and-guts romanticism so fashionable at present in some science and semi-science, man's attitudes and beliefs concerning the social environment are seen mainly as a by-product of tendencies that are buried deeply in his evolutionary past or just as deeply in his unconscious. This seems to be particularly true in a field in which the acquisition of knowledge about the springs of human behaviour is perhaps the most urgent and ominous task confronting us at present. This is the field of relations between large human groups which includes, of course, race relations and international relations. The psychological aspects of intergroup relations include the study of behaviour in intergroup situations, of behaviour related to these situations, and of beliefs and attitudes concerning an individual's own group and various other groups which are relevant to him. The competitive or co-operative, hostile or friendly, relations between groups are determined, to a very large extent, by the logic of the situations within which they arise. Once this is taken for granted it is equally true that these situations have their effects on the motives and attitudes of millions of individuals, that these motives and attitudes in turn determine behaviour, and that this behaviour partly determines in turn the subsequent relations between the groups. A psychological theory of intergroup relations must provide a two-way link between situations and behaviour, and it can do this through an analysis of the motivational and the cognitive structures which intervene between the two. But it is in this analysis that man's search to understand his environment often seems to be forgotten, and a peculiar one-way causation is established. In this, ideas and beliefs seem to be considered as no more than projections and rationalizations of powerful motivational forces, and somehow or other it has implicitly been taken for granted that inferences can be made directly from motivation and the evolutionary past of the species to complex intergroup behaviour without paying much attention to the flimsy cognitive by-products thrown out as if at random by the

subterranean springs of emotion and 'instinct'. Our image of a social man is that of a man who has lost his reason. Otherwise, the argument usually runs, how can we explain the perennial hostility of man to man ? Not much attention has been paid to the fact that co-operation between groups also needs to be explained; or that hostility need not be based on unconscious motivational factors, that it can also follow as a result of attempts to explain to oneself in the simplest and most convenient way the causal sequence of relations between groups. Two intellectual traditions form the background from which arises this denial of the autonomy of cognitive functioning. One consists of extrapolating from the background of animal behaviour to human behaviour in complex social situations; the other, of assuming that theories of unconscious motivation provide the neces- sary and sufficient basis for the understanding of social attitudes. There is no short- age in either of these trends of thought of carefully considered attempts to look in all directions before leaping. A recent paper by Tinbergen (1968) provides an excellent example of such methodological caution. But it is just as true that the general climate of opinion favours the blood-and-guts model which at present is having quite a run. It has been blessed and speeded on its way in the last few years by a number of books, some of which have quickly become best sellers. The act of blessing has been performed not only in the protected gentility of academic dis- cussions; it has burst through again and again to the public forum owing to serial- ization in newspapers, television appearances, and other public pronouncements. And thus, suddenly, tentative views concerning a complex problem about which we know very little have become public property and are already being used here and there to buttress and justify certain political opinions and actions. The relevance to this discussion of both the biological and the psycho-analytic points of view has been succinctly summarized by Lorenz (1964) in a recent symposium. He wrote: There cannot be any doubt, in the opinion of any biologically-minded scientist that intraspecific aggression is, in Man, just as much of a spontaneous instinctive drive as in most other higher vertebrates. The beginning synthesis between the findings of ethology and psycho-analysis does not leave any doubt either, that what Sigmund Freud has called the 'death drive' is nothing else but the mis- carrying of this instinct which, in itself, is as indispensable as any other (p. 49). I do not wish to quarrel on this occasion with all of this statement and to dis- cuss its several ambiguities. From the point of view of the present discussion, its major difficulty lies in the gaps which persist when the usual extrapolations are made to complex social behaviour in man. There is no doubt that under some conditions all men can and do display hostility towards groups other than their own, be they social, national, racial, religious, or any other. There is also no doubt, however, that under other conditions this hostility either does not appear or can be modified. The scientifically minded biologist (as distinct from Lorenz's biologically

minded scientist) would have to specify for us in the case of human behaviour, as he does so often and so successfully for animal behaviour, the invariances of the waxing and waning of the aggressive drive. Until he does so, statements such as that of Lorenz are just about as useful as would be statements relating the development of the rich variety of gastronomic traditions to man's undeniably innate need for food and drink, or as have been the attempts to explain the complex forms of the use of language with the help of a few basic laws of conditioning. It is hardly startling to say that the best way to predict whether a man will har- bour hostile attitudes towards a particular group and what will be the content of these attitudes is to find out how he understands the intergroup situation. And it is hardly any more startling to say that this understanding will in turn affect his behaviour. This does not mean, of course, that emotional and motivational factors are unimportant. But it is just as true that the greatest adaptive advantage of man is his capacity to modify his behaviour as a function of the way in which he perceives and understands a situation. It is difficult to see why it should be assumed that he loses this capacity as soon as he confronts human groups other than his own, and that it is in these situations alone that most of his concepts, attitudes, beliefs and modes of thinking are no more than powerless and pale projections of instinctive or unconscious drives. It is not, however, the purpose of this paper to present a detailed methodological analysis of inferences about complex social behaviour that are made from some of the more extreme positions in ethology and in psychoanalysis. At any rate, their present importance lies more perhaps in their impact on public opinion than in the durable scientific contributions that they are likely to make to the study of intergroup relations. We know only too well that prejudice is part and parcel of intergroup relations, and in particular of race relations. Klineberg (1968) proposed recently the following general definition:

The English term 'prejudice' and its equivalents in many other European languages refer primarily to a prejudgment or a preconcept reached before the relevant information has been collected or examined and therefore based on inadequate or even imaginary evidence. In contemporary social science this notion has been retained but is usually regarded as constituting only one aspect of the complex phenomenon of prejudice, namely, the conceptual, or cognitive, aspect—the ideas or opinions we have about those individuals or groups who are the objects of such prejudgment. [The term 'stereotype' is usually applied to this aspect.] Prejudice also involves an attitude for or against, the ascription of a positive or negative value, an affective, or feeling, component. Usually there is in addition a readiness to express in action the judgments and feelings which we experience, to behave in a manner which reflects our acceptance or rejection of others: this is the conative, or behavioral, aspect of prejudice. [The resulting

actions are also described as representing varying degrees of discrimination.] Prejudice may therefore be defined as an unsubstantiated prejudgment of an individual or group favourable or unfavourable in character, tending to action in a consonant direction (p. 439). In the context of Klineberg's definition, the purpose of this paper is to present an outline of the cognitive etiology of prejudice, mainly with regard to its unfavourable aspects. The principal argument will be clear from the preceding general considerations: it is that the etiology of intergroup relations cannot be properly understood without the help of an analysis of their cognitive aspects, and also that this analysis cannot be derived from statements about motivation and about instinctive behaviour. We live in a social environment which is in constant flux. Much of what happens to us is related to the activities of groups to which we do or do not belong; and the changing relations between these groups require constant readjustments of our understanding of what happens and constant causal attributions about the why and the how of the changing conditions of our life. These attributions are based on three processes which will be discussed in turn. They are the processes of categorization, of assimilation, and of search for coherence.

Categorization Much work has been done in social psychology on the so-called stereotypes which can be defined as the attribution of general psychological characteristics to large human groups. There is no doubt that the content of various stereotypes has its origins in cultural traditions, which may or may not be related to over-generalized common experience, past or present. But what is perhaps more important is their general structure and function. As the late Gordon Allport (1954) and many others have pointed out, stereotypes arise from a process of categorization. They intro- duce simplicity and order where there is complexity and nearly random variation. They can help us to cope only if fuzzy differences between groups are transmuted into clear ones, or new differences created where none exist. They represent, of course, tendencies towards simplification rather than sharp dichotomies: in other words, in each relevant situation we shall achieve as much stereotyped simplification as we can without doing unnecessary violence to the facts. But there is good evidence that even when facts do turn against us and destroy the useful and com- fortable distinctions, we still find ways to preserve the general content of our categories. In a rather formal way, the problem of stereotypes is that of the relation between a set of attributes which vary on continuous dimensions and classifications which are discontinuous (Tajfel, 1959a). For example, classifications into nationalities or racial groups are, on the whole, discontinuous; most people are clearly X or Y and rarely something rather indefinable in between. Height of people or colour of skin

are continuous dimensions. If it were true that all the Scandinavians were taller than all the Italians, we would have a perfect bi-serial correlation; and one could predict the class membership of an item from its value on a certain dimension, and vice versa, despite the fact that these values were not the original criterion on which the classification was based. It will be obvious that theoretically the possible bi- serial correlations of that nature may vary all the way from fully predictable relations to cases where there is no relationship at all; and that in the world of human groups there will be very many cases where there is no relationship, hardly any 'perfect' ones, and quite a number which show a strong positive correlation, such as, for example, some physical characteristics associated with race. Three empirical statements need to be inserted at this point, all of which are based both on common experience and on a good deal of evidence from experimental work in social psychology. The first is that personal traits or characteristics can be empirically treated as dimensions much in the same way as height and weight would be if we could conceive them only in comparative terms of 'more' and 'less', 'shorter' and 'longer', 'heavier' and 'lighter'. This is the kind of statement that I make if I say that someone is 'intelligent' or 'honest' or iazy'; these are essentially comparative judgements which could hardly be made in a vacuum of absolute assertions. The second statement is that, through personal and cultural experience, dimensions such as 'intelligent', 'lazy', or 'honest' are subjectively associated with classifications of people into groups. As long as we have little specific knowledge about an individual, we shall tend to ascribe to him the characteristics which we derive from our knowledge of his class membership, be it a class of trade unionists, under- graduates, animal lovers, or Patagonians. Two inferences follow directly: one is that, in many social situations which present notorious ambiguities of interpreta- tion, it will always be easier to find supporting evidence for the assumed class characteristics of an individual than to find contradictory evidence. The second inference is perhaps socially more important: whenever we are confronted with the need to interpret the behaviour en masse of the members of a particular group, there is bound to be very little clear negative feedback following the ascription of this behaviour to the assumed class characteristics. The third statement refers to two consequences of the tendency to simplify in order to cope. They are but two aspects of the same phenomenon and can be described as follows: when a classification is correlated with a continuous dimension, there will be a tendency to exaggerate the differences on that dimension between items which fall into distinct classes, and to minimize these differences within each of the classes. The results of an experiment conducted in Oxford a few years ago (Tajfel & Wilkes, 1963) can serve as an illustration. Three groups of subjects were presented with a series of eight lines which dif- fered in length from each other by a constant ratio. They were asked to estimate the length of each line in turn. For one group, the four shorter lines were labelled A,

Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 69.235.193.204, on 03 Apr 2017 at 03:20:46, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021932000023336 Cognitive aspects of prejudice 179 the four longer ones B. (The possible effect of the labels A and B per se in the judgements of length was controlled). For the second group, the labels A and B were attached each to half of the lines, but in a random relation to length. The third group had the lines without any labels. The series of eight lines was presented a number of times in successive random orders.

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Some of the results are summarized in Text-figs. 1-3. Text-fig. 1 presents the discrepancies shown by groups of subjects in the differences between their judgements of the lines after one experimental session. It will be seen that, at the point of break between the two classes (i.e. between line 4—the longest of the shorter class,

and line 5—the shortest of the longer class), the group which experienced a fully predictable relation between the labels and the length of lines exaggerated the differences between the lines considerably more than the control groups. None of the other differences between the judgements of the various groups reached the level of statistical significance. Text-fig. 2 presents similar data from groups of subjects who returned a week later to the same judging situation: as a function of more experience with the classification, the discrepancy between the experimental group

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TEXT.-HG. 3. Comparison of actual and apparent differences between adjacent stimuli after one long experimental session, o, Classified series; x, control series.

and the others became more marked. Introducing one judging session of double length rather than having a second one a week later led to even more drastic results, as can be seen in Text-fig. 3. In Text-fig. 3 the phenomenon of subjective reduction of differences within each of the classes is also noticeably present. Effects of this type can thus be obtained in judgements of length of lines. With- out the introduction of any variables of social or emotional nature they present the essential features of social stereotypes: the subjective accentuation of differences in relevant dimensions between classes of stimuli, and their subjective reduction within each class. It is therefore not unreasonable to assume that the same features of the same categorizing process are responsible, in part at least, for biases found in judgements of individuals belonging to various human groups. In other words, if length of lines would stand for personal characteristics subjectively correlated with a classification that is being used, and the classification itself would be in terms of racial, ethnic, national or any other social criterion, we would have the full-blown stereotype. This has been demonstrated in a number of experiments (e.g. Secord, Bevan & Katz, 1956; Razran, 1950; Tajfel, 1959b; Tajfel, Sheikh & Gardner, 1964).

There is, however, one obvious and essential difference between the judgements of lines in the experiments just described and stereotyped judgements of human beings when these are associated with prejudice. In the case of our lines it would have been enough to present some form of reward to the subjects for accurate judgements and to penalize them for the inaccurate ones in order to eliminate quite rapidly the biases that were obtained. This is certainly not the case when hostile stereotypes are used. Their rigidity and resistance to information which contradicts them is undoubtedly one of their most salient features. This does not present, however, much of a mystery. In the first place, judgements of human characteristics in complex social situations are much more uncertain and ambiguous than the judgements of lines in a laboratory setting. The negative feed-back of contradictory information is therefore much less clear and much easier to ignore. In the second place, and this is probably more important, the consequences of a mistake in judgement are radically different in the two situations. If a man is prejudiced, he has an emotional investment in preserving the differentiations between his own group and the 'others'. Inaccurate judgements are not followed by the obvious dire consequences of inaccurate judgements about the physical properties of the environment. On the contrary, the preservation of these judgements is self-rewarding, and this is particularly so when prejudiced judgements are made in a social context strongly supportive of hostile attitudes towards a particular group. We are then confronted with a spiral effect in which the existence of prejudice at large not only provides additional support and rewards for hostile judgements; it also removes the possibility of a 'reality check' for these judgements which then feed upon each other and become more and more strongly entrenched in the form of powerful social myths.

Assimilation The content of the categories to which people are assigned in virtue of their social identity is generated over a long period of time within a culture; the origin and development of these ideas are a problem for the social historian rather than for the psychologist. The task of the social psychologist is to discover how these images are transmitted to individual members of a society, and it is here that the second of the three processes previously mentioned, that of assimilation, comes into play. The wider problem of assimilation of social information as a form of social learning is well beyond the scope of this paper. I should like to concentrate on two points which appear the most relevant to the autonomy of cognitive functioning in attitudes towards other groups. One is concerned with the learning of evaluations (or preferences), the other with the balance that occurs early in life between a child's identification with his own group and the pressure of notions about various groups, including his own, which are generally accepted in his society.

In his work on the development of moral judgement in the child, Piaget (1932) described the transition from the stage in which the value of pronouncements is judged by their source rather than by their content, to a stage in which the child begins to interact and to co-operate with equals. At this point it is beginning to learn to take conceptually the role of the other. This ability 'to see the same data from more than one point of view' (Holmes, 1965, p. 134) is not only the basis for the development of intellectual operations, but also for 'the emergence of a new morality', the progress from constraint to co-operation. According to Piaget, this progress cannot take place when the child is exposed to one only source of information and 'when it remains in awe of this source of truth' (Holmes, 1956, p. 135). These tend to be precisely the conditions under which the child learns his socially sanctioned truths about a variety of human groups other than his own. It is not surprising, then, that later in life the ordinary categories of moral judgement, governed by conceptual reciprocity, apply with difficulty to individual members of these groups or to the groups as a whole. Thus, 'bad' and 'good', even 'liked' or 'disliked' become incontrovertible statements of fact not different in their mode of assimilation from, for example, 'large' or 'small'. I can perhaps illustrate this from one of the studies (Tajfel & Jahoda, 1966) we conducted within a wider research project on the development of national attitudes in children. In one of our tests, each child was presented with a number of black plastic squares varying in size. He was then asked to point to the squares which would represent the sizes of America, France, Germany and Russia if the square of the median size stood for his own country. In another test, his preferences for the same four countries were elicited through a series of paired comparisons. One aspect of the results can be described as follows: at the ages of 6 and 7 children in Britain agree rather more about which countries they like and dislike than about practically anything else concerning these countries. And this agreement on preferences still runs very closely to the agreement on factual items at the ages of 10 and 11. This can be put in a different way: at the age of 6-7, children in Britain agree rather more that they prefer America and France to Germany and Russia than that both America and Russia are larger in size than both France and Germany. There is no theoretical difference between the learning of these two kinds of 'fact'; and, if anything, the knowledge of facts about preferences crystallizes rather earlier than the corresponding knowledge of facts about size. I do not believe that the early formation of evaluative attitudes about outgroups presents any more mystery than that, or that we need to concoct magical brews made of territorial imperatives, instinctive dislikes, blood bonds, and other such ingredients to account for these facts. In the case of racial attitudes, as distinct from those which apply to national, ethnic or other outgroups, the learning and assimilation of socially sanctioned value judgements is made even easier through the existence of obvious visual cues which place each relevant individual firmly and instantly in the category to which he

belongs. This additional factor of 'visibility', combined with the rich linguistic associations of 'black' and 'white' (cf. Gergen, 1967, for a review) acts in several directions at once: it not only facilitates the placement of an individual in the appropriate category, but also helps to determine the descriptive content of the category and a more efficient 'filtering' of contradictory information. The same simplicity in the attaching of evaluative labels to crude and rudimen- tary categories applies to the formation of preferential attitudes towards one's own racial, national or ethnic group. Children do develop these attitudes fairly early on, and certainly well before they have any clear idea about the meaning of the relevant categories. In another study, also forming part of the project previously mentioned, we presented children with a series of twenty photographs of young men, and asked them to put each photograph in one of four boxes which were labelled respectively: / like him very much, I like him a little, I dislike him a little, I dislike him very much. Several weeks later we came back to the same children with the same photographs and told them that some of them were of people who were Eng- lish and some not English. Two boxes were available, one labelled English, one not English. The children were asked to put in the appropriate box the photographs which, according to them, belonged to each of the two categories. One half of the children had the two sessions in the order just described, the other half in the opposite order, starting with English-not English and having later the like-dislike session. One way to treat the results is in the form of a correlation in which one of the scores for each photograph consists of its mean 'liking' position in the total group of children, and the other of the percentage of children who assigned the same photograph to the category English. This correlation is very high (about 0-8); there is a great deal of consistency between the frequency of assignment of a photograph to the category 'English' and the degree of its liking. The same photographs were used with roughly the same results in several other countries where, of course, the nationality categorization was in terms of Dutch-not Dutch, Belgian-not Belgian, Austrian-not Austrian, etc.* Results such as these do not, of course, by themselves explain anything. They only tell us that, with the use of devious stratagems, one can elicit from children a fairly objective index of high consensus in their preference for their own national group. There exists, however, a possibility to assess tentatively the weight that needs to be given to the assimilation of social value judgements in the development of ingroup preferences. There are many minority groups in the world today which stand low in the evaluative pecking order of human groups that each society con-

* Full reports of two of these studies are now available. They can be found in: JASPARS, J.M.F., VAN DE GEER, J.P., TAJFEL, H. & JOHNSON, N. (1965) On the Development of Inter- national Attitudes. Report ESP No. 001-65, Psychological Institute, University of Leiden; and SIMON, M.D., TAJFEL, H. & JOHNSON, N. (1967) Wie erkennt man einen Osterreicher. Kolner Z. Soziol. Sozialpsychol. 19, 511.

structs for itself. If it were true that the identification with one's own group is based on some kind of a universal and self-generating process, then the fact that a group is considered as inferior in the social order should not considerably affect the affiliation with it shown by its own young children. If, on the other hand, a system of preferences in the society at large does affect all of its members, then children of the groups assumed to be inferior should be exposed to a conflict in which the progres- sive acquisition of their own group identity, and the formation of their own social self that goes with it, should clash with the ordering that is generally accepted and socially transmitted. There are a few relevant studies in existence. For example Mary Goodman (1964), working in New England in the late 'forties, elicited by various means preferences for Negroes and whites in a group of nursery school children between the ages of 3£ and S\: 92% of the white children expressed a preference for their own group; the corresponding figure for Negro children was 26%. There is an earlier and famous study by Clark & Clark (1947) in which Negro nursery school children were shown a brown and a white doll and were asked which of the two they preferred and which of the two they looked like: 66 % of the children identi- fied themselves with the brown doll; exactly the same proportion expressed a preference for the white one; in an answer to another question, 59% declared that the brown doll 'looked bad'. The sensitiveness of the children to the social context is particularly well brought out in a study recently conducted by Morland (1966). He worked with groups of nursery school children in Lynchburg, Virginia, and in Boston: 46% of Negro children expressed preference for their own group in Boston; only 22% did so in Lynchburg. The trend was reversed for the white children's preferences for their own group: the figure was 68 % in Boston and 80 % in Lynchburg. Similar results were obtained in an inter-racial situation undoubtedly much less tense than in the United States. Vaughan (1964) found that, at the ages from 4 to 8, the proportion of Maori children in New Zealand expressing preference for their own group was about half of the corresponding proportion of the white children. One further example from our own work will be provided. The study with photographs which has already been referred to was also conducted in Israel.* The Israeli Jewish population originates in part from Europe and in part from the Middle East and North Africa. According to recent figures, just over 60% of the population is in the second category. Strains have developed, and there undoubtedly exists a correlation between socio-economic status and origin. In Israel we did not use the set of English photographs which served in several European countries. A special set was prepared of which half were of Israelis of European origin and half of Israelis of Oriental origin. The subjects of the Oriental photographs could easily have been taken for southern, mediterranean Europeans. Half of the children who * This work was done in Haifa under the supervision of Dr Y. Rim of the Israel Institute of Technology. A full report is in preparation.

made the judgements were of Oriental and half of European origin. There was again a very high overall correlation between the assignment of a photograph to own national group and the degree of its liking. But the most interesting results came in comparing the judgements made of the two categories of photographs. Both groups of children, the Oriental and the European, expressed a greater overall preference for the European photographs, independently of their national assignments; both groups assigned a larger proportion of the European photographs than of the Oriental ones to the category Israeli. And there was a sharp increase in both these trends for both groups as a function of age. All this evidence points to the high sensitivity of children to the context of social influences in which they live—even when these influences are at cross-purposes with the powerful forces working towards an identification with the child's own racial or ethnic group. The enduring basis for future prejudices and conflicts is laid most crucially in childhood. And—as might be expected—the sensitivity to the social context continues throughout life. This was well brought out in a study by Pettigrew (1958) who worked in South Africa and in the United States. In South Africa, he applied three attitude scales to his subjects: an F-scale roughly comparable to the one used by Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson & Sanford (1950); a C (conformity) scale and an A (anti-African) scale. The C-scale was nearly as predictive of the attitudes towards the Africans as was the F-scale; students born in Africa were found to be more prejudiced, but not more authoritarian, than those not born in Africa; the same was true of students belonging to the Nationalist party as compared with others; the Afrikaners 'are both more anti- African and more authoritarian, and, when the F-scale differences are corrected for, they remain significantly more hostile to the Africans' (p. 35). Results which point in the same direction were obtained by Pettigrew (1958) in a comparison of four small towns in Georgia and North Carolina with four similar locations in New England. He concluded that 'in areas with historically embedded traditions of racial intolerance, externalizing personality factors underlying prejudice remain important, but socio-cultural factors are unusually crucial and account for the heightened racial hostility' (p. 40). To this it may be added that the scores on the F-scale which are designed to elicit the personality correlates of prejudice are themselves by no means free of conforming influences in societies which display a high incidence of one form or another of an authoritarian ideology. Thus, Petti- grew's conclusion can be viewed as a rather conservative estimate of the psychological importance in prejudice of 'socio-cultural factors'.

Search for coherence The process of categorization provides the mould which gives shape to intergroup attitudes, and the assimilation of social values and norms provides their content. But this does not tell us very much about the manner in which individuals react to

specific intergroup situations which confront them, and about the way in which they try to come to terms with constant changes that occur in these situations. It is here that the consideration of the third process previously mentioned, that of search for coherence, may be of some help. Instead of introducing this search for coherence in general terms, I should like to illustrate it with an example. We were once piloting one of our studies on national attitudes in children in a primary school in a suburb of Vienna. A boy of about 11 was being interviewed and stated, like many others, his dislike for the Russians. He was then asked why he disliked the Russians. The answer was: 'because they occupied our country, and Hitler was their chief. If the individual is to adjust to the flux of social change, he must attempt to understand it; in other words, in order to deal with change an individual must make constant causal attributions about the processes responsible for it, and these attributions must fulfil at least two criteria: they must equip him to deal with new situations in a manner which appears consistent to him, and they must do this in a way which will preserve, as far as possible, his self-image or integrity. This need to preserve the integrity of the self-image is the only motivational assumption that we need to make in order to understand the direction that the search for coherence will take. One of the most important classes of events within the stream of constant social change arises directly from the fact that an individual is a member of numerous social groups which interact with other groups. Theoretically, two types of change (and consequently, of the need for cognitive adjustment to change) can be distin- guished: intragroup and intergroup. The former consists of the individual's changing circumstances within the group or groups to which he belongs; the latter, of those aspects of the changing relations of his group with other groups which affect directly some important aspects of his life. In both cases, he needs to build a cognitive structure which provides him with a satisfactory explanation of the causes of change. A 'satisfactory' explanation will manage to preserve personal integrity while at the same time—for reasons of cognitive economy—it will tend towards as much simplification as the situation allows for. The effects of change—whether intra- or inter-group—on the manner in which an individual relates himself to his own gr6up can only be of two kinds: an increase in the intensity of affiliation with the ingroup, or a decrease, i.e. alienation from it. In both cases, the change of attitude towards the group requires a causal attribution. In all cases in which this attribution is confined to social agents (as distinct from physical causes, such as natural catastrophes, etc.) it can go in two directions only: the determinants of change may be attributed to some characteristics and actions of the individual himself and/or other individuals; or they may be attributed to the characteristics and actions of his own and/or of other groups. It is this second category of causal attributions which is of interest here. All that we know about causal attributions regarding social events points to the conclusion

that, unless situational explanations are easily available (and often even when they are), actions of others tend to be explained in terms of their individual and fairly permanent characteristics. In the case of individual attributions, this type of explanation provides obvious advantages in terms of simplification and of predictability of further events. There is no reason to assume that this need for simplification and for predictability is any less relevant in causal attributions to groups. There are, however, some important differences: the first is that explanations in terms of group characteristics obviously must represent a considerably greater degree of simplification than in the case of individual characteristics; the second (already referred to) that, with regard to the predictability of future events, the feedback of causal attributions to group characteristics is much more complex, ambiguous, and difficult to interpret than in individual cases. It is therefore likely that internal require- ments will play a much greater part in the causal attributions to groups, and that for the same reason these attributions will be much more resistant to change than the individual ones. However, the fact that group attributions are bound to be resistant to change does not mean that they can never change. If one considers a sequence of events which would generate individual causal attributions in one case and group attributions in another, the prediction is that the modification of the latter would lag much more behind the events than of the former. It is not the purpose of this paper to suggest experimental designs; but it is certainly possible to think of experimental situations in which the relevant variables could be manipulated. The requirement of simplification implies ipso facto that of personalization. If there is to be an explanation in terms of the characteristics of a group, these must be characteristics which are relevant to the situation and common to the group as a whole, with a corresponding neglect of individual differences between the members of a group. There is abundant evidence, both in the psychological literature and in common experience, of this personalization of even very large human groups. Starting from this, some fairly general statements can be made: (i) Any change in the status quo between social groups imposes on the individuals involved a need to construct a causal explanation to account for the change. This explanation can be of two kinds: (a) either situational, or (b) referring to the characteristics of the groups. (ii) Situational explanations are in terms of preceding events that do not originate in the groups involved (such as a natural catastrophe). When events of this nature are not concrete, clear-cut and easily discernible, causal attributions will tend to be made in terms of the characteristics of groups (iii) Causal attributions to group characteristics can be of two kinds: either referring to the non-psychological characteristics of a group (e.g., its wealth or power, ecological conditions in which it lives, its skin colour), or in terms of its psychological characteristics. This is, however, an uneasy distinction, since the 13

non-psychological characteristics are often assumed to be related to, or be the cause of, various psychological characteristics, and vice versa. (iv) In view of this, a more appropriate dichotomy appears to be between explanations in terms of group attributes which are assumed to be situational, transi- tional and flexible, and those which are assumed to be inherent and immutable. (v) Causal group attributions of complex social events must tend towards cognitive simplicity. Attributions in terms of 'inherent' group characteristics satisfy this requirement. (vi) In their attribution of causality to inherent characteristics of groups, these 'ideologies' are also best fitted to shift the locus of responsibility for change either from the individual himself to a group, or from the ingroup to an outgroup. They will therefore be most likely to appear when other types of causal attributions either conflict with the prevailing values and beliefs, or represent a threat to the individual's self-image. It follows therefore that not just any kind of intergroup conflict or competition should lead to the creation and spread of these attributions. It would be interesting to seek examples of those which do not end up in this way, and to recreate them experimentally. It would be equally interesting to create sequences in which the initial 'inherent' attribution weakens, despite the intergroup competition or conflict remaining, as a function of the disappearance of the conflict of values or of threat to the self-image. This is not easy, as that kind of social engineering has rarely been attempted, though some instances of it can be found in the management of industrial disputes. Most changes in the structure of intergroup relations do tend to involve the creation of inherent ideologies with very little planned or unplanned social therapy in sight to deal with them. It is interesting that this occurs whether the position of a group deteriorates or improves; whether the group becomes better suited to fulfil the needs of its individual members, or is in the process of becoming less and less effective in doing so. The common feature of those determining conditions which result in inherent group ideologies is in their association with a conflict of values or with the threat to the individuals' self-image. As distinct from the previous case, examples here are only too easy to find. It may be of some interest, however, to mention one or two in order to illustrate the variety of pertinent conditions and the underlying uniformity of the postulated processes. An improved group position and the resulting stronger affiliation of its members is often achieved at the cost of using the group's capacity to put another group at a disadvantage. This is, of course, a one-sentence history of colonialism and of related forms of successful expansion. One of the better examples can be found in the heyday of Victorian England; the principal beneficiary of the successful expansion was a social class which was also imbued with a fairly definite code of values

and morals. The advantages accrued from the colonial gains had to be explained away in terms which would not conflict with the code—and thus, 'white man's burden' with its conceptions of inherent superiority and inferiority came quickly into being. The ideologies themselves may vary in content depending upon the cultural background from which they arise—e.g. the religious elements in the hierarchy of human groups built by the Bible-carrying early Boers of South Africa, the 'degeneration' of other peoples in the blood myths of Nazi Germany going back to a background of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the 'moral' justifica- tions of slavery—but their formal features remain constant. We witness today an interesting special case of this general category of processes. An intensified affiliation with a group is only possible when the group is capable of supplying some satisfactory aspects of an individual's social identity. This can be defined as the attribution by the individual to the ingroup of certain characteristics from the sharing of which he derives some satisfaction; i.e. the group is an adequate reference group. The case of Negroes in the United States is one where the only clear definition of the group which is generally shared is in terms of skin colour, hardly a satisfactory point of reference. Many (or most) of the other presumed attributes of the Negro group originate from the conceptions of it held by the outgroups. In a situation of increasing tension, a search for a satisfactory and distinctive definition of the ingroup becomes desperate, and it can find expression, once again, in the creation of inherent attributions, both about the ingroup and the outgroup. These ideologies again fulfil here the function of preserving personal integrity, and they fulfil it rather better—for reasons already stated— than ideologies in which group differences would be conceived to be more ambiguous and flexible. This is probably one of the important psychological determinants of the rise of the extreme fringe of Negro racism now spreading also to Britain (cf. Mason, 1967). This is not to say that other solutions are not being found and used, but rather to reiterate the point that the kind of sequence suggested here provides an explanation for one of the solutions being adopted.

Summary and conclusion The aim of this paper was to stress the importance of the adaptive cognitive functioning of man in the causation of prejudice. It was felt that this approach has the merits of economy, credibility and testability of explanation which are not always shared by views seeking the psychological causes of intergroup tensions in the evolutionary past of the species or in unconscious motivation. Three cognitive processes were considered from the point of view of their relevance to the genesis of prejudice in an individual: categorization, assimilation, and search for conceptual coherence. Though the paper was not concerned either with discussing ways to reduce prejudice or with outlining in any detail designs for future research, it is my belief

that the general approach adopted here has implications, both for social action and for research, which have not been as yet consistently and fully taken into account. There is no easy way to deal with intergroup prejudice in its manifold varieties, and all one can hope for is that its more vicious and inhuman forms can be made less acute sooner or later. It is patently obvious that beliefs and views about causes of social events which are held by great masses of men are more easily accessible to change than their motives; and that there is at least a chance that a change of beliefs and views may affect in turn the management of conflicts, real or imaginary. This would be particularly true if such changes were to be planned against a background of strong legislation preventing public forms of discrimination against minorities. It is therefore important and useful, for the purposes of science as well as for those of the society at large, that a consideration of prejudice as a phenomenon in the minds rather than in the guts of men should take precedence over views which are, on the whole, not only untestable but also useless in the planning of any form of relevant social change.

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