Before addressing the critical question of how prejudice and stereotyping can be reduced, it’s important to acknowledge that some people are more prone to being prejudiced and to employing stereotypes than others. In addition, some people are more resistant to efforts to reduce prejudice than others. Prejudice is and has been common in most if not all known cultures. However, within a culture, there is variability in both which outgroups people dislike and who exhibits these prejudices most strongly.

What accounts for these differences? One answer is that the factors that cause prejudice, which we discussed in chapter 10, vary among individuals. For example, people have different direct experiences with outgroups and are exposed to different kinds of information about them. They also vary in their level of self-esteem and the lessons they learn growing up about how groups differ and what those differences mean. However, theorists have also proposed that there may be a particular kind of person who is especially likely to be prejudiced.

Theodor Adorno was an influential theorist who advanced this perspective in response to the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany and the inhumanities committed during the Holocaust. Adorno and his colleagues initially set out to explain the roots of anti-Semitism, but they discovered that individuals who express prejudice toward one group, such as an ethnic minority, also express prejudice toward other groups, such as women and the poor. More important, Adorno and colleagues found that prejudiced individuals share a cluster of personality traits: They uncritically accept authority, prefer well-defined power arrangements in society, adhere to conventional values and moral codes, and tend to think in rigid, black-and-white terms. This cluster of traits is known as the authoritarian personality and was originally scored by a measure know as the F scale (Adorno et al., 1950). As we might expect, people who score high on this scale tend to be prejudiced against a wide range of outgroups.

If the authoritarian personality contributes to prejudice in society, it would be useful to understand its origins. Freud (1905/1960) proposed that because of inevitable frustrations, children always develop hostile as well as loving feelings toward their parents. Building on this idea, Adorno and colleagues argued that children raised by overly strict and punitive parents are forced to stifle spontaneous impulses that are considered socially taboo or inappropriate. As a result, they suppress negative feelings of hostility toward their parents, and these feelings linger in the unconscious into adulthood. Adorno and colleagues proposed that when individuals express prejudice, they essentially are displacing these repressed feelings onto those they perceive as different or inferior to themselves and their group. They want to punish those who violate societal norms for what is “right,” just as they were punished during childhood for their own “deviance.”

Although research following up on the Adorno group’s work has provided some refinements in how social psychologists think about and measure the prejudiced personality, most of this research has supported the general tenor of their pioneering work. Research shows, for example, that individuals with a high need for structured knowledge—that is, people who in general prefer to think about things in simple, clear-cut ways—tend to stereotype outgroup members more than do individuals who are relatively tolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty (Jamieson & Zanna, 1989; Kruglanski & Webster, 1996; Neuberg & Newsom, 1993). Also, people who experienced difficulties in forming secure attachments with their parents in childhood also have been shown to be particularly likely to express prejudice and hold stereotypes of outgroups (e.g., Shaver & Mikulincer, 2012).

On the basis of Adorno’s pioneering work on the authoritarian personality, researchers have developed two modern measures of general proneness to prejudice: right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) (Altemeyer, 1981, 1998) and social dominance orientation (SDO), which was mentioned earlier in chapter 9 (Pratto et al., 1994; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). Let’s take a closer look at each.

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Individuals high in RWA believe that the social world is inherently dangerous and unpredictable, and that the best way to maintain a sense of security in both their personal and social lives is to preserve society’s order, cohesion, and tradition. More specifically, these individuals tend to display three factors:

Authoritarian submission, the tendency to submit to and comply with those they consider legitimate authority figures. For example, they strongly agree with the statement “Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn.”

Conventionalism, conformity to traditional moral and religious norms and values. They feel that “The ‘old-fashioned ways’ and ‘old-fashioned values’ still show the best way to live.”

Authoritarian aggression, the desire to punish individuals or groups that authorities label wrongdoers. They’re likely to believe that “Once our government leaders and the authorities condemn the dangerous elements in our society, it will be the duty of every patriotic citizen to help stomp out the rot that is poisoning our country from within.”

Because individuals high in RWA are concerned with maintaining an ordered society, they are particularly likely to express prejudice against individuals and groups seen as dangerous and thus threatening that order, such as violent criminals, as well as those who violate traditional values, such as feminists, gays, and lesbians.

Individuals high in SDO hold the belief that the world is a ruthlessly competitive jungle in which it is appropriate and right for powerful groups to dominate weaker ones. They believe that society should be structured hierarchically, with some groups having higher social and economic status than others. Hence, they agree with statements such as “Some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups.” In addition to believing in a dog-eat-dog worldview, high-SDO individuals are motivated to maintain and justify their own group’s power, dominance, and superiority over others. They therefore agree with statements such as “Sometimes other groups must be kept in their place.” High-SDO individuals are prejudiced against groups they regard as threatening the existing group hierarchy in society, as well as lower-status groups they perceive as inferior within that hierarchy, such as physically handicapped people, unemployment beneficiaries, and homemakers (FIGURE 11.4).

For both high-RWA individuals and high-SDO individuals, prejudice is a response to groups that they regard as threatening cherished belief systems. Note, though, that these two types of people adhere to different sets of values and goals and therefore are likely to differ about which groups they find threatening (Duckitt, 2001). Indeed, the presence of RWA and SDO predict prejudice against specific groups. For example, RWA but not SDO predicts dislike of socially deviant groups that threaten traditional norms and values but that are not lower in the socioeconomic hierarchy, such as drug dealers and rock stars. SDO predicts dislike of disadvantaged groups, such as people who are unattractive, mentally handicapped, or obese, whereas RWA does not because high-RWA individuals are not likely to consider those groups socially deviant or dangerous (Duckitt, 2006; Duckitt & Sibley, 2007).

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Although RWA and SDO predict commitment to distinct belief systems and predict dislike of different outgroups, within the United States, both variables are correlated with political conservatism (Jost et al., 2003). This does not mean that all conservatives are prejudiced or that all prejudiced people are conservatives, but it does suggest that there is a statistical tendency for measures of political conservatism, RWA, SDO, and generalized prejudice against outgroups all to correlate positively with each other (e.g., Cunningham et al., 2004).