Social scientists would be able to influence policy makers to curb discrimination by law An analysis of Gordon Allport s the nature of prejudiceI m writing a paper with some people at work about assessing intercultural understanding and the importance of intercultural interaction in overcoming stereotypes and therefore discrimination Ages ago I read something that said that some researchers got a group of young people at something like a summer camp in the US and then put them at random into two groups From memory the people in the two groups didn t know anyone else in the larger group before being assigned Then the researchers created competition between the two groups and this was effective in creating cross group conflict Then they forced the two groups to work together for a clear outcome and they found that the cross group conflict diminished Someone said once that the main task of social science is to state the obvious The thing is.

It turns out that in 2002 he was regarded as the 11th most influential psychologists of the 20th century He wrote his The Nature of Prejudice shortly after the holocaust and while the civil rights movement in the US was raging And it became something of a best seller they mention in this book it was also sold in airports and newsagencies But he still expected that the people who would get the most from reading it would be the least likely to read it And so he included lots of recommendations in the text for policy makers and so on. The key ideas here are that prejudice is a cognitive issue mostly due to a cognitive shortcut that our brains use of creating stereotypes This is based on the notion that we generally take the path of least effort in dealing with the world and so if a stereotype can save us time and not really impact on us in any other way.

With his 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice American psychologist Gordon Allport displays the crucial skill of reasoning producing and organizing an argument that was persuasive enough to have a major impact not only in universities but also on government policy The question that Allport tackled was an old why are people so disposed to prejudice against those from other groups Earlier psychologists had suggested a number of reasons especially in the case of racial prejudice Some had suggested that racism was a learned behaviour conditioned by negative experiences of other races others that there was an objective rationale to negative racial stereotypes Allport however reasoned that prejudice is essentially a by product of the necessary mental shortcuts the human brain uses to process the vast amount of information it takes in Because our brains want to use as little effort as possible they regularly fall back on simple stereotypes which easily generate prejudice Gathering strong evidence for this hypothesis he reasoned clearly and persuasively that our natural cognitive approach is the most significant factor in accounting for prejudice Going further still Allport also reasoned that once this was better understood if this is obvious it isn t something that we often do The world seems to be getting increasingly segregated with of the Apartheid wall in Israel or the growing segregation of US schools as two themes from the top of my head In Australia we have an education system that ensures the rich and poor receive very different forms of education something likely to drive a wedge between these two camps for generations to come Anyway I asked some people at work if they knew about that research and they pointed me to Allport s work I d never heard of him before and to celebrate that fact then we are likely to follow that Which is a problem for racial discrimination since races are often separated and so the stereotypes can go unchallenged for a very long time This meant that his way of addressing prejudice was through interaction that is the expectation that real life interaction is likely to undermine stereotypical ways of seeing other people Although that said he is quoted as saying interaction is hardly enough It has sometimes been held that merely by assembling people without regard for race color religion national origin we can thereby destroy stereotypes and develop friendly attitudes The case is not so simple page 40 To me the question isn t so much about putting people beside each other although this is obviously better than keeping them apart but rather in getting them to interact Anyway this book has given me some links to others I ll need to read now 9781351355049 This summary is quite wordy and contains much irrelevant filler So I m not sure if it s the summary or the original content that is weak The theory that contact decreases racism is nice but I would have liked evidence of decreased racism in the real world from actions based on the theory 9781351355049