Prejudice and Discrimination

Core Idea

Prejudice is an affective, evaluative attitude toward a social group and its members, while discrimination is differential behavior based on group membership; stereotypes are cognitive generalizations about group members. These three components — affective, behavioral, cognitive — can operate independently and often do: people may hold prejudiced attitudes without discriminating (due to social norms) or discriminate without conscious prejudice (through institutional processes). Modern forms of prejudice (aversive racism, benevolent sexism) are more subtle and ambivalent than classic forms, often expressed in ambiguous situations where denial of prejudice is plausible.

How It's Best Learned

Distinguish the affective, cognitive, and behavioral components with specific examples for a single outgroup, then analyze what conditions allow each to become activated or suppressed independently.

Common Misconceptions

• Absence of explicit prejudice does not indicate absence of bias; implicit measures routinely detect bias in self-described egalitarians.
• Prejudice reduction at the individual level does not automatically translate to reduced discrimination if institutional structures remain unchanged.

Explainer

From your work on social cognition, you know that the mind categorizes automatically — placing people into groups is part of how we process social information efficiently. Prejudice, discrimination, and stereotyping are the three ways that intergroup categorization goes wrong, and understanding them requires keeping the three concepts clearly distinct.

Stereotypes are cognitive generalizations about group members — beliefs about what people in a group are typically like. They are not necessarily hostile; they can be descriptive or even ostensibly positive ("women are nurturing," "Asians are good at math"). What makes them problematic is that they are applied to individuals who may not fit the group pattern, and they are resistant to updating even when disconfirming evidence is present. From your knowledge of schemas, you can see why: stereotypes function as schemas for social groups, and schemas are confirmed more easily than they are revised.

Prejudice is the affective component — the evaluative attitude toward the group, which can range from active hostility to subtle discomfort or ambivalence. Discrimination is the behavioral component — differential treatment based on group membership. The critical insight is that these three components can operate independently. A person can hold a stereotyped belief without strong emotional prejudice. A person can feel prejudice and yet not discriminate, because social norms create costs for visible bias. And discrimination can occur without conscious prejudice, through institutional structures — hiring criteria that historically disadvantaged one group, neighborhood policies that produce racially segregated schools — where no individual need intend the outcome.

Modern research focuses on subtle, ambivalent forms of bias that have replaced the blatant prejudice of earlier eras. Aversive racism describes the pattern in individuals who explicitly endorse egalitarian values but harbor implicit biases that surface in ambiguous situations — when a discriminatory response can be attributed to something other than race. Benevolent sexism treats women as needing protection or elevation, which feels positive but reinforces gender hierarchies by denying women agency. These forms persist precisely because they are hard to identify and easy to rationalize.

The policy implication that follows from separating the three components is sobering: reducing individual prejudice, while valuable, does not automatically reduce discriminatory outcomes. If institutions have built-in structural biases, they will reproduce differential outcomes even as individual attitudes improve. This is why researchers and policymakers increasingly distinguish between individual-level interventions (reducing prejudice and implicit bias) and structural interventions (changing the policies and criteria through which outcomes are determined).