Causes and Continuity of Prejudice and Discrimination

Prejudice and discrimination are among the most persistent social problems in human history. They don’t appear out of nowhere – they grow from specific conditions, are reinforced by social structures, and are kept alive by both individual psychology and collective norms. Understanding why they develop and how they continue is essential to confronting them effectively. This post breaks down the key historical, situational, and psychodynamic forces that drive prejudice and discrimination – and explains why they’re so difficult to dismantle.

Defining the terms: prejudice vs. discrimination 🔗

Before exploring causes, it’s worth being precise about what these terms mean. According to social psychologists, prejudice refers to an unjustified, often negative attitude toward individuals based solely on their membership in a social group. It encompasses cognitive, affective, and behavioral components – what we think, feel, and are inclined to do toward a group. Discrimination, by contrast, is when those biased attitudes translate into actual negative behavior – denying someone a job, an education, or basic respect because of the group they belong to.

Importantly, the two don’t always go hand in hand. A business owner may deny service to a minority group not out of personal prejudice, but because they fear it will hurt their profits. Conversely, someone may hold deep internal prejudices without ever acting on them. Understanding this distinction matters because the causes – and solutions – for each can differ.

Historical roots: how the past shapes the present 🔗

Many of the world’s most entrenched prejudices have roots in economic and political history. Group hierarchies – who holds power, who owns land, who controls wealth – don’t emerge from thin air. They are shaped by centuries of conflict, exploitation, and competition over resources.

The role of economic conflict and occupational roles 🔗

One well-documented example is anti-Jewish prejudice in medieval Europe. Historical analysis shows that much of the popular prejudice against Jews grew from their visible role as moneylenders – a position they occupied because the Church prohibited Christians from charging interest. Their association with money created an image of Jews as greedy and manipulative, even though this role was forced upon them by social exclusion from other professions. Over centuries, this economically derived stereotype hardened into ethnic and racial ideology, eventually feeding into modern antisemitism and the horrors of the Holocaust.

Historical records document that in 19th-century Europe, Jews were increasingly characterized as a racially distinct and inferior group – a perception that blended older religious hostility with new pseudo-scientific racial theory. This long accumulation of prejudice provided the ideological groundwork for Nazi genocide. The lesson here is stark: prejudices that begin as economically motivated can calcify into racial or ethnic ideologies with catastrophic consequences.

Prejudice against women: a legacy of status and power 🔗

Gender-based prejudice follows a similar logic. For much of recorded history, women were legally and socially subordinated – denied property rights, education, and political participation. These conditions weren’t just the result of prejudice; they also produced prejudice. When women were excluded from professional and public life, their absence from positions of authority reinforced the stereotype that they were inherently less capable, less rational, or less suited for leadership. Research on prejudice and social structure shows that low-status groups are often perceived as warm but incompetent – a patronizing form of bias that justifies keeping them in subordinate roles while appearing benevolent.

This is a crucial mechanism: status differences don’t just reflect prejudice – they actively generate and sustain it.

Situational factors: what keeps prejudice alive 🔗

Even when historical prejudices exist, they need ongoing situational support to survive. Two of the most significant situational drivers are competition for resources and conformity to social norms.

Competition and realistic group conflict 🔗

Realistic Group Conflict Theory (RGCT), developed by Muzafer Sherif and colleagues in the 1960s, explains that when groups compete for scarce resources – jobs, land, status, political power – prejudice and hostility naturally intensify. The theory holds that perceived competition, even more than actual competition, is enough to spark intergroup hostility. Sherif’s classic Robbers Cave Experiment demonstrated this dramatically: two groups of boys at a summer camp, with no prior history of conflict, quickly developed deep hostility simply by being placed in competition with each other.

This has real-world parallels. Economic downturns, for instance, often produce spikes in prejudice against immigrant groups, who are blamed for “taking jobs” from the majority population. Studies using this framework found that white opposition to school busing for racial integration in the 1970s was driven largely by a perceived threat to valued resources and lifestyles – not abstract ideology. Competition makes the out-group feel threatening, and threatening out-groups attract prejudice.

Conformity to norms 🔗

Once prejudice becomes established in a community or culture, it is maintained through social conformity. People learn what attitudes are acceptable within their social circles and often adopt those views to fit in – even without strong personal conviction. Research on social learning shows that children absorb prejudiced attitudes through observation – by watching how adults treat certain groups, seeing who occupies positions of authority, and absorbing the unspoken lessons of their environment. Albert Bandura’s work on social learning theory reinforces this: behavior and attitudes are acquired through modeling, not just direct instruction.

This explains why prejudice can persist even among individuals who wouldn’t personally describe themselves as prejudiced. Discriminatory norms embedded in institutions, workplaces, or families become the default – and deviating from them requires active effort.

In-group bias and social identity 🔗

A key psychological mechanism underlying much prejudice is in-group favoritism. Henri Tajfel and John Turner’s Social Identity Theory explains that people derive a significant part of their self-esteem from the social groups they belong to. To maintain a positive self-image, people tend to favor their in-group and derogate out-groups. This doesn’t require a history of conflict or resource competition – even arbitrary group divisions can produce bias. The simple act of categorizing people as “us” versus “them” is enough to trigger preferential treatment for the in-group and suspicion toward the out-group.

Psychodynamic factors: the inner architecture of prejudice 🔗

Beyond history and social context, psychology has identified several internal mechanisms that make individuals particularly susceptible to prejudiced thinking.

Frustration and the scapegoat hypothesis 🔗

The frustration-aggression hypothesis offers one of the most compelling explanations for why prejudice intensifies during times of hardship. The theory holds that when people are frustrated – blocked from achieving their goals – they become aggressive. But aggression toward the actual source of frustration is often impossible or dangerous. So people displace it onto a more accessible, less powerful target: the scapegoat.

Scapegoats are effective psychological targets precisely because they are visible, identifiable, and socially sanctioned as targets by the broader group. Minority groups – racial, ethnic, religious – have historically served this function. The scapegoating of Jewish people in economic crises, or immigrants during periods of unemployment, follows this exact pattern: displaced frustration seeks a convenient, relatively powerless target.

The authoritarian personality 🔗

Not everyone is equally prone to prejudice, and personality structure plays a meaningful role. Theodor Adorno and colleagues proposed in their landmark 1950 work The Authoritarian Personality that certain individuals are psychologically predisposed to prejudice. These individuals – described as having an “authoritarian personality” – tend to think in rigid, black-and-white terms, submit unquestioningly to authority, and direct aggression toward those perceived as deviant or inferior.

The theory traces this personality type to strict, controlling upbringings. Children raised in overly harsh environments learn to suppress their own impulses and resentments – especially toward their parents. Later, because they cannot consciously direct anger at authority figures, they project it onto socially vulnerable groups. The result is a person who is deferential to power while simultaneously contemptuous of the weak.

Adorno’s central argument was that status anxiety, channeled through authoritarian upbringing, leads to the repression of personal inadequacies – which are then projected outward onto minorities and outsiders. Research since the 1950s has refined the concept, with Bob Altemeyer’s Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale identifying three core tendencies: submission to authority, aggression toward out-groups sanctioned by those authorities, and rigid adherence to conventional values.

Intolerance for ambiguity 🔗

Closely related to the authoritarian personality is a broader cognitive trait: intolerance for ambiguity. People who are uncomfortable with uncertainty tend to prefer clear, simple categories – and stereotypes provide exactly that. Placing people in fixed groups (“us” vs. “them,” “competent” vs. “inferior”) reduces cognitive complexity. The authoritarian personality is characterized by rigidity and a tendency toward black-and-white thinking, making nuanced, case-by-case assessments of individuals feel psychologically threatening. Stereotyping, in this light, is not laziness – it is a defensive cognitive strategy.

The cycle of maintenance: why prejudice is so hard to break 🔗

What makes prejudice particularly resistant to change is that it becomes self-reinforcing. Discriminatory practices shape social outcomes – who gets educated, who gets hired, who accumulates wealth – and those outcomes are then used to justify the original prejudice. If a group is systematically denied educational opportunities and ends up less represented in professional roles, that underrepresentation is misread as evidence of natural inferiority, rather than structural disadvantage.

Research on the psychological costs of discrimination shows that even anticipating prejudice – the vigilance required to navigate a world that may be hostile – produces measurable physiological stress responses. Chronic exposure to discrimination contributes to elevated cardiovascular reactivity and long-term health disparities. This means prejudice harms not only through overt acts, but through the sustained psychological burden it places on those who are targeted.

Institutional reinforcement compounds this. Legal systems, educational institutions, and media representations that perpetuate stereotypes normalize prejudice and make it invisible to those who benefit from it. Developmental research confirms that prejudice takes root in childhood, and that by adulthood it is deeply entrenched and resistant to change – which is why early intervention is considered so critical by researchers in the field.

Understanding the development and maintenance of prejudice and discrimination is not just an academic exercise. It reveals that these are not simply failures of individual character – they are the product of historical structures, situational pressures, and psychological needs that affect us all to varying degrees. Awareness of these mechanisms is the first step toward disrupting them.

What do you think? If prejudice is partly learned through social conformity and observation, at what point does an individual bear personal responsibility for the biased attitudes they hold? And given how deeply historical economic conflicts have shaped stereotypes about specific groups, do you think those stereotypes can ever be fully dismantled – or do they simply evolve into new forms?

References

1. https://www.simplypsychology.org/prejudice.html
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3. https://remember.org/guide/history-root-stereotypes
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5. https://psychology.iresearchnet.com/social-psychology/social-psychology-theories/realistic-group-conflict-theory/
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realistic_conflict_theory
7. https://sites.psu.edu/aspsy/2015/04/05/prejudice-and-discrimination-is-learned/
8. https://pressbooks-dev.oer.hawaii.edu/psychology/chapter/prejudice-and-discrimination/
9. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/psychology/frustration-aggression-theory
10. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/authoritarian-personality-theory
11. https://psychology.iresearchnet.com/social-psychology/personality/authoritarian-personality/
12. https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199828340/obo-9780199828340-0160.xml
13. https://taylorandfrancis.com/knowledge/Medicine_and_healthcare/Psychiatry/Authoritarian_personality/
14. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3483920/
15. https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10080495