Department of Educational Psychology
Date of this Version
2007
Citation
Patterns of Prejudice 41:5 (2007), pp. 517–542.
doi: 10.1080/00313220701657401
Abstract
Fifty years after Gordon Allport’s classic The Nature of Prejudice (1954), what do we know about the nature of prejudice? Quite a bit, actually, much of which Allport already knew, but some of which represents genuine progress in scientific understanding. That’s the message of On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years after Allport, in which forty-four authors, guided by three editors, successfully manage what Allport did alone a half-century ago: to present in one volume the state of the art in the psychological study of prejudice. The volume has been carefully conceived and structured to provide comprehensive and systematic coverage of Allport’s views and of progress in the years since 1954. The first chapter, written by the three co-editors, provides an excellent overview of Allport’s “enduring insights” and of areas in which there have been important subsequent developments. The remaining twenty-five chapters, all concise and well written, do the same for each of various topics Allport addressed. This organizational framework, it turns out, is not just a tribute. Rather, it reflects the reality that Allport, who died in 1967, continues to set the agenda for research and theory on prejudice. The Nature of Prejudice remains, in the words of the present co-editors, “the foundational work for the social psychology of prejudice” (1), whose “table of contents . . . has defined the field over the past 50 years” (xiv).
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Comments
Copyright © 2007 David Moshman. Published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group. Used by permission.