Allport's Scale

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Allport's Scale of Prejudice and Discrimination is a measure of the manifestation of prejudice in a society. It was devised by psychologist Gordon Allport in 1954. [1] [2]

Contents

The scale

Allport's Scale of Prejudice goes from 1 to 5.

  1. Antilocution : Antilocution occurs when an in-group freely purports negative images of an out-group. [2] Hate speech is the extreme form of this stage. [3] It is commonly seen as harmless by the majority. Antilocution itself may not be harmful, but it sets the stage for more severe outlets for prejudice (see also ethnic joke).
  2. Avoidance: Members of the in-group actively avoid people in the out-group. [2] No direct harm may be intended, but psychological harm often results through isolation (see also social exclusion).
  3. Discrimination : The out-group is discriminated against by denying them opportunities and services, putting prejudice into action. [2] Behaviors have the intention of disadvantaging the out-group by preventing them from achieving goals, getting education or jobs, etc. Examples include Jim Crow laws in the US, Apartheid in South Africa, and the Nuremberg Laws in 1930s Germany.
  4. Physical Attack: The in-group vandalizes, burns, or otherwise destroys out-group property and carries out violent attacks on individuals or groups. [2] Physical harm is done to members of the out-group. Examples include pogroms against Jews in Europe, the lynchings of Black people in the US, ongoing violence against Hindus in Pakistan and Muslims in India.
  5. Extermination : The in-group seeks extermination or removal of the out-group. [2] They attempt to eliminate either the entirety or a large fraction of the undesired group of people. Examples include the Cambodian genocide, the Final Solution in Nazi Germany, the Rwandan genocide, the Armenian genocide, and the genocide of the Hellenes.

This scale should not be confused with the Religious Orientation Scale of Allport and Ross (1967), which is a measure of the maturity of an individual's religious conviction.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Discrimination</span> Prejudicial treatment based on membership in a certain group

Discrimination is the process of making unfair or prejudicial distinctions between people based on the groups, classes, or other categories to which they belong or are perceived to belong, such as race, gender, age, religion, physical attractiveness or sexual orientation. Discrimination typically leads to groups being unfairly treated on the basis of perceived statuses based on ethnic, racial, gender or religious categories. It involves depriving members of one group of opportunities or privileges that are available to members of another group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Genocide</span> Intentional destruction of a people

Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part.

A hate crime is crime where a perpetrator targets a victim because of their physical appearance or perceived membership of a certain social group.

Hate speech is a legal term with varied meaning. It has no single, consistent definition. It is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation". The Encyclopedia of the American Constitution states that hate speech is "usually thought to include communications of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group on account of a group characteristic such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation". There is no single definition of what constitutes "hate" or "disparagement". Legal definitions of hate speech vary from country to country.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Prejudice</span> Attitudes based on preconceived categories

Prejudice can be an affective feeling towards a person based on their perceived group membership. The word is often used to refer to a preconceived evaluation or classification of another person based on that person's perceived personal characteristics, such as political affiliation, sex, gender, gender identity, beliefs, values, social class, age, disability, religion, sexuality, race, ethnicity, language, nationality, culture, complexion, beauty, height, body weight, occupation, wealth, education, criminality, sport-team affiliation, music tastes or other perceived characteristics.

Heterosexism is a system of attitudes, bias, and discrimination in favor of heterosexuality and heterosexual relationships. According to Elizabeth Cramer, it can include the belief that all people are or should be heterosexual and that heterosexual relationships are the only norm and therefore superior.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gordon Allport</span> American psychologist (1897–1967)

Gordon Willard Allport was an American psychologist. Allport was one of the first psychologists to focus on the study of the personality, and is often referred to as one of the founding figures of personality psychology. He contributed to the formation of values scales and rejected both a psychoanalytic approach to personality, which he thought often was too deeply interpretive, and a behavioral approach, which he thought did not provide deep enough interpretations from their data. Instead of these popular approaches, he developed an eclectic theory based on traits. He emphasized the uniqueness of each individual, and the importance of the present context, as opposed to history, for understanding the personality.

Antilocution describes a form of prejudice in which negative verbal remarks against a person, group, or community, are made but not addressed directly to the subject.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Homophobia</span> Negative attitudes and discrimination toward homosexuality and LGBT people

Homophobia encompasses a range of negative attitudes and feelings toward homosexuality or people who identify or are perceived as being lesbian, gay or bisexual. It has been defined as contempt, prejudice, aversion, hatred or antipathy, may be based on irrational fear and may sometimes be attributed to religious beliefs.

In psychology and other social sciences, the contact hypothesis suggests that intergroup contact under appropriate conditions can effectively reduce prejudice between majority and minority group members. Following WWII and the desegregation of the military and other public institutions, policymakers and social scientists had turned an eye towards the policy implications of interracial contact. Of them, social psychologist Gordon Allport united early research in this vein under intergroup contact theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hatred</span> Deep and emotional extreme dislike

Hatred or hate is an intense negative emotional response towards certain people, things or ideas, usually related to opposition or revulsion toward something. Hatred is often associated with intense feelings of anger, contempt, and disgust. Hatred is sometimes seen as the opposite of love.

An individual's or community's religious orientation involves presumptions about the existence and nature of God or gods, religious prescriptions about morality and communal and personal spirituality. Such presumptions involve the study of psychology, ethics, sociology and anthropology.

The attribution-value model is a framework for understanding individual differences in prejudice, developed by Chris Crandall and colleagues. It states that not only do minorities possess undesirable characteristics incongruent with the majority, but also that minorities are also responsible for them. For example, overweight individuals are viewed as “lazy” and unable to control themselves. This belief that targeted groups should be held accountable for their status arouses negative emotional reactions towards them.

Minority stress describes high levels of stress faced by members of stigmatized minority groups. It may be caused by a number of factors, including poor social support and low socioeconomic status; well understood causes of minority stress are interpersonal prejudice and discrimination. Indeed, numerous scientific studies have shown that when minority individuals experience a high degree of prejudice, this can cause stress responses that accrue over time, eventually leading to poor mental and physical health. Minority stress theory summarizes these scientific studies to explain how difficult social situations lead to chronic stress and poor health among minority individuals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Discrimination against gay men</span> Prejudice, hatred, or bias toward gay men, male homosexuality, or men perceived to be gay

Discrimination against gay men, sometimes called gayphobia, is a form of homophobic prejudice, hatred, or bias specifically directed toward gay men, male homosexuality, or men who are perceived to be gay. This discrimination is closely related to femmephobia, which is the dislike of, or hostility toward, individuals who present as feminine, including gay and effeminate men. Discrimination against gay men can result from religion, prejudicial reactions to one's feminine mannerisms, styles of clothing, and even vocal register. Within the LGBT-community, internalized issues around meeting social expectations of masculinity have been found among gay, bisexual, and transgender men. Gayphobia is misandry that intersects with homophobia. It is analogous to lesbophobia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Genocide prevention</span> Any act or actions that works toward averting future genocides

Prevention of genocide is any action that works toward averting future genocides. Genocides take a lot of planning, resources, and involved parties to carry out, they do not just happen instantaneously. Scholars in the field of genocide studies have identified a set of widely agreed upon risk factors that make a country or social group more at risk of carrying out a genocide, which include a wide range of political and cultural factors that create a context in which genocide is more likely, such as political upheaval or regime change, as well as psychological phenomena that can be manipulated and taken advantage of in large groups of people, like conformity and cognitive dissonance. Genocide prevention depends heavily on the knowledge and surveillance of these risk factors, as well as the identification of early warning signs of genocide beginning to occur.

Online hate speech is a type of speech that takes place online with the purpose of attacking a person or a group based on their race, religion, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, disability, and/or gender. Online hate speech is not easily defined, but can be recognized by the degrading or dehumanizing function it serves.

The Nature of Prejudice is a 1954 social psychology book by American psychologist Gordon Allport, on the topic of prejudice.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Incitement to genocide</span> Crime under international law

Incitement to genocide is a crime under international law which prohibits inciting (encouraging) the commission of genocide. An extreme form of hate speech, incitement to genocide is an inchoate offense and is theoretically subject to prosecution even if genocide does not occur, although charges have never been brought in an international court without mass violence having occurred. "Direct and public incitement to commit genocide" was forbidden by the Genocide Convention in 1948. Incitement to genocide is often cloaked in metaphor and euphemism and may take many forms beyond direct advocacy, including dehumanization and accusation in a mirror.

Hate speech is public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation. Hate speech is "usually thought to include communications of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group on account of a group characteristic such as race, colour, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation".

References

  1. Allport, Gordon (1954). The Nature of Prejudice . Addison-Wesley. ISBN   0-201-00179-9.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Watson, Peter (2007). Psychology and Race. Transaction Publishers. pp. 45–46. ISBN   978-0-202-30929-3.
  3. Mullen, B.; Leader, T. (2005). "Linguistic factors: Antilocution, ethnophaulisms, ethnonyms, and other varieties of hate speech". In Dovidio, J.F. (ed.). On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years After Allport. Wiley/Blackwell. pp. 192–208. ISBN   978-1-4051-2751-6.