Processes of Prejudice and the Roots of Racism: A Socio-Cognitive Approach. Prepublication/Working Paper No. 3.

A cognitive theory about the representation and processing of ethnic attitudes is presented, and strategies people use to express ethnic attitudes in conversations are discussed. Recent developments in cognitive and social psychology and in microsociology have shown that ethnic prejudices or attitudes are both cognitive and social results of social information processing in intergroup relations. Ethnic prejudice, formulated in terms of attitude schemata about minority groups, can be categorically organized in terms of their major social functions: dominance, differentiation, distance, depersonalization, diffusion, diversion, and the various forms of daily discrimination. Ethnic groups are represented according to prototypical characteristics, e.g., origin, appearance, socio-economic position. There are many strategies which can be used to manipulate these cognitions, including irrelevant participant categorization, use of negative prototypical properties of minorities, favoritism in ambiguous situations of ingroup members, and negative information spreading. How everyday talk exemplifies many of these cognitive and social strategies of prejudice is shown. (RM)