This excerpt was written by Margaret L. Andersen and Howard F. Taylor, Sociology: Understanding a Diverse Society, Second Edition (Wadsworth Publishing 2001).

Prejudice is the evaluation of a social group, and individuals within that group, based on conceptions about the social group that are held despite facts that contradict it and that involve both prejudgment and misjudgment (Allport, 1954; Pettigrew, 1971; Jones, 1997). Prejudices are usually defined as negative predispositions or evaluations, rarely positive. Thinking ill of people only because they are members of group X is prejudice. The negative evaluation arises solely because the person is seen as a member of group X, without regard to countervailing traits or characteristics the person may have. A negative prejudice against someone not in one's own social group is often accompanied by a positive prejudice in favor of someone who is in one's own group. Thus, the prejudiced person will have negative attitudes about a member of an out-group (any group other than one's own) and positive attitudes about someone simply because he or she is in one's in-group (any group one considers one's own).

Most people disavow racial or ethnic prejudice, yet the vast majority of us carry around some prejudices, whether about racialöethnic groups, men and women, old and young, upper class and lower class, or straight and gay. Prejudice is what social scientists call a variable÷it varies from person to person. Five decades of research have shown definitively that people who are more prejudiced are also more likely to stereotype others by race or ethnicity, and often by gender, than those who are less prejudiced (Adorno et al., 1950; Jones, 1997; Taylor et al., 1997; Worchel et al., 2000). Nevertheless, everyone possesses some prejudices.

Prejudice based on race or ethnicity is called racialöethnic prejudice. In-groups and out-groups in this case are defined along racial or ethnic lines. If you are a Latino and dislike an Anglo only because he or she is White, then this constitutes prejudice. It is a negative judgment ("prejudgment") based on race and ethnicity and very little else. In this example, Latino is the in-group and White is the outgroup. If the Latino individual attempts to justify these feelings by arguing that "all Whites have the same bad character, "then the Latino is using a stereotype as justification for the prejudice. Similarly, gender prejudice exists in our society. There are negative prejudices based on gender, and ingroup and out-group are defined by gender. Finally, there is class prejudice, the negative evaluation of people solely on the basis of their social class, but little reference to anything else about them. Note that prejudice can be held by any group against another. Thus, African Americans can be prejudiced against Whites or against Hispanics and Asian Americans. African Americans of West Indian (Caribbean) descent may be prejudiced against non-West Indian African Americans. Such prejudice does exist, although sociological research has found that recent concerns that there is a backlash of prejudice by African Americans against Hispanics and Asian Americans is generally less than prejudice by White Americans toward these groups (Cummings and Lambert, 1997).

Prejudice is also revealed in the phenomenon of ethnocentrism, which we examined in Chapter 3 on culture. Ethnocentrism is the belief that one's group is superior to all other groups. The ethnocentric person feels that his or her own group is moral, just, and right and that an outgroup ÷and thus any member of the out-group÷is immoral, unjust, wrong, distrustful, or criminal. The ethno- centric individual uses his or her own in-group as the standard against which all other groups are compared. Generally, the greater the difference between groups, the more harshly the out-group will be judged by an ethnocentric individual and the more prejudiced that person will be against members of the out-group.