| Chapter Introduction: | Introduction to the Handbook on Prejudice |
|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
memberships, however, may come to an abrupt end when the social and political conditions are under stress. In times of crisis, such eclectic individualism quickly vanishes together with ranges of tolerance of difference. As in-group boundaries tend to tighten, they enforce compulsory collective commitments. Stress situations strengthen group identities and force individuals to act in conformity with their groups. When France decided in 2002 not to join the U.S.-led alliance in the war on Iraq, French-speaking persons in the United States were forced to leave a public bus in New York, French wine was spilled in the gutter, and french fries were renamed “freedom fries”. Collectivism is not only an effect of totalitarian rule, but can also spill over in a democracy in times of war.
When Allport started the discourse on prejudice half a century ago, he wrote, “This volume maintains that prejudice is ultimately a problem of personality formation and development” (2000, 36). The same line of research was pursued in the 1950s by the Adorno School and its investigation of the “authoritarian character”. Today, the (socially embedded) individual is no longer the privileged starting point of research. Collectivism, a term that was shunned by democratic social psychologists, has lately gained an unexpected emphasis (Sherif and Sherif 1953). Today, the real issues involved in the study of prejudice concern less personality formation and development than identity formation and the dynamics of identity politics. The stage on which the new conflicts rage is no longer that of social or international conflict, but the globally disenfranchised world which is interlinked through new channels of communication and, at the same time, torn apart by new, lethal divisions. In the 1950s, there was still the vision that smaller circles could be integrated in larger circles and in-group loyalty could be extended by education concentrically beyond the orbit of family and nation to encompass, finally, “One World”. Today, we know that the vision of such a progressively inclusive development is a utopian one. Or, to put it differently, this kind of research was in itself the result of an individualist premise, bias, or prejudice, whichever terminology one may choose.
For heuristic purposes, Tajfel distinguishes between purely interpersonal behaviour and purely intergroup behaviour. The English writer