Allport's Legacy and the Situational Press of Stereotypes

Journal of Social Issues, Fall, 1999 by David M. Marx, Joseph L. Brown, Claude M. Steele

David M. Marx [*]

This article focuses on two aspects of Allport's (1954) investigation of the psychology of being a target of prejudice. Whereas most researchers in this area view Allport as an expectancy theorist, we revisit another aspect of Allport's theory: the situational threat posed by negative stereotypes. First, we examine this issue, as it applies to the academic underachievement of negatively stereotyped groups, by contrasting the situational threat posed by stereotypes with traditional and current expectancy-oriented conceptions. Second, we show that stereotypes do not appear to affect self-expectations; instead, they appear to foster a climate of mistrust that results in depressed performance. Finally, we discuss how interventions that ameliorate the climate of mistrust, such as the presence of educators who are competent minority group members, tend to raise levels of performance.

One of the important contributions of Gordon Allport that has affected modern social psychology only in the last decade or so is his focus on the psychology of the targets of prejudice. He was not the first to describe this psychology. Freud, Bettelheim, Mead and others had noted the psychological importance of being a target of stereotyping and prejudice, and in some instances, even offered specific theories of the experience, as in Freud's notion of "identification with the oppressor" (Brill, 1938). But Allport used a language that is most in contact with the cognitive paradigm of modern psychology. For this reason, it is his treatment of this psychology that provides the broadest foundation for contemporary research and theory about the psychology of being on the receiving end of prejudice.

Although it is difficult to extrapolate what side Allport would take on the current debates in this literature, most researchers have cast him essentially as an expectancy theorist. The quote, taken from The Nature of Prejudice (1954)--most often used in this regard--is "One's reputation, whether false or true, cannot be hammered, hammered, hammered, into one's head without doing something to one's character" (p. 142). It is perhaps fair to say that most contemporary researchers assume that Allport is talking about expectancies here: self-beliefs about one's character and capacities that may well come to have an influence of their own on the person's behavior and psychological life. Allport's use of Merton's (1948) concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy is taken as evidence of this: that what Allport had in mind was a process by which the target of prejudice internalizes the negative views of his or her group through the "hammering" exposure he described, and then "self-fulfills" those internalized beliefs as one would fulfill a self-expectancy.

Although this view might be a quite reasonable interpretation of how Allport saw prejudice and stereotypes affecting a person, it is, we stress, an interpretation of Allport and not necessarily all that he had in mind. A chief aim of this article, in exploring the legacy of Allport' s work, is to examine another possible way in which negative views of a person's group might come to affect a person's behavior and psychology. The alternative we focus on is the situational effect that such negative views or stereotypes might have on a person. That is, aside from whatever effects a negative stereotype may have through its internalization as a self-expectancy, it may also have effects that stem directly from its posing an acute, and sometimes chronic, situational pressure in a person's life; internalization need not be involved. In our minds, this approach represents another extension and development of the Allport legacy. It is clear from The Nature of Prejudice that he understood that negative group stereotypes can exert an immediate and situational pressure on a person's psyche. For example, he writes at one point about the prospect of being seen and treated stereotypically as causing a state of "obsessive concern" in a person about how he or she is being perceived. Allport (1954) writes that a Black person cannot "enter a store, restaurant, movie, hotel, amusement park, school, train, plane, or boat, to say nothing of a white person's home, without wondering uneasily whether he will suffer insult and humiliation. This haunting anxiety is, of course, greater if he is traveling and thus unfamiliar with local pathways where people of his color may feel safe" (p. 140).

But perhaps reflecting psychology's difficulty in thinking systematically about contextual pressures, this implication of Allport's thinking has been less well developed. Although we acknowledge the possibility that negative group stereotypes can be internalized and can affect behavior as expectancies, our focus is on a different part of Allport's target-of-prejudice problem space: the situational pressure posed by the prospect of being seen or treated through the lens of a negative group stereotype, and the effect this situational pressure can have on one's behavior and psychology.