Toward a Problem-Focused Understanding of Prejudice

In his target article, Henry (this issue) reminds us of a criticism that is often lodged against social psychological research. The claim that too much research is derived from a college student sample is unassailable, especially in light of the summary data that Henry provides from the field’s top basic and applied journals. It also seems undeniable that our field’s biased sampling practice would be a problem for the psychological study of prejudice. But in this commentary, we would like to argue that the focus on college samples is not the primary issue of concern in prejudice research but is rather a symptom of a larger problem with our empirical approach to this topic. The larger problem is that we rarely study prejudice as if it is a problem to be solved. As Henry points out, the study of prejudice is one of the jewels in the crown of social psychology. It’s a topic that drew many of us to the discipline in the first place. And more so than many topics, prejudice is clearly a problem in society throughout history and around the globe, but what percentage of our scientific inquiry has really been focused on finding solutions? Several years ago, I (first author Toni Schmader) attended a Claremont Symposium focused on the topic of Reducing Prejudice. As a graduate student interested in stigma, discrimination, stereotyping, and bias, I was eager to hear what the field’s leading scholars had to say about how prejudice could be reduced. I must admit, however, that by the end of the day I was a bit disappointed. Most speakers trotted out their talks de jour, summarizing their most recent data shedding light onto the underlying processes that explain when, why, and how prejudice manifests itself. A few slides at the end were charged with translating this process-focused information into solutions, but it was clear that very little research was focused directly on the solutions themselves.1 We do not mean to dismiss the work that was described that day; it included some of the best experimental research that has been conducted to understand prejudice. But it