Prejudice Reduction and Collective Action: A Conflict or Confluence of Interests?

Abstract

There is a growing body of research findings suggesting that prejudice reduction strategies can have unintended negative consequences, particularly by helping to stabilize systems of inequality. In light of these findings, a handful of scholars have suggested that the field be guided less by the prejudice reduction tradition, so as to focus more on collective action. While agreeing with the recent critiques of prejudice reduction, I argue that in more robustly embracing a collective action approach we should be careful not to abandon the notion of perceptualism that colored original thinking on prejudice reduction, lest we artificially narrow the scope of social psychological research and unintentionally ignore communities that do not fit well within current thinking in the collective action tradition.

Keywords

• social change
• prejudice
• ironic effects
• sedative effects
• collective action
• perceptualism