Use in Studying Prejudice

A third area of application is social psychology, especially the study of prejudice.
Gordon Allport suggested that those who exhibit racial or religious prejudice are typically people who feel inferior themselves: They are trying
to feel better about themselves by feeling superior to someone else. Typically,
prejudice against African Americans has been greatest among whites
of low socioeconomic status. Prejudice against new immigrants has been
greatest among the more poorly skilled domestic workers. Another example
of prejudice would be social class distinctions. The middle class feels inferior
(in terms of wealth and privilege) to the upper class. Therefore, the
middle class responds by using its private logic to demean the justification of
wealth: “The rich are rich because their ancestors were robber barons or because
they themselves were junk bond traders in the 1980’s.” The middle
class feels superior to the lower class, however, and again uses private logic to
justify and legitimize that class distinction: “The poor are poor because they
are lazy and irresponsible.” In order to solidify its own identity as hardworking
and responsible, the middle class develops a perception of the poor that
is more derogatory than an objective analysis would permit.
The most telling application of the theory of individual psychology to
prejudice occurred in the first part of the twentieth century in Germany.
The rise of Nazi anti-Semitism can be associated with the humiliating German
defeat in World War I and with the deplorable conditions brought
about by hyperinflation and depression. Adolf Hitler first blamed the Jews
for the “November treason” which brought about the defeat of the German
army. (This private logic allowed the German people to believe that their defeated
army would have achieved an all-out victory at the front had it not
been for the Jewish traitors back in Berlin.) All the problems of capitalism
and social inequality were laid at the feet of Jewish financiers, and every fear
of rabble-rousing Communists was associated with Jewish radicals. Because
everything bad, weak, cowardly, or exploitive was labeled “Jewish,” non-
Jewish Germans could believe that they themselves were everything good.
The result of the institutionalization of this private logic in the Third Reich
led to one of the most blatant examples of masculine protest that humankind
has witnessed: World War II and the Holocaust. 434