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Prejudice in Psychology and Religion

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Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion

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“You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger.”

- Buddha

Individual prejudice is often rooted in culturally based ethnocentrism. Humans may also explain behavior through a lens of group interest and collective bias aimed at race, gender presentation, and religion, among other things. Psychoanalytically oriented investigations of relationships between culture and personality began in earnest during the period between the two World Wars with the work of Lasswell (1930), Fromm (1941), Maslow (1943), Sartre (1948/1976), and Reich (1946). In an attempt to go even deeper by fusing the theoretical orientation of psychoanalysis and clinical psychology methodologies, Adorno et al. (1950) suggested that authoritarian personalities collectively exploit the weak while simultaneously submitting to their superiors, exemplified by Nazi behavior during Hitler’s Third Reich. This led to a fallacious assumption by the authors that: (1) prejudiced people are authoritarian...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stephen F. Austin State University, Nacogdoches, TX, USA

    Dianne Dentice

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  1. Dianne Dentice
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Correspondence to Dianne Dentice .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

    David A. Leeming

  2. Blanton-Peale Institute, New York, NY, USA

    David A. Leeming

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Dentice, D. (2020). Prejudice in Psychology and Religion. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24348-7_521

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