Prejudice and intergroup relations (1): the nature of post-communist prejudice
The Social Psychology of Democracies in Transition
Overview of the lecture
This lecture is the first of two on prejudice and intergroup relations. Today’s session develops the social-psychological definition of prejudice, examines its effects on targets, traces its principal causes, and uses this apparatus to analyse the specific patterns of post-communist prejudice that have shaped Central and Eastern Europe since 1989. The second half of the lecture turns to the enduring puzzle of anti-Semitism in CEE societies that have almost no remaining Jewish populations, drawing on Jelena Subotić’s 2019 book Yellow Star, Red Star for its account of Holocaust memory politics and ontological security. The lecture closes with a scene from Paweł Łoziński’s 1992 documentary Dziedzictwo (Birthplace), in which the Polish-Jewish writer Henryk Grynberg returns to the village where his father was killed and confronts a villager whose fear and shame, more than fifty years after the event, illustrate the enduring structure of post-communist prejudice with unusual clarity.
Defining prejudice
The three components of an attitude
Prejudice, in the social-psychological literature, is a hostile or negative attitude toward people in a distinguishable group, based solely on their membership in that group. Because it is an attitude, it has three components. The cognitive component contains the beliefs and thoughts that make up the attitude, typically in the form of stereotypes. The affective component contains the emotions attached to the attitude — anger, disgust, fear, contempt, or warmth, with varying intensities. The behavioural component contains the actions the attitude motivates, including discrimination. The characteristics that prejudiced attitudes assign to the target group are typically negative and applied to the group as a whole, overriding information about any individual member.
The cognitive component
Categorisation is the cognitive foundation of prejudice. The human mind cannot avoid grouping stimuli into categories, and social neuroscience research suggests that category-creation is an adaptive mechanism present from birth. Humans categorise along the salient cues available in a given environment: gender, age, race, language, accent, dress, religious identifiers. Once a category is established, stereotype-consistent information receives more attention and is remembered more easily than the exceptions. Stereotyping is a step beyond simple categorisation: it consists in assigning near-identical characteristics to virtually all members of a group, regardless of actual variation among them. The world is too complicated for us to hold highly differentiated attitudes about everything; we maximise cognitive economy by constructing nuanced attitudes about the domains that matter to us and relying on simplified, error-prone beliefs about the rest.
The affective component
The affective component of prejudice is what makes it hard to argue with. Logical arguments frequently fail against prejudice because the underlying emotion is not logical: fear, disgust, and contempt persist even when a person consciously knows the prejudice is wrong. Susan Fiske’s Stereotype Content Model organises the emotional content of stereotypes along two dimensions, warmth and competence.
| High competence | Low competence | |
|---|---|---|
| High warmth | Admired (the in-group, allies) | Pitied (the elderly, the disabled) |
| Low warmth | Envied (the rich, “the elite”, historically the Jews in many European contexts) | Contempt (the homeless, “parasites”, often the Roma in contemporary CEE) |
Groups in the envied quadrant are particularly dangerous targets: admired for their capability, suspected of malevolence, imagined as manipulating events from behind the scenes. Historical anti-Semitism in many European contexts has placed Jews in this quadrant. Groups in the contempt quadrant are targets of different violence: dehumanised, blamed for their own condition, excluded from mainstream institutions. Roma populations in contemporary CEE often occupy this quadrant.
The behavioural component
Discrimination is the behavioural manifestation of prejudice: unjust treatment of individuals based solely on their membership in a group. Hiring discrimination is one of the most-studied domains: audit studies across many European labour markets consistently find lower callback rates for CVs that signal minority ethnic or religious identity, even when the underlying qualifications are identical. Microaggressions — small slights, indignities, and put-downs that aggregate to a constant stressor for minority-group members — represent the subtler end of the spectrum. Housing, education, policing, and healthcare are all domains in which prejudice becomes institutional, producing measurable disparities independent of any individual actor’s explicit prejudice. Explicit discrimination has declined across most of Europe since the 1960s, but subtle and institutional discrimination have proven much more durable.
The effects of prejudice
Responses of targets
Targets of prejudice respond in one of two broad patterns. Internalisation involves accepting, at least partially, the negative stereotype society assigns to one’s group. This produces lowered self-efficacy, avoidance of domains where the stereotype predicts failure, and, over time, reduced attainment in exactly those domains. The opposite response is reappropriation: turning the stigmatised identity into a source of empowerment, solidarity, and pride. Whether internalisation or reappropriation dominates in any specific case depends on the strength of in-group identity, the availability of counter-narratives, the existence of political mobilisation possibilities, and the historical memory of resistance that the group can draw on.
The self-fulfilling prophecy
Prejudices generate self-fulfilling prophecies through the mechanism by which low expectations produce interactions that confirm those expectations. If a majority-group member expects little from a minority group, they interact with the group in ways that make confirmation of the prejudice more likely. Consider the stereotype that a particular group is irredeemably uneducable and fit only for low-paying jobs. The belief justifies inadequate schooling investment (“why waste resources?”). The inadequate schooling produces low skill acquisition. The low skill acquisition produces limited job prospects. The prophecy fulfills itself, and the prejudice gains apparent empirical confirmation. The mechanism operates at both individual and institutional levels, and it is one of the most durable ways that stereotypes reproduce themselves across generations.
Stereotype threat
Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson’s work on stereotype threat (or more broadly, social identity threat) identifies a specific performance-degrading mechanism. Stereotype threat consists in the feelings and behaviours prompted by knowing that one is being evaluated as a member of one’s group, rather than as an individual. The burden of representing the whole group creates apprehension that interferes with performance in exactly the domain where the stereotype predicts poor performance. The effect operates regardless of whether the stereotype is internalised, and it affects whichever social identity happens to be salient in a given moment. Asian-American women primed on “Asian” tend to do better on maths tests; Asian-American women primed on “woman” do worse. Even white males, who are usually beneficiaries of positive stereotypes about mathematics, perform less well when primed to expect comparison with Asian males. Stereotype threat helps explain why gaps in educational, occupational, and political attainment can reproduce themselves even in contexts where explicit discrimination has substantially declined.
The causes of prejudice
Pressures to conform
Most prejudice does not require deep hatred. Most people, simply by living in a society where stereotypical information is widely available and discriminatory behaviour is normal, develop prejudiced attitudes and behave in discriminatory ways to some extent. Institutional discrimination, where companies or institutions are legally permitted or socially encouraged to discriminate, makes prejudice seem normal and reduces the perceived cost of expressing it. Normative conformity — the tendency to go along with the group to fulfil expectations and gain acceptance — explains both why people with deep prejudices might not act on them (when the prevailing norm is anti-discrimination) and why people without strong prejudices might behave in discriminatory ways (when the prevailing norm permits or requires discrimination). The implication is that interventions targeting norms and institutions can shift collective prejudice behaviour even without altering individual psychology.
Blaming the victim
Well-intentioned majority-group members often genuinely sympathise with groups that are targets of discrimination. But true empathy is difficult for people who have always been judged on their own merit rather than on their group membership. When empathy is absent, it is easy to fall into the attributional trap of blaming the victim’s disposition rather than their situation. The just-world hypothesis provides an additional reason: believing that people get what they deserve is psychologically comforting, because it implies that one is oneself safe as long as one behaves well. It is frightening to think one lives in a world where people, through no fault of their own, can be discriminated against, denied equal pay, or deprived of basic necessities. It is more reassuring to believe that the victims brought their fate upon themselves. The same mechanism produces rationalisations of majority privilege: “our privileges are earned; their disadvantages are their own fault”.
Realistic conflict theory
Muzafer Sherif’s realistic conflict theory holds that limited resources produce competition, which produces prejudice and discrimination. In politics, weak leaders often select a minority group as a scapegoat, concentrating collective blame on “those people” who are “the reason for all our problems”. This is an effort to unify citizens (“us”) against “them” and to distract everyone from “our” leaders’ failures to run the country. Under conditions of scarcity, in-group members feel more threatened by out-group members; accordingly, incidents of prejudice, discrimination, and violence toward out-group members rise. The economic shock of the 1990s in CEE produced exactly the conditions Sherif’s theory predicts would generate prejudice: rapid resource redistribution, high unemployment, visible winners and losers, weak state capacity, and populations searching for explanations.
Post-communist prejudice
Historical layers
Many CEE countries have long histories of ethnic tension that predate communism. Polish-Ukrainian, Czech-German, Hungarian-Romanian, and Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian conflicts all have pre-20th-century origins, and ethnocentrism and in-group bias shaped inter-ethnic relations for centuries. Nationalist movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often defined themselves in opposition to specific minority groups, and historical traumas — the Holocaust, post-WWII expulsions, border changes, and the genocides of the Yugoslav wars — became embedded in collective memory and identity formation. Religious divisions often reinforced ethnic boundaries, with Catholic Poles distinguished from Orthodox Russians, Catholic Croats from Orthodox Serbs from Muslim Bosniaks, and so on. Anti-Semitism had deep historical roots in many CEE societies that long predated the Holocaust, and economic roles were frequently ethnically segregated, with Jews concentrated in commerce and finance, Germans in crafts, and Roma in particular trades. Economic downturns historically triggered scapegoating of these groups, and realistic conflict theory explains the pattern well.
Communism’s mixed record
Communist regimes officially rejected ethnic nationalism as “bourgeois” and promoted class identity over ethnic or religious identity. Ethnic prejudice was deemed incompatible with communist ideology, and public expression of anti-minority sentiment was officially discouraged. In practice, the record was mixed and often hypocritical: Stalin’s anti-Jewish campaigns of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Polish anti-Zionist campaign of 1968, the Bulgarian “Revival Process” of the 1980s (which targeted ethnic Turks), and numerous smaller episodes all demonstrated that state-level prejudice persisted within the formal framework of proletarian internationalism.
Submerged prejudices continued to operate beneath the official surface. Ethnic stereotypes were re-framed in communist-acceptable language (Jews as “cosmopolitans”, Roma as “asocial elements”, Germans as “revisionists”), and traditional prejudices found new outlets through coded language and discriminatory practices that did not formally invoke ethnicity. State-managed memory controlled the historical narratives about inter-ethnic relations: wartime collaboration was minimised or erased from official histories, the Holocaust was subsumed under the broader “anti-fascist struggle” narrative, and selective collective memory reinforced the positive self-image of the ethnic majority in each country.
The 1989 rupture
The collapse of communism in 1989–91 created an ideological vacuum. Social identity threat triggered defensive responses across populations who had lost the class-based identity framework of the old regime. Populations searched for new sources of collective self-esteem, and ethno-nationalism offered a ready-made identity resource precisely because it had been suppressed and therefore retained its appeal as an alternative. Uncertainty and anxiety about the economic and political future increased the appeal of simple in-group/out-group framings. National identities resurfaced with renewed intensity; out-group homogeneity effects intensified as ethnic boundaries were redrawn; and cognitive biases reinforced stereotypical thinking about ethnic minorities.
Economic insecurity reinforced the pattern. The transition created clear winners and losers, and relative deprivation theory (which we analysed in Lecture 8 in connection with anomie and aggression) explains the resentment that emerged toward the perceived beneficiaries. Economic stress increased the psychological need for scapegoats, and fear of competition from minorities triggered defensive prejudice. Nationalism served as compensatory identity: it offered psychological compensation for lost status and security, it buffered transition anxiety through terror-management mechanisms, and strong in-group attachment restored a form of ontological security that rapid change had threatened.
Competitive victimhood and system justification
Competitive victimhood emerged as a distinctive post-communist pattern. Narratives emphasising majority-group suffering under both communism and Nazism justified preferential treatment for the in-group and the rejection of minority claims for redress. Downplaying or denying historical complicity in minority persecution became a common response to external pressure to acknowledge it, and social comparison processes produced the minimisation of others’ suffering. These patterns are central to Subotić’s analysis of Holocaust memory, to which we return below.
Prejudice also served a system-justifying function in the post-1989 context. It helped justify the unequal outcomes of transition by attributing them to characteristics of the disadvantaged groups. Blaming minorities for systemic problems reduced cognitive dissonance about the legitimacy of the new system. Just-world beliefs led to attribution of minority disadvantage to internal factors (“Roma don’t want to work”), and self-serving attributional biases protected the moral self-image of the majority group.
Roma as a case study
The intensification of anti-Roma attitudes during transition is the clearest case of these mechanisms working together. Pre-existing prejudices combined with economic competition to produce hostility; stereotype threat degraded Roma performance in education and employment; self-fulfilling prophecies reinforced the negative stereotypes; and post-communist media contributed by presenting Roma predominantly through negative frames. Limited intergroup contact allowed stereotypes to go unchallenged, and institutional discrimination translated attitudinal prejudice into systemic disparities in housing, education, employment, policing, and healthcare. EU-level pressure and national commissions have documented the pattern in many CEE countries without successfully dismantling it.
The Holocaust after communism
The paradox of post-Holocaust anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism persists in CEE societies whose Jewish populations are negligible. In Poland, which had approximately 3.3 million Jews before the Holocaust (roughly 10% of the population), fewer than 20,000 Jews remain (less than 0.05% of the population). In Lithuania, which had approximately 7% Jewish population before the war, the current proportion is below 0.01%. In Romania, the proportion fell from approximately 4% to approximately 0.03%. Yet anti-Semitic attitudes and conspiracy theories remain widespread. This is abstract prejudice, operating without direct intergroup contact, and conspiracy theories about “Jewish influence” serve to explain the system failures that post-transition CEE experiences (“we don’t control our own country”). The pattern deserves explanation, because it does not fit the realistic-conflict or direct-contact models that explain most other ethnic prejudice.
Subotić (2019) Yellow Star, Red Star
Jelena Subotić’s 2019 book Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance After Communism (Cornell University Press) provides a systematic account of post-communist Holocaust memory in three case studies (Serbia, Croatia, Lithuania) that together illuminate the broader regional pattern. Subotić’s first observation is that the concept of “the Holocaust” as a discrete and centrally important event in global memory did not exist before the early 1960s. In the aftermath of World War II, Western Europe concentrated on memorialising its victory over totalitarianism; in the Soviet-dominated East, the events of the war were placed inside a broader narrative of communist revolutionary triumph and anti-fascist heroism. The Western Holocaust narrative subsequently shifted to focus on the specific meaning of the Holocaust for the Jewish people, while the CEE memory of WWII remained primarily tied to victory over fascism.
Subotić identifies three patterns of post-communist Holocaust memory, each exemplified by one of her case studies.
| Pattern | Operation | Exemplary case |
|---|---|---|
| Memory inversion | The memory of the Holocaust is used as a vehicle for remembering the crimes of communism | Serbia |
| Memory divergence | The Holocaust is made an exclusively Nazi problem; the ethnic majority is absolved from blame and complicity | Croatia |
| Memory conflation | The Holocaust is directly combined with other atrocities, such as those committed by communists (“double genocide”) | Lithuania |
Each pattern solves the same problem in a different way: how to acknowledge the Holocaust sufficiently to belong to the liberal European community while protecting the ethnic majority’s self-image and avoiding difficult questions about complicity.
Ontological security
The theoretical concept that unifies Subotić’s analysis is ontological security — the security of the identity of states. States need stable narratives about their pasts to form the basis of their identities. Moments of crisis lead to the questioning of state identities and of the narratives on which those identities are built. Securing a desirable memory, one that presents the state and the nation as heroes rather than villains, is necessary for the state’s stability and its pursuit of prestige. The desirable memory of the Holocaust is one that CEE states need to maintain in order to belong to the international society of liberal European states.
The rapid collapse of communism in 1989–91 created exactly the kind of ontological insecurity the theory predicts. Existing relationships and the narratives they were based on were profoundly disrupted. New histories had to be constructed to make sense of the new polities, and the “new Europeans” pursued the project of “adding Stalinism” to the core European memory of the 20th century. The centrality of the Holocaust as a foundational European narrative was rejected across CEE because it was perceived as elevating Jewish victimhood over that of other regional ethnic groups. The focus on Jewish suffering was further rejected because it brought up debates about local complicity and about benefits accumulated after the Holocaust — property, businesses, houses left empty by murdered owners. The idea that people in CEE might be beneficiaries of the Holocaust clashes with existing narratives of CEE national victimhood under Nazism and communism, and the response to this challenge to their social identities as “good”, “innocent”, and “victimised” leads people in CEE to turn against the minority group the recognition of complicity would privilege — in this case, the Jews.
Birthplace (Łoziński, 1992)
Paweł Łoziński’s 1992 documentary Dziedzictwo (Birthplace) accompanies the Polish-Jewish writer Henryk Grynberg, a Holocaust survivor, on a return to the village of his childhood, Radoszyna, to investigate what happened to his father Abram Grynberg, who was killed in 1942. The film documents Grynberg’s conversations with villagers who remember the events. The scene we will watch together (approximately 27:15–30:27) contains Grynberg’s confrontation with a villager about the murder of his father.
The villager’s responses follow a recognisable pattern. He expresses fear: “their family is still here”, suggesting that even more than fifty years after the event, identifying perpetrators has practical consequences. He expresses shame: “Do you understand? And shame… What do you think!” He deploys a repertoire of excuses: “We sheltered Jews and gave them food” (moral credentialling, displacing the question); “Do you know how dangerous it was to hide a Jew?” (self-justification, shifting attention to majority-group suffering); “They could burn down your house and execute your whole family” (displacement onto Nazi terror). Grynberg’s insistence that the villager is withholding what he knows — “You know, but you don’t want to tell me” — meets evasion and eventual refusal: “I won’t tell anymore. It’s cold.”
The scene illustrates, with unusual directness, several of the theoretical mechanisms this lecture has covered. Individual-level prejudice and shame interact with collective memory: the villager cannot separate his own relationship to the events from his community’s relationship to them. The ontological-security framework (Subotić) predicts exactly the pattern: the villager cannot reconcile what happened with his image of his village, his family, and himself, so the truth becomes unspeakable. The cognitive dissonance of beneficiaries — those who inherited property, houses, and land from murdered Jews — blocks acknowledgement. The durability of fear, seventy years after the event, shows that naming perpetrators remains risky long after the end of the regime that encouraged the original violence. And the scene as a whole confirms the lecture’s central claim: prejudice that persists long after contact has ended is not about the out-group. It is about the in-group’s need to protect its self-image.
Conclusions
The architecture of post-communist prejudice is built from many of the mechanisms social psychology has identified in other contexts, but the specific historical trajectory of the region produces distinctive patterns.
| Mechanism | Post-communist form |
|---|---|
| Categorisation | Ethnic and national categories re-sharpened after 1989 |
| Stereotyping | Roma, Jews, LGBTQ+, migrants as persistent targets |
| In-group bias and out-group homogeneity | Rising national identification; out-groups collapsed into caricature |
| Realistic conflict | Economic transition produced scarcity and scapegoating |
| System justification | Prejudice justifies unequal transition outcomes |
| Social identity threat | Collapse of communist identity produced defensive ethno-nationalism |
| Competitive victimhood | Majority victimhood claims minimise minority suffering |
| Ontological security | Memory narratives protect national self-image |
Prejudice in CEE is not a communist legacy alone, nor a pre-communist survival alone. It is the product of multiple historical layers interacting with the specific pressures of transition. Anti-Semitism without Jews and anti-Muslim prejudice with almost no Muslims (the subject of next week’s lecture) are the signature patterns that require explanation, and the psychological function of these prejudices — protection of in-group esteem, stabilisation of narrative, management of ontological insecurity — typically matters more than any instrumental interest. The contact hypothesis, which will be the central theoretical framework of next week’s lecture, is the main tool the discipline has for prejudice reduction; its usefulness in contexts where the out-group is largely absent is a question the next lecture will address directly.
Questions for discussion
- Subotić argues that CEE states need a certain memory of the Holocaust to belong to the liberal European community. Is this memory reconstructible in a way that both satisfies European norms and acknowledges national complicity, or are these aims structurally in tension?
- The moral-credentialling move — “my family hid Jews” — defuses the speaker’s shame but blocks collective reckoning. How might public discourse distinguish between legitimate recognition of rescuers and the rhetorical use of rescue stories to deflect acknowledgement of systematic complicity?
- Anti-Semitism in CEE is largely prejudice without contact. If contact theory is the discipline’s main tool for prejudice reduction, does its absence in this case make the problem tractable (because the prejudice is disconnected from any real-world grievance and could in principle be deconstructed) or intractable (because no routine contact exists to disconfirm the stereotype)?
Social identity theory: us versus them
Personal identity is based on each person’s unique personality and life history. Social identity, by contrast, is based on the groups we belong to — national, religious, political, occupational. Social identities give us a sense of place in the world, and they form the basis on which others judge us. The foundation of social identity is the category of us, and as soon as “us” exists, everyone else is not us. Ethnocentrism — the belief that one’s own culture, nation, or religion is superior to all others — is universal across human societies and probably adaptive, because it increases attachment to the group and willingness to work on its behalf. The impulse to feel suspicious of outsiders likely reflects an ancient survival mechanism that favoured kin and tribe and regarded strangers as potential threats.
In-group bias, documented most famously in Tajfel’s minimal-group paradigm, shows that even when people have almost nothing in common, shared social category membership produces a bond, positive feelings, and preferential treatment. Even arbitrarily assigned categories (overestimators versus underestimators of the number of dots on a screen) produce robust in-group bias. Out-group homogeneity complements this effect: in-group members perceive out-group members as more similar to each other than they actually are. “They’re all alike.” One out-group member’s behaviour generalises to the whole group, while the in-group is perceived as diverse (because we see each of our own as individuals).