Overview of today’s lecture

• Defining prejudice: cognitive, affective, behavioural components
• Effects on targets: internalisation, self-fulfilling prophecy, stereotype threat
• Causes: pressures to conform, social identity, realistic conflict
• Post-communist prejudice: historical layers, communism’s record, the 1989 rupture, competitive victimhood
• The Holocaust after communism (Subotić 2019): ontological security, memory politics
• Birthplace (Grynberg 1992): Polish villagers, Jewish memory, fear and shame

What is prejudice?

• Prejudice is a hostile or negative attitude toward people in a distinguishable group, based solely on their membership in that group.
• Attitudes have three components:
  • Cognitive — beliefs, thoughts, stereotypes
  • Affective — emotions (anger, disgust, fear, warmth)
  • Behavioural — actions, including discrimination
• The characteristics assigned are negative and applied to the group as a whole, over-riding information about any individual member.

The cognitive component: categorisation

• The human mind cannot avoid creating categories. Social neuroscience shows that category-creation is an adaptive mechanism present from birth.
• We categorise along salient cues: gender, age, race, language, accent, dress.
• Stereotype-consistent information gets more attention and is remembered more easily than the “exceptions”.
• Stereotyping = assigning near-identical characteristics to virtually all members of a group, regardless of actual variation within it.
• We are cognitively economical: we cannot have fine-grained attitudes about everything, so we use error-prone shortcuts about most things.

The affective component: emotions about groups

• Prejudice is emotionally potent: logical arguments often fail against it.
• Negative feelings can persist even when a person consciously knows the prejudice is wrong.
• Fiske’s Stereotype Content Model: stereotypes vary along two dimensions – warmth and competence.

• Groups in the envied quadrant are the most dangerous targets: admired for capability, suspected of malevolence. In CEE history, Jews have often been placed there; in contemporary CEE, Roma often sit in the contempt quadrant.

The behavioural component: discrimination

• Discrimination = unjust treatment based on group membership.
• Manifestations:
  • Hiring discrimination: audit studies show that CVs signalling minority identity face lower callback rates across many European labour markets
  • Microaggressions: small slights, indignities, and put-downs that aggregate to a constant stressor for minority group members
  • Housing, education, policing: domains in which prejudice becomes institutional
• Stereotypes and prejudices affect behaviour subtly, often below conscious awareness.
• Explicit discrimination has declined in most European countries since the 1960s; subtle and institutional discrimination has proven much more durable.

On targets

• Internalisation: targets may come to believe the negative stereotype applies to their group (“maybe we really are inferior”).
• Reappropriation: the opposite response — turning the stigmatised identity into a source of empowerment, solidarity, and pride.
• Which response dominates depends on:
  • Strength of in-group identity
  • Availability of counter-narratives
  • Political mobilisation possibilities
  • Historical memory of resistance

The self-fulfilling prophecy

• If prejudices lead you to expect little from a group, you interact with them in ways that confirm the prejudice.
• Example: “This group is irredeemably uneducable and fit only for low-paying jobs.”
  • Why waste educational resources on them? → inadequate schooling
  • → they fail to acquire skills → they face limited job prospects
  • → the “prophecy” is fulfilled, and the prejudice gains apparent confirmation
• The mechanism operates at both individual and institutional levels, and is one of the most durable ways stereotypes reproduce themselves.

Stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson)

• Social identity threat: the feelings and behaviours prompted by knowing you are being evaluated as a member of your group.
• Carrying the “burden” of representing your whole group creates apprehension that interferes with performance.
• Whichever of your social identities is currently salient determines the effect:
  • Asian-American women primed on “Asian” do better on maths tests
  • Asian-American women primed on “woman” do worse
  • White males primed to expect comparison with Asian males perform less well
• Stereotype threat is one mechanism by which gaps in educational, occupational, and political attainment reproduce themselves even where explicit discrimination has declined.

Pressures to conform

• Most people, simply by living in a society where stereotypes abound and discrimination is normal, develop prejudiced attitudes and behave in discriminatory ways to some extent.
• Institutional discrimination — when companies or institutions are legally permitted, or socially encouraged, to discriminate — makes prejudice seem normal.
• Normative conformity: going along with the group to fulfil expectations and gain acceptance.
  • Explains why people with deep prejudices might not act on them (if the prevailing norm is anti-discrimination)
  • And why people without strong prejudices might behave in discriminatory ways (if that is the local norm)

Social identity theory: us vs them

• Personal identity: based on our unique personality and life history.
• Social identity: based on the groups we belong to — national, religious, political, occupational.
• Social identities give us place and position in the world; they form the basis on which others judge us.
• Ethnocentrism: the belief that one’s own culture, nation, or religion is superior.
  • Universal, probably adaptive: attaches us to our group, strengthens our willingness to work on its behalf
  • Rests on the fundamental category: us
  • As soon as “us” exists, everyone else is “not us”
  • The impulse to suspect outsiders may be part of an ancient survival mechanism

In-group bias and out-group homogeneity

• In-group bias (Tajfel): even with almost nothing in common, people who share a social category will bond quickly and extend favourable treatment to each other.
  • Even minimal groups (e.g. arbitrarily assigned dot-counters) produce the bias
• Out-group homogeneity: 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
  • In-group is perceived as diverse (because we see each of our own as individuals)

Blaming the victim

• Well-intentioned majority members often sympathise with discriminated groups — but true empathy is difficult when one has always been judged on merit.
• Falling into the attributional trap: blaming the victim’s disposition rather than the situation (fundamental attribution error).
• Reinforced by just-world belief:
  • We find it frightening to believe we live in a world where people can be discriminated against through no fault of their own
  • Much more reassuring to believe victims brought their fate on themselves
• Justifies in-group entitlement and superiority (“our privileges are earned; their disadvantages are their own fault”).

Realistic conflict theory

• Realistic conflict (Sherif): limited resources produce competition, which produces prejudice and discrimination.
• Scapegoating: weak leaders select a minority group as the target of collective blame — “those people are why we’re all struggling”.
• Under conditions of scarcity, in-group members feel threatened by out-group members and are more likely to express prejudice, discriminate, and tolerate violence.
• CEE application: the economic shock of the 1990s produced exactly the conditions Sherif’s theory predicts would generate prejudice.

Historical layers

• Many CEE countries have long pre-communist histories of ethnic tension: Polish-Ukrainian, Czech-German, Hungarian-Romanian, Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian.
• Nationalist movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries often defined themselves against minority groups; historical traumas (Holocaust, expulsions, border changes, Srebrenica) became embedded in collective memory.
• Religious divisions reinforced ethnic boundaries (Catholic Poles vs Orthodox Russians; Catholic Croats vs Orthodox Serbs vs Muslim Bosniaks).
• Economic roles were often ethnically segregated (Jews in commerce, Germans in crafts, Roma in particular trades), and downturns triggered scapegoating.
• Anti-Semitism in particular had deep roots long predating the Holocaust.

Communism’s mixed record

• Regimes officially rejected ethnic nationalism as “bourgeois” and promoted class identity; public expression of anti-minority sentiment was discouraged.
• In practice the record was hypocritical: Stalin’s anti-Jewish campaigns, the 1968 Polish anti-Zionist campaign, the Bulgarian “Revival Process” targeting Turks.
• Submerged prejudices continued underground, re-framed in acceptable language (Jews as “cosmopolitans”, Roma as “asocial elements”) and expressed through coded practice.
• State-managed memory controlled inter-ethnic narratives: wartime collaboration was minimised, and the Holocaust was subsumed under “anti-fascist struggle”.

The 1989 rupture

• The collapse of communism produced an ideological vacuum and acute social identity threat.
• Populations searched for new sources of collective self-esteem; ethno-nationalism was the ready-made identity resource, precisely because it had been suppressed.
• National identities resurfaced with renewed intensity; out-group homogeneity intensified; ethnic boundaries were redrawn.
• Economic transition produced winners and losers — relative deprivation (Lecture 8) explains the resentment that followed.
• Compensatory nationalism: strong in-group attachment restored the ontological security that rapid change had threatened (terror management).

Competitive victimhood and system justification

• Post-communist narratives emphasised majority-group suffering under both communism and Nazism.
• Claiming victim status justified preferential treatment for the in-group and rejection of minority claims; complicity in minority persecution was downplayed.
• Prejudice also served a system-justifying function: blaming minorities for systemic problems reduced cognitive dissonance about transition outcomes.
• Just-world beliefs attributed minority disadvantage to internal factors (“Roma don’t want to work”); self-serving attributional biases protected the moral self-image of the majority.
• Both moves prepare the ground for the Subotić analysis we turn to next.

Roma as a case study

• Anti-Roma attitudes predated communism but intensified during transition: economic competition + media framing + fundamental attribution error.
• Stereotype threat depressed Roma performance in education and employment; self-fulfilling prophecies reinforced negative stereotypes; limited contact allowed them to go unchallenged.
• Prejudice translated into institutional discrimination in housing, education, employment, policing, healthcare — sustained by normative conformity and diffusion of responsibility.
• EU-level pressure and national commissions have documented the pattern without dismantling it.

The paradox of post-Holocaust anti-Semitism

• Anti-Semitism persists in CEE despite small or absent Jewish populations.
  • Poland: ~2% Jewish in 1939; <0.01% today
  • Lithuania: ~7% → <0.01%
  • Romania: ~4% → ~0.03%
• This is abstract prejudice without direct intergroup contact.
• Conspiracy theories about “Jewish influence” justify system failures: “we don’t control our own country”.
• Grynberg’s Birthplace documentary (which we will watch) shows this pattern in granular detail.

Holocaust memory contestation

• Acknowledging Holocaust complicity threatens positive national self-image.
• Cognitive dissonance → minimisation or denial of collaboration.
• Moral credential effect: stories of individual Poles/Croats/Lithuanians helping some Jews are used to deny systematic complicity.
• Memory divergence, conflation, and inversion (Subotić’s typology) all protect group esteem at the cost of historical accuracy.

Jelena Subotić (2019) Yellow Star, Red Star

• The concept of “the Holocaust” as global memory did not exist before the early 1960s.
• Post-WWII West: focused on memorialising victory over totalitarianism.
• Soviet-dominated East: Holocaust placed inside a broader communist revolutionary triumph and anti-fascist heroism narrative.
• Western memory shifted to the specific Jewish meaning of the Holocaust; CEE memory remained tied to “victory over fascism”.

Three patterns of memory

• Memory inversion (e.g. Serbia) — the memory of the Holocaust is used as a vehicle for remembering the crimes of communism.
• Memory divergence (e.g. Croatia) — the Holocaust is made an exclusively Nazi problem, with the ethnic majority absolved from blame and complicity.
• Memory conflation (e.g. Lithuania) — the Holocaust is directly combined with other atrocities, such as those committed by communists — “double genocide”.

Ontological security

• Ontological security — the security of the identity of a state.
• States need stable narratives about their pasts to ground their identities.
• Moments of crisis lead to questioning of state identities and their narratives.
• 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 pursuit of prestige.
• A “desirable memory” of the Holocaust is one that CEE states need to maintain to belong to the society of liberal European states.

The 1989–91 trauma of memory

• The rapid collapse of communism created a feeling of ontological insecurity: existing identity narratives were profoundly disrupted.
• New histories had to be constructed to make sense of the new polities.
• 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, perceived as elevating Jewish victimhood over that of other ethnic groups.
• The focus on Jewish suffering was also rejected because it raised debates about local complicity in the Holocaust and the benefits accumulated in its aftermath (houses, property, businesses left empty).

Why this clashes with national self-identity

• The idea that people in CEE might be beneficiaries of the Holocaust clashes with existing narratives of victimhood.
• The response to this challenge to their social identities as “good”, “innocent” and “victimised” leads people in CEE to turn against minority groups — in this case, the Jews.
• Memory politics and psychological defence produce the same outcome: a persistence of anti-Semitism in societies that have almost no Jews.

The film and what to watch for

• Dziedzictwo / Birthplace (Paweł Łoziński, based on Henryk Grynberg’s writing), 1992.
• Grynberg, a Polish-Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor, returns to Radoszyna to find out what happened to his father Abram, killed in 1942. We watch approximately 27:15 – 30:27: his confrontation with a villager.
• Watch for the villager’s:
  • Fear — “their family is still here”. Naming perpetrators is still risky.
  • Shame — “Do you understand? And shame… What do you think!”
  • Repertoire of excuses: “We sheltered Jews” (moral credentialling); “Do you know how dangerous it was?” (self-justification); “They could burn down your house” (displacement).
• And Grynberg’s insistence: “You know, but you don’t want to tell me…”

What the scene shows

• The ontological security framework in microcosm: the villager cannot reconcile what happened with his image of his village, his family, himself — so the truth becomes unspeakable.
• The cognitive dissonance of beneficiaries: inheriting property from murdered Jews, unable to acknowledge the inheritance.
• The durability of fear: fifty years later, naming perpetrators is still risky.
• 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.

The architecture of post-communist prejudice

Questions for discussion

• Subotić argues that CEE states need a certain memory of the Holocaust to belong to the liberal European community. Is the 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?
• Anti-Semitism in CEE is largely prejudice without contact. If contact theory (next lecture) is our main tool for prejudice reduction, does its absence make the problem tractable or intractable?