sed. Dr. Vance Locke and Dr. Lucy Johnston at the University of Canterbury have recently published papers on the issues of social cognition and stereotyping . Personality approaches have been challenged by the dominance of social cognitive perspectives. These view prejudice as inevitable consequences of normal and functional cognitive processes such as categorisation and stereotyping. Our limited cognitive capacities, it is argued, make the simplification and generalisation of social information necessarily adaptive, so that a group’s tendency to view outgroup members as “ all alike “ is not surprising. Cognitive mechanisms are thus viewed as the essential foundations to stereotyping and prejudice. Martha Augoustinos and Katherine J Reynolds of the Australian National University have said that since the 1920’s, when prejudice emerged as a construct of significant interest to psychologists, there have been several distinct stages of theoretical and empirical development, i.e. white superiority and minority backwardness, human irrational and faulty cognitive processes, unconscious psychological defences, individual personality structures and expressions of group interests and intergroup relations .The psychodynamic approach which Freud spawned many psychodynamic theories of human personality. The main one lies in the view that early childhood experiences crucially affect an individual’s later personality. This was taken by Adorno et al (1950) and more recent the non-pyschodynamic derivatives of authoritarianism. Adorno et al argues that the authoritarian personality has its origins in childhood. Where parents adopt an excessively harsh and disciplinarian regime in order to enforce on their children emotional dependence and obedience, children develop a love/hate relationship with their parents. This conflict between love and hate is stressful and there is a need to resolve it. The hatred is repressed through ...
