FOREWORD
Gordon Allport was a modest man. Yet in his reserved, even shy, manner, he was justly proud of The Nature of Prejudice. His honored place in psychology had been achieved years prior to his undertaking the writing of this volume; Personality: A Psychological Interpretation, published in 1937, had firmly established him as one of the world's leading personality theorists. But it was Allport's book on intergroup prejudice that most directly expressed his deepest concerns and values, that translated his more abstract work into concrete ideas for reform and social change.
Allport died in 1967 at the age of 70. Were he alive today, he would undoubtedly be especially pleased by this reissuance of The Nature of Prejudice on its twenty-fifth anniversary. And he would also be pleased at the judgments of the book's intellectual content now being rendered a generation later.
The table of contents you will soon inspect has in fact organized the scholarly study of the important concept of prejudice. The Nature of Prejudice delineated the area of study, set up its basic categories and problems, and cast it in a broad, eclectic framework that remains today. The book continues to be cited as the definitive theoretical statement of the field, and it remains unchallenged in social science as the book on prejudice.