Despite tremendous effort and what appear to be our best efforts stretching over hundreds of years, discrimination, oppression, brutality, and tyranny remain all too common features of the human condition. Far from having escaped the grip of human ugliness in the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s, we seem only to have increased the overall level of chaos, confusion, and intergroup truculence during the post-civil rights era and the resolution of the cold war. We see signs of this brutality and oppression all around us, from the streets of Los Angeles and Brooklyn to the hills of Bosnia and the forests of Rwanda. Rather than resolving the problems of intergroup hostility, we merely appear to stumble from viciousness to viciousness. Why?

While some journalists and poets have written astute and penetrating descriptions of this nearly ubiquitous barbarism, it is primarily social scientists who have tried to construct a theoretical understanding of these phenomena. As a result, the social science literature on the interrelated topics of stereotyping, prejudice, intergroup relations, gender, race, and class discrimination has become enormous.