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Prejudice can also be a psychological trait and is often studied via questionnaires that inquire into individual beliefs. In fact, at one point, Allport notes:

Studies constitute a very strong argument for saying that prejudice is basically a trait of personality. When it takes root in a life it grows like a unit. The specific object of prejudice is more or less immaterial. What happens is that the whole inner life is affected; the hostility and fear are systematic.²¹

There are several psychological explanations for how an individual comes to be prejudiced, including acquiring prejudice through the adoption of one’s family or reference group, participating in processes of projection, and developing a prejudiced personality. These explanations are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but each has a different focus.

Individuals are often prejudiced because they have learned this prejudice from their family or other immediate reference group. Parents can foster an atmosphere of prejudice by emphasizing power and authority rather than trust and tolerance. Studies suggest that children as young as 2 and a half learn racial differences and labels before they quite understand them.²² At the first stage of prejudice development, a child learns how to generalize people into groups. Next, the child practices rejection of individuals based on group membership but may not understand this behavior. At the third stage, the child learns how to make prejudice sound rational and acceptable to society. At the last stage, around the age of 12, a child knows how to use language that sounds acceptable while practicing rejection in behavior. The irony of learning prejudice is that a young child often speaks in prejudicial terms but doesn’t believe these ideas, due to a lack of comprehension, while an older child knows how to practice discrimination while deferring to social graces. As adults, people learn to mold their prejudices to their life experiences and fit their biases to their particular needs.²³

Prejudice also develops out of a psychological desire to project one’s personal problems onto someone else. This desire can arise from frustration with one’s personal life, community, or broader conditions of living; it can arise from aggression and hatred that an individual generally feels; and/or it can come from anxiety or guilt associated with fear, economic insecurity, or low self-esteem. Generally, projection emerges “whenever, and in whatever way, a correct-appraisal of one’s own emotional life fails and gives way to an incorrect judgment of other people.”²⁴ Allport notes three types of projection: (1) direct, (2) mote-beam, and (3) complementary. Direct projection helps solve one’s own inner conflict by ascribing it to another group and then directly blaming the out-group members for it. Mote-beam projection is when a person exaggerates qualities in others, which both the out-group and the prejudiced person hold but go unrecognized within the prejudiced person. Complementary projection is the process of explaining one’s own state of mind by projecting imaginary intentions and behaviors onto others. A particular type of projection is scapegoating—that is, when one assigns to a group one’s own negative characteristics. Scapegoating is a common form of projection because it allows the individual not to accept responsibility or guilt for personal issues because it is assigned to others.²⁵

A third psychological explanation for prejudice is the prejudiced personality. Allport outlines eight general characteristics of a prejudiced personality: (1) The person has underlying insecurity and buried feelings; (2) the person has ambivalence toward his/her/zir parents; (3) the person has rigid moralistic views, such as an irrational allegiance to manners and conventions; (4) the person has strong dichotomized thinking, with a clear line set between good and bad people; (5) the person has little tolerance for ambiguity; (6) the person is extropunitive, in that the person assigns blame to others, rather than taking internal stock of personal faults or limitations; (7) the person strongly adheres to social order and is devoted to institutions and organizational memberships; and (8) the person prefers an authoritarian type of power.²⁶ Of course, prejudiced people may have all or some of these characteristics, and some may be more or less present, but these eight characteristics are typical of prejudiced personalities. On an extreme level, demagogues, as leaders who appeal to prejudiced people rather than logic, cater to this prejudiced personality by emphasizing broad sweeping narratives, such as the people have been cheated, there is a conspiracy against the people, the government is corrupt, and the people cannot trust foreigners. Demagogues and fascists, as seen with Hitler, often exhibit a high level of paranoia, a characteristic that commonly belongs to those with extreme prejudice.²⁷