John Harding
Introduction
John Snodgrass Harding (3 March 1919 - 25 June 2013) was an American social psychologist who wrote the reference chapters on prejudice that two successive generations of researchers were trained on. Between them, the 1954 and 1969 editions of his chapter "Prejudice and Ethnic Relations" in the Handbook of Social Psychology defined the subject for fifteen years and fixed the shape of the questions everyone else then worked on.
His distinctive claim was that prejudice is not only a matter of feeling. Harding insisted on the cognitive and judgemental machinery underneath it - the way a stereotype biases reasoning about individuals - at a time when the field was dominated by psychodynamic and personality accounts of the prejudiced person. Cornell's memorial statement credits that emphasis with anticipating the social cognition and judgement-and-decision-making perspectives that later came to dominate the discipline.
The rest of his career was spent on the applied side of the same problem: how research on prejudice, mental health and social policy might actually be used.
Early Life and Education
Harding was born in Chicago in 1919. He took his B.A. summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota, then completed a master's degree and a Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard University, finishing the doctorate in 1943.
In 1942, before the doctorate, he held a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship at the Princeton University Office of Public Opinion Research, one of the wartime centres that turned survey methods into instruments of government. The war itself was spent as a research psychologist with the U.S. Army Air Forces.
Academic and Professional Career
The Commission on Community Interrelations
From 1946 to 1952 Harding worked on methods of combating prejudice and discrimination at the Commission on Community Interrelations of the American Jewish Congress, an organisation founded by Kurt Lewin. The Commission was the most concentrated attempt anywhere to put Lewin's action-research programme into practice: small, disciplined studies of intergroup contact, designed so that the results could be handed straight to the people running housing projects, community centres and trade unions.
This is where Harding's intellectual circle formed. Bernard Kutner, Harold Proshansky and Isidor Chein, his three collaborators on the Handbook chapters, all came out of the same milieu, and the problems the Commission was paid to solve - why contact between groups sometimes reduces hostility and sometimes does not, why expressed attitudes so often fail to predict behaviour - became the problems the chapters were written to organise.
New York and Cornell
In 1952-1953 he worked on a test development project at New York University's Research Center for Human Relations, the other main institutional home of Lewin's post-war programme.
In 1953 he moved to Cornell University's Department of Child Development and Family Relationships - later the Department of Human Development - and stayed until his retirement in 1989, a thirty-six year run in a single department. At Cornell he was associated with the Cornell Program in Social Psychiatry, and his research sat across intergroup relations and mental health. He belonged to the American Psychological Association, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, and the Society for Research in Child Development.
From 1956 to 1959 he edited the Journal of Social Issues, SPSSI's interdisciplinary journal, which in his hands carried work on prejudice and discrimination, addiction, mental illness and health disparities. He was among the first American social psychologists to publish a comparative study of how the symptoms of mental health and illness vary between cultures - an unusual thing to attempt in the 1950s, and one that anticipated concerns the field returned to seriously only decades later.
In the 1980s he turned toward gerontology. In 1981 he wrote a proposal arguing for a department of policy analysis within Cornell's College of Human Ecology, a change that eventually came about.
Colleagues remembered him as the department's unofficial historian, with a memory for published research that he used to place colleagues' work in context - and, by their account, a habit of being sharply critical of an argument while never saying anything unkind about the person making it.
Major Contributions to Psychology
Prejudice and ethnic relations
The Handbook of Social Psychology chapters are the work for which Harding is known. The 1954 version, written with Bernard Kutner, Harold Proshansky and Isidor Chein, ran to forty pages in the second volume of Gardner Lindzey's first edition; the 1969 revision, in the second edition edited by Lindzey and Elliot Aronson, grew to seventy-six pages and effectively became a short book on the subject.
What distinguished them was range. The chapters surveyed prejudice from several directions at once - psychoanalytic, sociological, developmental and personality-oriented - and treated the individual, the group and the social structure as levels that all had to be described. They covered the formation of ethnic attitudes in children, the content and measurement of stereotypes, the effects of prejudice on those targeted by it, and the evidence on whether interventions actually worked.
Stereotypes as cognitive bias
Harding's own emphasis lay on a point the field mostly was not making in the 1950s: that a stereotype is not simply a hostile belief but a cognitive structure that biases how evidence is read. On this account the interesting question is not only how much hostility a person feels toward a group, but how their expectations distort the interpretation of what members of that group do - which behaviour gets noticed, which gets explained away, which is recalled afterwards.
Cornell's memorial statement goes so far as to say that this work "revolutionized the field of personality studies by showing how stereotypes could provide a cognitive bias in reasoning," and that it anticipated the social-cognition perspective. Both claims come from a memorial document rather than from citation analysis, and historians of the field generally date the cognitive turn in stereotyping research to the 1970s and to work that proceeded without reference to Harding's chapters. What is not in dispute is that the emphasis was early and that it was not the mainstream of its decade.
Applied and policy work
Harding's interest in policy ran alongside the theory throughout. He spent six years at an organisation whose entire purpose was applied work; he edited a journal dedicated to the application of social psychology to social problems; he proposed and eventually secured a policy analysis unit within his own college. His papers at Cornell run to six cubic feet and include material on moral-dilemma interviews, literacy projects, the Initial Teaching Alphabet, and research on women's roles in academic achievement - the record of a working academic who took on whichever applied problem was in front of him.
Major Publications
Harding, J., Kutner, B., Proshansky, H., & Chein, I. (1954). Prejudice and ethnic relations. In G. Lindzey (Ed.), Handbook of social psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 1021-1061). Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Harding, J., Proshansky, H., Kutner, B., & Chein, I. (1969). Prejudice and ethnic relations. In G. Lindzey & E. Aronson (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (2nd ed., Vol. 5, pp. 1-76). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
These two chapters are the core of his published work. Much of the rest takes the form of convention papers, project reports and unpublished material held in the Cornell collection; the finding aid for that collection is the starting point for anyone tracing it.
Impact and Legacy
For fifteen years Harding's chapters were where a researcher started. That is a specific kind of influence, and a fragile one: the next edition of the Handbook, in 1985, replaced the prejudice chapter with one written from a single cognitive perspective, and the pluralism of the 1954 and 1969 versions - psychoanalytic, sociological, developmental, personality - narrowed out of the field. Commentators who have compared the three editions have used the contrast as a measure of how much theoretical ground social psychology gave up in the space of two decades.
The chapters also drew fire in their own time. Writing in Commentary a few years after the first edition appeared, the sociologist William Petersen argued that the concentration of these psychologists on "the allegedly prejudiced person" had encouraged a confusion between prejudice and an unfavourable judgement that happens to be well grounded. His complaint was about definition: the field, he said, had drifted toward defining prejudice as "simply a hostile attitude" when it ought to be understood as an attitude resting on incomplete knowledge. The objection has kept some of its force, and it points at a real fault line in the mid-century programme - if prejudice is defined by the hostility rather than by the failure of evidence, then any hostile person counts as prejudiced whether or not they are right.
A second problem was structural to the whole research programme of the period. Prejudice research of the 1950s measured verbal attitudes, and verbal attitudes did not reliably predict what people did. Richard LaPiere had made the point in 1934 by touring the United States with a Chinese couple and comparing how they were treated against what the same establishments later said on a questionnaire. Nearly twenty years later Bernard Kutner and his colleagues - Kutner being Harding's own co-author - found the same gap in a study of whether hotels and restaurants would accommodate Jewish guests: what people said on the telephone did not predict what they did in person. Harding's turn to cognition and judgement was in part a response to that failure, since a cognitive account has more to say about the gap between what someone professes and how they act than a summary attitude score does.
The larger critique is the one that eventually displaced the approach rather than refuting it. Harding and his collaborators worked within a frame in which prejudice was, first and last, a fact about individuals - their attitudes, their cognitions, their personalities. Later scholarship, and the shift toward institutional and structural accounts of racism from the 1980s onward, treated that framing as a limitation: locate the problem in individual minds and the remedies that follow are educational and interpersonal, while the arrangements that produce and reproduce group inequality stay out of view. Harding was more attentive to social structure than most of his contemporaries - the 1969 chapter devotes real space to the societal level - but the unit of analysis remained the person.
He retired from Cornell in 1989 after thirty-six years and died in Ithaca in 2013, aged 94.
Learn More
Kurt Lewin — founder of the Commission on Community Interrelations where Harding spent his formative years.
Gordon Allport — The Nature of Prejudice appeared in 1954, the same year as Harding's first Handbook chapter.
Muzafer Sherif — the Robbers Cave experiments, the other great mid-century approach to intergroup conflict.
Urie Bronfenbrenner — a Cornell colleague in human development whose ecological model took social context seriously.
Prejudice — how the concept is defined and measured in social psychology today.
Ethnocentrism — the in-group favouritism that prejudice research has tried to explain since the 1950s.
Further material on Harding is held at Cornell: the finding aid for his papers, 1927-2004, and the university's memorial statement, both in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.