By Marcus Eugênio Oliveira Lima, Professor Titular de Psicologia, Universidade Federal de Sergipe (UFSE), Aracaju, SE, Brazil
The article Theories in Social Psychology: Intra-individual Explanations in the Racism Analysis in Brazil, published in the journal Paidéia (Ribeirão Preto), aimed to analyze the explanatory power that classic and modern theories of social psychology have for understanding racism in Brazil. Four intra-individual theories were considered, three of which are broader — the Authoritarian Personality Theory, the Closed Mind Hypothesis and the Social Dominance Theory — and one that is more specific to racism — the Aversive Racism Theory.
The first two general explanations date from the 1950s and 1960s. The Social Dominance Theory was formulated in the 1990s and Aversive Racism in the 1980s. Despite the long existence of these theories, ranging from 30 to 70 years old, and the fact that some of them are among the most important psychosocial theories, none have been adapted for empirical analysis of racism in Brazil, according to our search of papers available within CAPES-Periódicos.
Our proposal is both important and challenging; challenging because, to the best of our knowledge, this task has not yet been done. And it is important due to two prevailing behaviors in Brazil: one is highly critical, arguing that imported theories fail to facilitate an understanding of racism in Brazil and merely demonstrate the intellectual colonization of the country; and the other tends to be uncritical, adopting theories and analytical models without adequately contextualizing them to the Brazilian reality. Both positions end up not contributing as much as they could to the evolution of lines of research in Social Psychology on racism in Brazil (Lima, 2020).
Doise (1980) acknowledges the inherent arbitrariness in any classification, as theories often exhibit hybrid characteristics, involving multiple levels of analysis. Note that the very levels of racism production/manifestation (individual, cultural, and structural) are also hybrid, with blurred or non-existent boundaries between them. To minimize additional arbitrariness, the classification of psychosocial theories by Doise (1980) will be followed.
Another remarkable aspect is that three criteria were adopted when choosing which theories of racism to include in the analysis: (1) the theory must be formulated or developed within Social Psychology, (2) it must hold empirical support, and (3) theory impact, indicated by its presence in Social Psychology literature on the subject. The proposed classification also considered the scope of the theory: whether it was more general (about conflict) or more specific (about racism).
Our results reveal, firstly, that statements such as “these European and North American models do not fit the reality of racism in Brazil” are inaccurate, to say the least. In practice, these more individuating models have not even been tested or, at best, have been tested in an erratic way.
Despite this underutilization by Brazilian psychosocial literature, the theories of Authoritarian Personality, Social Dominance, Aversive Racism, and the Closed Mind Hypothesis do have potential for analyzing racism in Brazil when we consider that the hallmarks of our cultural formation are elitism—typical of social dominance—conservatism, fear of change, ethnocentrism, and the “do you know who you’re talking to?” logic, emblematic of authoritarian personalities and closed minds.
However, these theories have a potential for analyzing Brazilian racism that should not be ignored. The patriarchy that marks our cultural formation and the paternalism impregnated in the roots of our cordiality, important postulates of some of them, largely define the expressions of racism in Brazil.
We have seen that the dimension of ethnocentrism, a necessary condition for the expression of racism in the Authoritarian Personality Theory and the Closed Mind Hypothesis, is less prevalent in Brazilian racism. Brazilian racism is not as ethnocentric as that of Europeans and Americans. Black individuals in Brazil are not an exogenous group; their otherness is not the logic of the external, but an otherness imposed from within.
The main conclusion stresses the importance of testing the more individual-level psychosocial theories imported and confronting them with the peculiarities of our racist reality. This would be a way to combat decoloniality through interconnection, and to avoid combating one epistemicide with another.
LIMA, M.E.O. Social Psychology theories and their impact on racism studies in Brazil [online]. SciELO in Perspective: Humanities, 2025 [viewed ]. Available from: https://humanas.blog.scielo.org/en/2025/01/09/social-psychology-theories-and-their-impact-on-racism-studies-in-brazil/
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