Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society Irrational categorization, natural intolerance and reasonable discrimination: Lay representations of prejudice and racism Lia Figgou 1 * and Susan Condor 2 1 Department of Psychology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece 2 Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, UK This paper explores how the constructs of ‘prejudice’ and ‘racism’ were used and understood by respondents in an interview study concerning the settlement of Albanian refugees in Greece. Analysis indicated the existence of multiple, potentially contradictory, common sense understandings of prejudice and racism, analogous to some accounts of the prejudice construct in academic social psychology. However, notwithstanding the fact that respondents displayed multiple understandings of racism or prejudice in theory, these abstract formulations were rarely employed to account for actual instances of discrimination. Specific discriminatory acts against Albanian people were framed instead as matters of fear and risk. By virtue of being cast within a problematic of in/security rather than within the discursive frame of prejudice, particular hostile actions against the Albanian refugees could be glossed as reasonable and understandable. The topic of racial or ethnic prejudice has represented a long-standing concern on the part of social psychologists. Samelson (1978) went so far as to argue that the adoption of the prejudice construct (in opposition to accounts of ‘racial difference’) contributed to the rise of social psychology as a distinct subdiscipline in the late 1920s. Over the course of the last century, social psychologists have built up a considerable body of literature detailing the nature, prevalence, and causes of prejudicial attitudes, stereotypes, and discriminatory behaviour (see Augoustinos & Reynolds, 2001; Brown, 1995; Jones, 1997; Plous, 2002, for recent reviews). However, comparatively little attention has been paid to everyday understandings of these same constructs. Rather, academic social psychologists have tended to treat ordinary social actors as unreflexive formulators of stereotyped views, bearers of prejudiced attitudes, or agents of discriminatory behaviour. The privilege to define prejudice and to recognize it as a problem, the capacity to theorize its existence and to speculate on possible solutions, has been restricted largely to the reified universe (Moscovici, 1984) of academic social psychology. * Correspondence should be addressed to Lia Figgou, Fleming 40, 55133, Thessaloniki, Greece (e-mail: lfiggou@hotmail.com). The British Psychological Society 219 British Journal of Social Psychology (2006), 45, 219–243 q 2006 The British Psychological Society www.bpsjournals.co.uk DOI:10.1348/014466605X40770