1 Prejudice, Stereotyping and Discrimination: Theoretical and Empirical Overview John F. Dovidio, Miles Hewstone, Peter Glick, and Victoria M. Esses ABSTRACT This chapter has two main objectives: to review influential ideas and findings in the literature and to outline the organization and content of the volume. The first part of the chapter lays a conceptual and empirical foundation for other chapters in the volume. Specifically, the chapter defines and distinguishes the key concepts of prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination, highlighting how bias can occur at individual, institutional, and cultural levels. We also review different theoretical perspectives on these phenomena, including individual differences, social cognition, functional relations between groups, and identity concerns. We offer a broad overview of the field, charting how this area has developed over previous decades and identify emerging trends and future directions. The second part of the chapter focuses specifically on the coverage of the area in the present volume. It explains the organization of the book and presents a brief synopsis of the chapters in the volume. Throughout psychology’s history, researchers have evinced strong interest in understanding prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination (Brewer & Brown, 1998; Dovidio, 2001; Duckitt, 1992; Fiske, 1998), as well as the phe- nomenon of intergroup bias more generally (Hewstone, Rubin, & Willis, 2002). Inter- group bias generally refers to the systematic tendency to evaluate one’s own membership group (the ingroup) or its members more favorably than a non-membership group (the outgroup) or its members. These topics have a long history in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology (e.g., Sumner, 1906). However, social psychologists, building on the solid foundations of Gordon Allport’s (1954) mas- terly volume, The Nature of Prejudice, have developed a systematic and more nuanced analysis of bias and its associated phenom- ena. Interest in prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination is currently shared by allied disciplines such as sociology and political science, and emerging disciplines such as neu- roscience. The practical implications of this