Mapping "prejudice" research reveals its preoccupation with implicit bias

One of the many difficulties of doing social science is that the concepts that we study are often fuzzy.  Precisely defining concepts like "attitudes", "cognition", and the "self" can be challenging, which sometimes leads to dramatic differences in how scientists use the terms.

The challenges are only enhanced when the object of study is a politically charged concept like my chosen field of study, prejudice.  I believe this fuzziness in the definition of "prejudice" has exerted a distorting influence on research on the topic, affecting the questions researchers ask, the measures researchers use, and the interventions researchers develop.

Today, I'm going to focus on a small piece of this issue by answering the following questions:

1. When contemporary researchers choose to study "prejudice", how do they use the term?
2. What does contemporary researchers' use of the term "prejudice" reveal about their (often unstated) definitions of of the term?