8 - Prejudice Flashcards
Prejudice vs Discrimination vs Stereotyping
• All refer to how we perceive and act toward members of social groups
• People’s relations to other groups
Affect -> Prejudice
Behavior -> Discrimination
Cognition -> Stereotyping
Discrimination
Discrimination: Negative or positive behavior directed towards a social group and its members because of their group membership
• Only that group (and others like it) receive that treatment
Prejudice
Prejudice: Positive or negative feelings and evaluations about others based on knowledge of their group memberships
Hot prejudice: motivated, thoughtful, outward
o e.g. protest of the mosque built around WTC
Cold prejudice: less motivated, subtler, implicit feelings that becomes expressed in behavior, but not in such a strong way.
o e.g. scrutiny, airport screenings
what are social groups?
• People who share a meaningful social characteristic
o Meaningful to them and/or to others
• As usual, what is meaningful will depend on the situation and what is salient and on accessibility and applicability
o Categorization is flexible
sources of prejudice
no real integrated theory
Roughly divided into four sources
• Emotional (1930s)
• Personality (1950s)
• Social (1960s)
• Cognitive (1980s)
emotional sources of prejudice
frustration-aggression theory
scapegoat
realistic conflict theory
o Prejudice comes from frustration
o Frustration-Aggression Theory
• Preventing people from obtaining some thing that is desirable or sought after – you displace this and put it on to another group
scapegoating - Scapegoat theory: outgroups are targeted when things are not going well for ingroup
- • Hovland & Sears (1940) - economic conditions were bad, the number of lynchings increased
- Miller BUgelski - camp attendees deprived of night out, incrased prejudice against Japs and Mexicans
more likely when frustrations are vague
Realistic conflict theory - Prejudice arises when groups compete for scarce resources
o Frustration-Aggression Theory
• Preventing people from obtaining some thing that is desirable or sought after – you displace this and put it on to another group
• Scapegoating
Scapegoat theory: outgroups are targeted when things are not going well for ingroup
o Realistic Conflict Theory
• Prejudice arises when groups compete for scarce resources
• More anti-black feelings among poor whites living near poor blacks in US (Tumin, 1958; Pettigrew, 1978)
• Perception of different social groups change according to what is going on in the world
In the absence of conflict, generally positive views arise
E.g. Japs princeton impressions were only negative during war
Muzafer Sherif (1961)
• Conflict and competition incites prejudice
and aggression
• Robber’s Cave Study
• All boys camp - Robber’s Cave State Park,
Oklahoma “Good boys” matched on SES,
education, etc.
• 22 boys about 12 years of age (2 groups)
Robber’s Cave study
• Phase 1: Creation of ingroups (which thus creates outgroups)
• Phase 2: Created friction between the groups by making the groups aware of one another and then engaging them in competition
o Groups would taunt each other (taunting songs, flag burning, cabin raid)
• Retaliation got out of hand – hostility, intense friction
• Each group developed stereotypes about the group
• Phase 3: How can the conflict be resolved?
o Integration can lead to conflict resolution
o Both groups had to work towards the same goal – fix the camp’s water supply
o After the cooperative activities, they were more likely to make friends from the other group
• Personality sources of prejudice
• Prejudice is rooted in an Authoritarian
personality
• Power: love and respect for power
• Rigidity
• Hostility towards outsiders
• Political conservatism
• Love for a rigid social hierarchy
evidence is mixed
**• Most of the research was done by examining explicit attitudes **
• Social sources of prejudice
o Prejudice embedded in norms and values of a culture/society
o Socialization and conformity drive prejudice and stereotypes
o Transmitted explicitly through products of culture (e.g. media, jokes)
socialization
• Socialization teaches people what to think
• Eagly & Steffen (1984): Does the
distribution of males and females into
different social roles help explain gender
stereotyping?……
when no job info, people inferred women less likely to be employed than men (56% vs 80%)
• Cognitive sources of prejudice
• Decline in self-reported prejudice, but still discrimination
• Prejudice as unfortunate by-product of normal cognitive
functioning
- Stereotypes, ways of maintaining cognitive economy and of categorizing people; they have their advantages:
- Diminish the cognitive load.
• Cognitions about category member are activated so you can deal with information about the individual
social categorization
and outgroup homogeneity effect
o Social categorization: identifying individuals as members of a social group because they possess (a) feature(s) that is thought to be typical of that group
rooted in low-level cognitive process
can lead to Outgroup homogeneity effect:
• Outgroup: the group to which you (the perceiver) don’t belong
• Ingroup: the group to which you belong
**Members of the outgroup are seen to be more similar to one another **
