Ch. 13 Prejudice

Question 1

Prejudice

Answer 1

PREJUDICE – A hostile or negative attitude toward people in a distinguishable group based solely on their membership in that group. Prejudice is an attitude made up of three components:

• Cognitive component, involving the beliefs or thoughts (cognitions) that make up the attitude.
• Affective or emotional component, representing both the type of emotion linked with the attitude (e.g., anger, warmth) and the intensity of the emotion (e.g., mild uneasiness, outright hostility).
• Behavioral component, relating to one’s actions. People don’t only hold attitudes; they usually act on them as well.
• Prejudice is a two-way street; it often flows from the minority group to the majority group as well as in the other direction.

Affective Component: Prejudice

• PREJUDICE – a blend of a stereotype and emotional “heat” toward a particular group – so hard to change due to the emotional component.
  
  • Logical arguments are rarely effective in countering emotions.
• In experiments, students’ skin conductance spiked when they heard their most disliked group complimented or their most liked group derogated.
• EMOTIONAL RESPONSES to groups develop as the target groups are perceived along the dimensions of Warmth and Confidence.
  
  • Competent + Warmth = ADMIRATION
  • Competent + Cold = ENVY
  • Incompetence + Warm = PITY
  • Incompetence + Cold = CONTEMPT
• We see only the information that confirms how right we are about “those people” and dismiss information that might require us to change our minds.

Question 2

Stereotype

Answer 2

Cognitive Component: Stereotypes

• STEREOTYPE – is a generalization about a group of people in which identical characteristics are assigned to virtually all members of the group, regardless of actual variation among the members.
  
  • The human mind cannot avoid creating categories – an adaptive mechanism, one built into the human brain.
  • When you think about a social group, concepts that you associate with that group become more accessible.
  • As a result, stereotype-consistent information is given more attention and remembered more easily than the “exceptions” to the stereotype.
  • We tend to categorize according to what we regard as normative (i.e. based on norms).
  • Stereotyping, however, goes a step beyond simple categorization.
• Newborns have no preferences for faces of one race or another, but if they live in a “monoracial” world, they will show a preference for faces of their own race by only 3 months of age. If they repeatedly see faces of two or more races, however, they show no preference.
• So, why do we use stereotypes? – The world is too complicated for us to have highly differentiated attitudes about everything, we maximize our cognitive time and energy by constructing nuanced, accurate attitudes about some topics while relying on simple, error-prone beliefs about others. Gordon Allport (1954) “the law of least effort.” Given our limited capacity for processing information, it allows human beings to behave like “cognitive misers”
• Even when a given stereotype is accurate, it blinds us to a person’s individuality. (Regardless of whether the stereotype is positive or negative).
• To know if a stereotype is true or not, you have to be open to evidence that disconfirms it.
• POSITIVE STEREOTYPES GOOD?
  
  • Positive stereotypes also disadvantage both parties.
  • It is more maladaptive to mistakenly view someone positively than to mistakenly view them negatively.
• BENEVOLENT SEXISM – where women are idealized as being better than men for stereotypically female qualities like being caring and good cooks.
• HOSTILE SEXISM – describes what we typically think of as sexism: The belief that women are inferior to men and the endorsement of negative stereotypes of women.
• Both positive and negative stereotypes legitimize discrimination and can be used to justify relegating people to stereotyped roles.

Question 3

Discrimination

Answer 3

Behavioral Component: Discrimination

• DISCRIMINATION – Unjustified negative or harmful ACTION toward a member of a group solely because of his or her membership in that group.
  
  • Discrimination is a result of Prejudice.
• Overweight people are less likely than slender people to receive appropriate medical treatment, presumably because doctors tend to chalk up their problems to being overweight.
• INSTITUTIONALIZED DISCRIMINATION – When discrimination is a part of the institution.
  
  • The discrimination may be carried out even by those who are NOT prejudiced in order to conform to the organizational norms (and prevent rejection).
  • Ex: Hiring Discrimination
  • “Whitening” a résumé — non-White person removes references to their ethnicity in their résumé, and it is affective.
  • Discrimination appears institutionalized in our criminal justice system,
• MICROAGGRESSIONS – the “slights, indignities, and put-downs” that many minorities routinely encounter.
• FROM PREJUDICE TO DISCRIMINATION
  
  • Police officers are often forced to make quick decisions under conditions of extreme stress, exactly the point at which IMPLICIT BIAS would kick in.
  • In 2015, police shot five times as many unarmed Black people as unarmed White people.
  • White participants were especially likely to pull the trigger when the men in the videos were Black, whether or not they were holding a gun. This “SHOOTER BIAS” meant that people made relatively few errors when a Black person was actually holding a gun; it also meant, however, that they made the most errors (shooting an unarmed person) when the person was Black.
• Discrimination can also be activated when a person is angered or insulted:
  
  • In one experiment, White participants gave less shock to a Black “learner” than to a White learner when they were feeling fine. But once insulted, the White students gave higher levels to the Black learner than the white.

Question 4

Implicit and Suppressed Prejudice

Answer 4

• Identifying Suppressed Prejudices (Suppressed = keeping conscious prejudice secret)
  
  • BOGUS PIPELINE – using the bogus pipeline (where participants believed a machine would reveal their true attitudes if they lied).
• People expressed more racial (and other) prejudice when the bogus pipeline was used.
• Identifying Implicit Prejudices – (Implicit = prejudice that is unconscious. In other words, you don’t even realize you have the biases that you do.)
• The bogus pipeline is employed based on the assumption that people know what they really feel but prefer to hide those feelings from others.
• But some people may harbor IMPLICIT PREJUDICES that are hidden from themselves.
• ‘Psychologists have developed several ways of MEASURING IMPLICIT PREJUDICE.
  
  • Implicit Association Test (IAT), which measures the speed of people’s positive and negative associations to a target group.
  • Implicit Association Test (IAT) A test that measures the speed with which people can pair a target face (e.g., Black or White, old or young, Asian or White) with positive or negative stimuli (e.g., the words honest or evil) reflecting unconscious (implicit) prejudice.
• People respond more quickly when White faces are paired with positive words and when Black faces are paired with negative words.
  
  • That speed difference is said to be a measure of their implicit attitudes toward African Americans because it’s harder for their unconscious minds to link African Americans with positive words.
• The IAT could mean you are prejudiced, but it might not. it could also mean that the IAT is not always measuring what it says it’s measuring.
• Some psychological scientists think it simply captures a cultural association or stereotype, in the same way that people would be quicker to pair bread + butter than bread + avocado.
• In reality, however, some studies do show that the higher a person’s IAT score, the more likely he or she is to discriminate against the target in some way AND that people are “surprisingly accurate” when predicting their implicit prejudice.

Question 5

Effects of Prejudice on the Victim

Answer 5

Effects of Prejudice on the Victim

• SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY – An expectation of one’s own or another person’s behavior that comes true because of the tendency of the person holding it to act in ways that bring it about.
  
  • Ex: All other things being equal, if you believe that Amy is not very bright and treat her accordingly, chances are that she will not say a lot of clever things in your presence. Your behavior influences Amy’s behavior. If the people she is talking to aren’t paying much attention, she will feel uneasy. She will probably clam up and not come out with all the poetry and wisdom within her. Her silence then serves to confirm the belief you had about her in the first place.
  • In a classic experiment, researchers systematically varied the behavior of an interviewers (actually their confederates) so that it coincided with the way the original interviewers had treated the African American or White interviewees in the first experiment. But in the second experiment, all of the people being interviewed were White. The researchers videotaped the proceedings and had the applicants rated by independent judges. Applicants who were interviewed the way African Americans had been interviewed in the first experiment were judged to be far more nervous and far less effective than those who were interviewed the way White applicants had originally been interviewed.Their behavior, in short, reflected the interviewer’s expectations.
• SOCIAL IDENTITY THREAT – feelings and behaviors elicited by knowing that you are being evaluated as a member of your group.
  
  • This seems to extend to any situation where you feel at risk of being devalued on the basis of your identity.
  • It reduces our working memory capacity, so you do not have as many cognitive resources left to enable you to perform at your best. The extra burden of representing your whole social group creates an apprehension that interferes with your ability to perform well. And so people perform worse.
  • One of the triggers of social identity threat is the SALIENCE OF SOCIAL IDENTITY: If test takers are asked to indicate their race prior to taking the test, Black students perform significantly worse than they would otherwise. This detail has no effect on the performance of White test takers.
    
    • Social identity threat is truly about whichever of your social identities is CURRENTLY salient in a given situation.
  • Ex: Are stereotyped Asian American women good or bad at math?
    
    • The answer depends on whether they are thinking about their ethnic identity or gender identity:
    • Asian American women do worse on math tests when they are reminded of their gender than when they are reminded of their cultural identity.
  • The impact of social identity threat extends beyond the situation that triggered it. University students whose social identities were triggered subsequently exhibited less self-control in other areas because their motivation for self-control had been sapped by the experience of social identity threat.
  • How can the effects of social threat be reversed?
    
    • If thinking about a negatively stereotyped identity can harm performance, then drawing on an identity that has a counter-stereotype ought to help performance
      
      • Whether or not you feel “social identity threat” depends on what category you are identifying with at the time.
      • Ex: Asian women do worse on math tests when they see themselves as “women” (stereotype = poor at math) rather than as “Asians” (stereotype = good at math).
• SELF-AFFIRMATION – the practice of reminding yourself— realistically— of your good qualities or experiences that made you feel successful or proud. Self-affirmation is a counter-stereotype approach.
  
  • Thinking about important social identities other than the negatively stereotyped one can help to counteract the effects of feeling stigmatized, disrespected, or incompetent
  • Even learning about social identity threat – like you are right now—is sufficient for improving test performance, because people know to attribute feelings of anxiety to the social situation instead of their abilities

Question 6

Causes of Prejudice

Answer 6

Causes of Prejudice

• There are three aspects of social life that can cause prejudice.
  
  • Group or institution, which demands conformity to normative standards or rules in the society.
  • Within the individual, the ways we process information and assign meaning to observed events.
  • Interacting groups of people, such as the effects of competition, conflict, and frustration.
• Pressures to Conform: Normative Rules
  
  • INSTITUTIONAL DISCRIMINATION – when companies and other institutions are legally permitted – or socially encouraged – to discriminate on the basis of race, gender, or other categories of prejudice.
  • If you grow up in a society where institutional discrimination exists – where few minority group members and women have professional careers and where most people in these groups hold menial jobs, the likelihood of your developing negative attitudes about the inherent abilities of minorities and women will be increased. This will happen without anyone actively teaching you that minorities and women are inferior and without any law or decree banning minorities and women from college faculties, boardrooms, or medical schools.
    
    • Social barriers create a lack of opportunity for these groups that makes their success unlikely.
• Defense of Marriage Act – had defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman and was ruled unconstitutional in 2013.
  
  • By 2017, 64% of all Americans thought same-sex marriage should be allowed.
• NORMATIVE CONFORMITY – The tendency to go along with the group in order to fulfill the group’s expectations and gain acceptance.
  
  • Explains why people who hold deep prejudices might not act on them, and why people who are not prejudiced might behave in a discriminatory way: They are conforming to the norms of their social groups or institutions.
• Confronting prejudice works. People who witness someone confront prejudice later exhibit less prejudice and stereotyping.
  
  • Silence has a price. It not only affects the target of the racist remark but it also affects the people who remain silent. They reduce dissonance by justifying their inaction (e.g. “oh, it wasn’t that bad”) and thereby increasing the chance that they won’t speak up in the future.
• Social Identity Theory: Us versus Them
• SOCIAL IDENTITY – The part of a person’s self-concept that is based on his or her identification with a nation, religious or political group, occupation, or other social affiliation.
  
  • Social identities give us a sense of place and position in the world. It feels good to be part of an “us.”
• ETHNOCENTRISM – The belief that one’s own ethnic group, nation, or religion is superior to all others.
  
  • It is universal, probably because it aids survival by increasing people’s attachment to their own group and their willingness to work on its behalf.
  • As soon as people have created an “us,” however, they perceive everybody else as “not us.”
  • The impulse to feel suspicious of “outsiders” seems to be part of a biological survival mechanism.
  • However, human beings are also biologically prepared to be friendly, open, and cooperative.
  • The brain is designed to register differences, it appears, but any negative associations with those differences depend on context and learning.
• IN-GROUP BIAS – The tendency to favor members of one’s own group and give them special preference over people who belong to other groups.
  
  • The group can be temporary and trivial as well as significant.
  • Unfortunately, it often leads to unfair treatment of others merely because we have defined them as being in the “out-group”.
  • in-group bias is an even more powerful reason for discrimination than outright prejudice and hostility.
• MINIMAL GROUPS – In short, even when the reasons for differentiation are minimal, being in the in-group makes you want to win against members of the out-group and leads you to treat the latter unfairly, because such tactics build your self-esteem and feeling of “belongingness.”
• When your group does win, it strengthens your feelings of pride and identification with that group.
• Ex: How do you feel about being a student of your university following a winning or losing football season? Students were more likely to wear their university’s insignia after victory than after defeat. “We” won. But if our team loses, we say “they” lost.
• OUT-GROUP HOMOGENEITY – The perception that individuals in the out-group are more similar to each other (homogeneous) than they really are, as well as more similar than members of the in-group are.
  
  • This is another consequence of social categorization – the belief that “they” are all alike.
  • If you know something about one out-group member, you are more likely to feel you know something about all of them.
• BLAMING THE VICTIM – The tendency to blame individuals (make dispositional (personal) attributions) for their victimization, typically motivated by a desire to see the world as a fair place.
  
  • The stronger a person’s belief in a “just world”, the more likely he or she is to blame the poor and homeless for their own plight.
  • When confronted with evidence of an unfair outcome that is otherwise hard to explain, they find a way to blame the victim – pointing to their alleged incompetence, belligerence, sluttiness, etc.
  • Most of us are good at reconstructing situations after the fact to support our belief in a just world. It simply requires making a dispositional attribution (it’s the victim’s fault) rather than a situational one (scary, random events can happen to anyone at any time).
    
    • Ex: In a fascinating experiment, college students who were provided with a description of a young woman’s friendly behavior toward a man judged that behavior as completely appropriate. Another group of students was given the same description, plus the information that the encounter ended with the young woman being raped by the man. This group rated the young woman’s behavior as inappropriate; she was judged as having brought the rape on herself.
  • How can we account for such harsh attributions? When something bad happens to another person, we will feel sorry for the person but at the same time relieved that this horrible thing didn’t happen to us. We will also feel scared that such a thing might happen to us in the future. We can protect ourselves from that fear by convincing ourselves that the person must have done something to cause the tragedy. We feel safer, then, because we believe that we would have behaved more cautiously.
  • One variation of blaming the victim is the “well-deserved reputation” excuse. It goes something like this: “If the Jews have been victimized throughout their history, they must have been doing something to deserve it.”
• JUSTIFYING PREJUDICE – Prejudices support the in-group’s feeling of superiority.
  
  • Most people who are in dominant positions in their society do not see themselves as being prejudiced; they regard their beliefs about the out-group as being perfectly reasonable.
  • Most people struggle between their urge to express a prejudice they hold and their need to maintain a positive self-concept as someone who is not a bigot.
  • But suppressing prejudiced impulses requires constant energy, so people are always on the lookout for information that will enable them to convince themselves that they are justified in disliking a particular out-group.
  • Once they find that justification, they can discriminate all they want and still feel that they are not bigots (thus avoiding cognitive dissonance).
    
    • Ex: Remember the experiments in which supposedly unprejudiced people administered more punishment to the out-group when they had been insulted or angered?
      
      • They had a justification for their increased aggression: “I’m not a bad or prejudiced person, but he insulted me! She hurt me!”
      • “Justification undoes suppression, it provides cover, and it protects a sense of egalitarianism and a non-prejudiced self-image.”
  • Many people justify their beliefs, including their prejudiced beliefs, by calling on religious doctrine.
• REALISTIC CONFLICT THEORY – holds that limited resources lead to conflict between groups and result in prejudice and discrimination.
  
  • Ex: In politics, weak leaders and governments often select a minority group to use as a scapegoat—“those people are the reason for all our problems.” This is an effort to unify their citizens (“us”) against “them” and thereby distract everyone’s attention from “our” failures to run the country.
    
    • In the US right now, there is a battle among citizens against Latinos who are allegedly taking away jobs.
    • These changes in the target of a majority group’s anger suggest that when times are tough and resources are scarce, in-group members will feel more threatened by the out-group.
      
      • Accordingly, incidents of prejudice, discrimination, and violence toward out-group members will increase.

Question 7

Reducing Prejudice

Answer 7

Reducing Prejudice

• FACTS DON’T SET THEM STRAIGHT – Because stereotypes and prejudice are typically based on false information, for many years social activists believed that education was the answer: All we needed to do was expose people to the truth, and their prejudices would disappear. But this expectation proved to be naive because of the underlying emotional aspects of prejudice,
  
  • In fact, some people presented with this kind of disconfirming evidence actually strengthened their stereotypical belief because the disconfirming evidence challenged them to come up with additional reasons for holding on to their prejudice.
• Luckily, repeated contact with members of an out-group can modify stereotypes and prejudice. But mere contact is not enough; it must be a special kind of contact.
• CONTACT HYPOTHESIS – The view that social interactions between social groups would reduce prejudice.
  
  • Empirical evidence supported this: White southerners joined the U.S. Army—after army units became integrated in the early 1950s—their racism gradually decreased.
    
    • Also, White students who have roommates, friends, and relationships across racial and ethnic lines tend to become less prejudiced and find commonalities across group borders.
    • Contact between heterosexuals and gays and lesbians has the strongest effect in decreasing prejudice whereas contact with the elderly has the weakest.
  • One problem with the classic contact hypothesis is that it requires each person to directly experience intergroup contact in order to reduce prejudice. Not practical.
    
    • Luckily, INDIRECT FORMS of contact that also predict less prejudice**. The **EXTENDED CONTACT EFFECT shows that simply knowing an in-group member has out-group friends is sufficient to reduce prejudice.
    • Also, getting emotionally connected to and invested in certain characters or celebrities from other social groups, which is called PARASOCIAL CONTACT.
    • And vicariously witnessing intergroup contact occur through vignettes in the news and entertainment media, which is called VICARIOUS CONTACT.
  • Another problem with the contact hypothesis is that social interactions between members of different groups, termed INTERGROUP INTERACTION, tend to be characterized by mistrust and anxiety.
    
    • These feelings of anxiety during intergroup interactions are a core reason people avoid interacting with people of other groups.
    • People’s expectations for intergroup interactions tend to be worse than intergroup interactions actually are. With more contact, the psychological differences between intergroup interactions and in-group interactions disappear.
      
      • Indeed, people with lots of intergroup contact do not show any physiological threat at all during interracial interactions.
  • The biggest problem with the contact hypothesis is that, sometimes, contact can make intergroup relations more hostile and even increase prejudice.
    
    • Especially in situations marked by extreme intergroup violence, mere contact does not seem to reduce prejudice and can even make it worse.
      
      • That said, even in these violent intergroup contexts, high-quality contact like cross-group friendship still predicts less prejudice and greater desire for reconciliation.
  • Contact can reduce prejudice only when four conditions are met:
    
    • Both groups are of equal status
    • Both share a common goal that reminds them of their common humanity
    • Contact involves intergroup cooperation
    • Contact is supported by law or local custom
• Studies that included all optimal conditions found a stronger link between contact and prejudice reduction than studies involving nonoptimal contact, but nonoptimal contact still predicted less prejudice.
• INTERDEPENDENCE – A situation that exists when two or more groups need to depend on one another to accomplish a goal that is important to each of them.
  
  • Cooperation Fosters Intergroup Relations When the Eagles and the Rattlers were in competition, few of the boys in each group had friends from the other side. Intergroup tensions were eased only after the boys had to cooperate to get shared privileges and the boys began to make friends across “enemy lines.”
• CONTACT GONE WRONG – Although contact between ethnic groups is generally a good thing, the desegregation of schools did not work as smoothly.
  
  • In 53% of studies on school desegregation, prejudice actually increased; in 34% of the studies, no change in prejudice occurred.
  • JIGSAW CLASSROOM – A classroom setting designed to reduce prejudice and raise the self-esteem of children by placing them in small, multiethnic groups and making each child dependent on the other children in the group to learn the course material.
    
    • Unlike the traditional classroom, where students are competing against each other, the jigsaw classroom has students depending on each other.
    • The jigsaw children became more truly integrated and found great success.
    • One reason for the success** of this technique is that the process of participating in a cooperative group **breaks down in-group versus out-group perceptions and allows the individual to develop the cognitive category of “oneness”.
    • In addition, the cooperative strategy places people in a “favor-doing” situation – where people who act in a way that benefits others subsequently come to feel more favorable toward the people they helped.
    • EMPATHY – another reason for it’s success is that it developed empathy.
      
      • This is IMPORTANT because the extent to which children can develop the ability to see the world from the perspective of another human being has profound implications for empathy, generosity, and learning to get along with others When we develop the ability to understand what another person is going through, it increases the probability that our heart will open to that person. Once our heart opens to another person, it becomes almost impossible to feel prejudice against that person, to bully that person, to humiliate that person.
    • This method is now generally accepted as one of the most effective ways of improving relations between ethnic groups, increasing acceptance of stigmatized individuals such as people with mental illness, building empathy, and improving instruction.