Chapter 11: Prejudice Flashcards
Prejudice: Groups
- Religion
- Obesity
- Age
- Immigration
- Politics
Prejudice
- Negative assumptions about a group and its members
Where Prejudice Comes From: Stereotypes
Beliefs about the personal attributes of a group of people - often overgeneralized, inaccurate, and confirmation biased
Results of Prejudice: Discrimination
Unjustifiable behavior toward a group or its members because of their belonging to that group
Discrimination: Racism & Sexism
1) Prejudicial attitudes or discriminatory behavior toward people of a certain race/sex
2) Institutional practices that subordinate based on race/sex (not always motivated by prejudice)
Prejudice: Implicit/Explicit
- IATs reveal implicit prejudice that we may not be consciously (explicit) aware of
- Prejudiced and stereotypic evaluations can occur outside of people’s awareness
Racial Prejudice
- Dramatic changes in recent years, but still prevalent
- Modern prejudice is mostly implicit (preference for familiarity)
Racial Prejudice: Biased Behaviours
- Employment discrimination
- Favouritism of employers
- Traffic stops (police violence)
- Patronization (overcompensating for prejudice resulting in mistreatment)
Automatic Racial Prejudice
- Implicit bias can leak into behavior
- Especially when distressed, our implicit biases can affect our decision making, allowing our biased instincts to take over
Gender Prejudice: Stereotypes
- Assumptions about essential differences between genders are prevalent
- While stereotypes contain some truth, they are not accurate representations of individuals
- Stereotypes do exist across cultures (innate?)
- Stereotypes (beliefs) are not prejudices (attitudes)
- One may hold stereotypes but believe in equality
Gender Prejudice: Sexism - Benevolent & Hostile
- Most people like women more than men
- Gender attitudes often mix benevolence with hostility (women are nice, but not to their husbands)
- Hostile sexist beliefs predict inequality
Gender Prejudice: Discrimination
- Men are 3x more likely to die of suicide or murder
- Attitudes are changing - no devaluation of work based on gender is seen
- People may be ridiculed when going against gender-norms
- Gender discrimination is much more prominent worldwide
- The largest form of gender discrimination occurs in fetuses
Prejudice: LGTBQ+
- Job discrimination
- Marriage support is mixed
- Harassment
- Rejection - community attitudes predict health (suicide rates and heart failure)
- In states that banned same-sex marriage, mental health issues and substance abuse went up in these groups - In states where it was legal, there was no such increase
Social Sources of Prejudice: Social Inequalities & SDO
- Unequal status BREEDS prejudice (not the other way around)
- SOCIAL DOMINANCE ORIENTATION: A motivation to have one’s group dominate other social groups
Social Sources of Prejudice: Socialization
- The Authoritarian Personality: disposed to favour obedience and intolerance of groups with lower social status
- Ethnocentrism: Belief in the superiority of one’s own cultural & ethnic group along with a disdain for all other groups
- Religion: Used both in the maintenance and justification of prejudice & in the undoing of prejudice
- Conformity: When prejudice is socially accepted, most people will conform to these norms
Social Sources of Prejudice: Institutional Supports
- Social institutions will often reflect prejudice to the extent that it is accepted within a society
- May be through overt policies or passive reinforcement
- Schools, government, media
Motivational Sources of Prejudice: The Scapegoat Theory
- Frustration, especially when sources are unknown, can often result in displaced aggression (scapegoating)
- Realistic Group Conflict Theory: Prejudices arise from competition between groups for scarce resources
- Lack of resources often leads to blaming another group of people (unemployment rates)
Social Sources of Prejudice: Social Identity Theory
- The “we” aspect of our self-concept; the part of our answer to “who am I?” that comes from our membership in groups
- IN-GROUPS: “Us” - groups who share a sense of belonging, a feeling of common identity
- OUT-GROUPS: “Them - groups perceived as distinctly apart from their group
- Social division is natural and our self-evaluations are influenced by group membership
Social Identity Theory: In-Group Bias
- We have a tendency to favour our own group
- Expresses and supports a positive self-concept - we often choose to identify ourselves within a group when that group is perceived positively (‘my team’ won VS ‘they’ lost)
- Breeds favouritism: “We are better than they” (even when randomly assigned)
- In-group bias does not always foster out-group prejudice
In-Group Bias: Terror Management
When confronted with reminders of mortality, our self-protective emotional responses often cause an increased adherence to cultural worldviews and prejudices (returning to what is safe)
Motivation to Avoid Prejudice
- Majority people often continue to feel uncomfortable around minority people no matter what their attitudes are
- Self-conscious people will often feel guilty and try to inhibit prejudicial responses
- Internal (belief that prejudice is wrong) rather than external (want to appear unprejudiced) motivation is more likely to result in change
Cognitive Prejudice: Categorization
- Energy-saving schemes for quick judgements and predictions
- We judge out-group people more quickly (evolutionary)
Cognitive Prejudice: Spontaneous Categorization
It is easier to rely on stereotypes when:
- Pressed for time
- Preoccupied
- Tired
- Emotionally aroused
Cognitive Prejudice: Out-group Homogeneity Effect
We perceive out-group members as more similar than in-group members (they are alike, we are diverse - maintain feelings of individuality)
Cognitive Prejudice: Own-race Bias
We tend to more accurately identify people of our own race
Distinctiveness: People
- Those who stand out are perceived as having more exaggerated qualities
- People define others by their distinctive traits and behaviours (someone who owns a snake & a dog - snake owner)
Distinctiveness: Self-consciousness
- We tend to misperceive others as reacting to our distinctiveness due to our heightened awareness of our differences
- Our perceptions of how other’s perceive us, therefore, can shape how we behave toward them, possibly causing them to feel how we assume they do
Distinctiveness: Vivid Cases
- When experience with a certain group is limited, we tend to generalize based on our limited experiences
- Experiencing those who stand out (out-group members) we tend to overestimate their presence within society
Distinctiveness: Illusory Correlations
- Because we are sensitive to distinctive events, we tend to correlate them when they occur together
- When a minority group (distinct) does distinct things, even if they are done at the same rate as the majority group does them, the combination of distinctness makes them appear correlated
- When reporting events, we often mention distinct traits along with the action (a (black/gay/satanist,) person murdered a child)
Attributions: Group-serving Bias
- Explaining away positive behaviours of out-group members (outlier, outside influence, etc.)
- Attributing negative behaviours to their dispositions (excusing such behaviour in their own group)
Just-World Phenomenon
- The tendency to believe that the world is just - people get what they deserve and deserve what they get
- Those who are discriminated against are therefore seen as less deserving (they asked for it
- We judge losers to be less competent even if the role of luck is obvious (may contribute to our perfectionism?)
Consequences of Prejudice: Self-Perpetuating Prejudgements
Prejudgements:
- guide our attention and memories (misremembering in accordance with our stereotypes)
- are self-perpetuating (explaining away behaviors that don’t fit our expectations)
Self-Perpetuating Prejudgements: Subtyping
Accommodating groups of people who deviate from one’s stereotype by thinking of them as a special category (atypical exceptions)
Self-Perpetuating Prejudgements: Subgrouping
Accommodating groups who deviate from one’s stereotype be forming a new stereotype for this subgroup (young hispanics are all nice, especially compared to the rest of hispanics)
Consequences of Prejudice: Discrimination
- Attitudes may align with a social system not only to rationalize it, but also because discriminatory attitudes affect those discriminated against
- Discrimination is self-fulfilling (discrimination may lead to results that are used to justify further discrimination)
Consequences of Prejudice: Stereotype Threat
- A disruptive concern that one (who is often negatively stereotyped) will be evaluated based on this stereotype rather than their actions
- This can result in increased self-consciousness in those who are subject to such stereotypes
- Stereotype threat can undermine performance through; stress, self-monitoring, and suppressing unwanted thoughts and emotions
Consequences of Prejudice: Do Stereotypes Bias Our Judgements?
Positive ways
- They reflect and will change with increased multiculturalism
- We often evaluate individuals more positively than groups)
Do Stereotypes Bias Our Judgements: Strong Stereotypes Matter
- Even when a strong stereotype is known to be irrelevant, it has an irresistible force (men who endorse sexism treat their wives worse)
Do Stereotypes Bias Our Judgements: Bias of Interpretations
- We interpret ambiguous information based on our own stereotypes of the provided information
- With little else to go on (unknown event) we rely on our expectations (stereotypes)
- This is adaptive, but harmful, especially when stereotypes are informed by things outside of genuine experiences
- We evaluate people more extremely if their actions violate our expected stereotypes (a woman who tells someone off is more assertive than a man who does the same)
