Chapter 11: Stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination

Question 1

Stereotypes

Answer 1

…—beliefs that certain attributes are characteristic of members of particular groups. … is a way of categorizing people. A … can be positive or negative, largely true or entirely false. It involves thinking about a person not as an individual, but as a member of a group, and projecting your beliefs about the group onto that person

Question 2

Prejudice

Answer 2

… refers to an attitudinal and affective response toward a group and its individual members. Negative attitudes generally get the most attention, but it’s also possible to be positively prejudiced toward a group. Prejudice involves prejudging others because they belong to a specific category.

Question 3

Discrimination

Answer 3

… refers to favorable or unfavorable behavior directed toward members of a group. It involves unfair treatment of others, based not on their individual character or abilities, but strictly on their group membership.

Question 4

Priming

Answer 4

… If I show you the word butter and then ask you to tell me, as quickly as you can that bread is a word more quickly than you’ll recognize that car is a word because of your preexisting association between bread and butter.

Question 5

the affect misattribution procedure (AMP)

Answer 5

…, doesn’t measure how quickly people respond to a stimulus after a given prime, but how people evaluate that stimulus.

Question 6

realistic group conflict theory

Answer 6

… According to this theory, prejudice and discrimination often arise from competition over limited resources.

Question 7

superordinate goals

Answer 7

Relations between the two groups quickly showed the effects of these … – goals that could only be achieved by both groups working together.

Question 8

the minimal group paradigm

Answer 8

People’s readiness to adopt an “us versus them” mentality has been extensively documented in experiments using … Numerous experiments have shown that most participants are interested more in maximizing the relative gain for members of their ingroup over the outgroup than they are in maximizing the absolute gain for their ingroup.

Question 9

social identity theory

Answer 9

The most widely recognized theory that attempts to explain the ubiquity of ingroup favoritism is …, which is based on the idea that our self-esteem comes not only from our personal identity and accomplishments, but also from the status and accomplishments of the various groups to which we belong.

Question 10

basking in reflected glory

Answer 10

Social identity theory also receives support from the everyday observation that people go to great lengths to announce their affiliation with a group when that group is doing well. …. To … is to use ingroup identity to enhance self-esteem. But does denigrating outgroups also boost self-esteem? Does criticizing another group make people feel better about their own group—and hence themselves? Indeed, it does.

Question 11

Paired distinctiveness

Answer 11

… is the the pairing of two distinctive events that stand out because they occur together.

Question 12

Self-fulfilling prophecies

Answer 12

Stereotypes can also be reinforced by …: that is, people act toward members of certain groups in ways that encourage the very behavior they expect to see from those groups.

Question 13

Subtyping

Answer 13

… reflects a more general truth: people treat evidence that supports a stereotype differently from evidence that refutes it. People tend to accept supportive evidence at face value, whereas they often critically analyze and discount contradictory evidence

Question 14

the outgroup homogeneity effect

Answer 14

We also tend to assume that the members of an outgroup are more similar to one another than those of us in our ingroup are. They all think, act, and look alike. We, on the other hand, are a remarkably varied lot. This tendency is called … Because we share the same group membership, we do not treat an ingroup member as a representative of a group. . Not so with outgroup members. We often treat an outgroup member merely as a representative of a group, so the person’s unique characteristics recede into the background.

Question 15

The own-race identification bias

Answer 15

… appears to result from the fact that people interact with members of their own race as individuals, without thinking about race, and so the individual features of the person in question are processed more deeply. When interacting with someone from another race, part of one’s attention is drawn to the person’s race, taking away from the processing of the person’ individuating characteristics.

Question 16

stereotype threat

Answer 16

…, the fear that they will confirm the stereotypes others have about them and their group. Stereotype threat leads to increased arousal, which can directly interfere with performance on complex tasks and serve as a source of distraction that interferes with concentration on the task at hand. Furthermore, knowing that ones group is “suspect” in the eyes of others tends to elicit negative thinking. This can both directly undermine performance and lead individuals to “play it safe” by being more obsessed with avoiding failure than striving for success.