Chapter 7: Prejudice Flashcards
Define:
prejudice
What Is Prejudice?
A hostile or negative attitude toward a distinguishable group on the basis of generalizations derived from faulty or incomplete information.
What are the unconscious and unintentional forms of prejudice?
What Is Prejudice?
- In an experiment by Devah Pager, well-spoken white and African-American students with the same resumes were sent to job interviews. For some, the resume noted that the applicant had previously served 18 months for cocaine possession.
- Who got called back for an interview? Those with a clean record were called three times as often as the blacks with a clean record. Among the ex-convicts, the employers called back the whites twice as often as the blacks.
- It’s not possible to know whether the employers felt animosity toward the black applicants or whether they were aware of the bias in their judgments. But the bias was there and its cost to the black applicants was considerable.
- In a more recent experiment, white subjects were more likely to respond if a person they witnessed falling down and hurting themselves was white rather than black. This bias was only apparent if the accident was fairly severe and the victim was clearly hurt; there was no bias if the accident was a minor one. In the same set of studies, black subjects did not show this bias.
- In a field experiment by Michelle Hebl, students were sent out for interviews and some indicated that they were gay while some didn’t. The employers who were interviewing students they believed were gay were less verbally positive, spent less time interviewing, used fewer words, and made less eye contact. These potential employers were uncomfortable or more standoffish than they were with people they believed to be heterosexual.
What are:
hostile and benevolent sexism
What Is Prejudice?
-
Hostile sexism: reflects an active dislike of women.
- Hostile sexists hold stereotypic views of women that suggest that women are inferior to men (e.g. they’re less intelligent, less competent, etc.).
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Benevolent sexism: appears favorable to women but actually is patronizing.
- Benevolent sexists hold stereotypically positive views of women (e.g. that they’re warmer, kinder, and more nurturing than men).
- Both kinds of sexists assume that women are the weaker and less competent sex, and both kinds of sexism serve to justify relegating women to traditional roles in society.
What are the ways in which we justify prejudice?
What Is Prejudice?
Crandall and Eshleman suggest that people struggle to maintain a balance between being prejudiced and being a good person. This requires mental energy, and thus we may be more attracted to information that allows us to express our prejudice. Once we find a valid justification for disliking a group, we can express prejudice without feeling like bigots—thus avoiding cognitive dissonance.
Frey and Gaertner demonstrated that whites are just as willing to help black students as other whites, but only if they believe that the black student earned it. It’s easy to rationalize our prejudice by saying that people don’t deserve to be treated the same because they haven’t worked as hard.
A key factor in justifying our biases is whether we believe an individual has control over his or her situation. For example, people feel okay about being prejudiced towards fat people because it’s perceived that these people have the choice to not be fat.
Sometimes, people can discriminate in favour of minorities. For example, Kent Harber demonstrated that white editors of essays will be less critical if they are led to believe that the essay was written by a black versus a white student.
Define:
stereotyping
What Is Prejudice?
To allow the little pictures in our heads that help us interpret the world we see to dominate our thinking, leading us to assign identical characteristics to any person in a group, regardless of the actual variation among members of that group.
- It’s not necessarily an intentional act of abuse; nor is it always negative. Rather, often it is merely a way we humans have of organizing and simplifying the complexities of our social world, and we all do it.
What are the consequences of stereotyping?
What Is Prejudice?
- When making judgments about people, we often ignore or give insufficient weight to information that does not fit the stereotype. A study by Bodenhausen and Wyer demonstrated that prisoners who fit a stereotype (e.g. “Carlos Ramirez” committing assult and battery) were more likely to be denied parole.
- Negative stereotypes are comforting: they help us justify an unfair system in which some people are on the top and some are on the bottom.
- Biased thinking has real-life consequences. Charles Bond discovered that nurses in a psychiatric hospital were four times more likely to use physical restraint and sedation against blacks than whites, even if the blacks were on average less violent than the whites.
- In an experiment, Joshua Correll demonstrated that police officers are more likely to shoot a black man holding an object in his hand than a white man. Saddeningly, this trend was seen in both white and black men.
What is:
the ultimate attribution error
What Is Prejudice?
This term describes the tendency for people to make attributions consistent with their prejudices in ambiguous situations.
What are the consequences of the ultimate attribution error?
What Is Prejudice?
- The most obvious way this plays out is in gender: If a man is successful on a given task, observers attribute his success to ability; if a woman is successful on that same task, observers attribute her success to hard work. If a man fails on a given task, observers attribute his failure either to bad luck or to lower effort; if a woman fails, observers feel that the task is too hard for her ability level—she doesn’t “have what it takes.”
- Daughters of women who hold these sorts of stereotypes tend to believe that they are lower in ability than their brothers, or other boys.
- This in turn means that women themselves may end up thinking that they just aren’t as skilled if the underperform.
- Women who believe that they are only hired for a job because of their gender hend to handicap their own performance.
Define:
stereotype threat
What Is Prejudice?
Apprehension towards confirming the existing negative stereotypes of one’s group.
How does hindsight bias play a role in the phenomenon of blaming the victim?
What Is Prejudice?
- Blaming the victim refers to a tendecy to blame victims for their victimization, attributing their predicaments to their own personalities and disabilities in order to see the world as fair and just. This term came out of Baruch Fischhoff ’s work on the hindsight bias.
- In an experiment, Ronnie Janoff-Bulman demonstrated the power of the hindsight bias in increasing subjects’ beliefs that rape victims were responsible for their own victimization. All else being the same, participants who read the last line of the story as: “The next thing I knew, he raped me,” were more likely to blame the woman’s behaviour for the outcome of the date.
List the five basic causes of prejudice.
Causes of Prejudice
- Economic and political competition or conflict;
- Displaced aggression;
- Maintenance of status or self-image;
- Dispositional prejudice;
- And conformity to existing social norms.
These causes aren’t mutually exclusive and may operate all at once. However, it’s important to understand the causes because our approach to solving bigotry will be determined by how we think it’s caused.
How does economic and political competition lead to prejudice?
Causes of Prejudice
- Given that resources are limited, the dominant group might attempt to exploit or derogate a minority group to gain some material advantage.
- It tend to increase when times are tense and there is conflict over mutually exclusive goals.
- This type of discrimination is most overtly seen in unions denying membership to women and members of ethnic minorities, thereby keeping them out of the relatively high- paying occupations controlled by the unions.
- When the Chinese were attempting to mine gold in California, they were described as “depraved and vicious, gross gluttons, bloodthirsty and inhuman.” However, a decade later, when they were willing to accept dangerous and arduous work building the transcontinental railroad—work that whites were unwilling to undertake—they were regarded as sober, industrious, and law-abiding.
What are the steps to producing prejudice in the lab?
Causes of Prejudice
- Randomly assign people of differing backgrounds to one of two groups.
- Make those two groups distinguishable in some arbitrary way.
- Put those groups into a situation in which they are in competition with each other.
- Look for evidence of prejudice.
What is:
scapegoating
Causes of Prejudice
The process of blaming a relatively powerless innocent person for something that is not his or her fault.
What is the role of emotion in scapegoating?
Causes of Prejudice
- It’s difficult to understand how the lynching of blacks could be due only to economic competition.
- In a study by Miller and Bugelski, researchers provided evidence for the presence of psychological processes in prejudice. In this experiment, white students were asked to state their feelings about various minority groups. They were then frustrated by being deprived of an opportunity. When they were then asked to restate their feelings about the minority groups, they showed increased prejudice. A control group that didn’t have the frustrating experience didn’t undergo any change in prejudice.
- In another experiment, participants were asked to deliver shocks to confederates as a part of a study on learning. There were four conditions: The accomplice was either black or white, and he was trained to be either friendly or insulting to the subject. When the black accomplice was friendly, the subjects administered slightly less intense shocks to him than to a white accomplice; when he insulted them, they administered far more intense shocks to him than to the white student.
- The general picture of scapegoating that emerges is that individuals tend to displace aggression onto groups that are disliked, that are visible, and that are relatively powerless. Moreover, the form the aggression takes depends on what is allowed or approved by the in-group.
