discrimination

Question 1

what are racial microaggressions?

Answer 1

• Racial microaggressions – verbal, behavioural or environmental indignities (can be conscious or subconscious) that communicate hostile or derogatory racial insults towards people of colour (Sue et al, 2007)

Question 2

what are the 3 factors that make up an ‘attitude’?

Answer 2

prejudice, stereotypes, discrimination

Question 3

attitudes: what is discrimination?

Answer 3

• the behavioural component of an attitude
• action with a negative impact on a minority group

Question 4

attitudes: what are sterotypes?

Answer 4

• cognitive component
• fixed and generalised belief about a group

Question 5

attitudes: what is prejudice?

Answer 5

• effective component
• typically negative feeling towards a member of a group because of their group membership

Question 6

what are the three approaches which attempt to explain discriminatory attitudes?

Answer 6

• motivational approach
• socio-cognitive approach
• economic perspective

Question 7

approaches: what is the ‘motivational approach’? (3)

Answer 7

the motivational approach - discrimination towards a group makes us feel more positive about ourselves/the groups we belong in
- draws on social identity theory

Question 8

MA: what is social identity theory? (2)

Answer 8

• Tajfel 1979
• our social identities (group membership) and personal identity make up our feeling of ‘self’ or ‘self concept’

Question 9

MA: how does social identity relate to this approach? (2)

Answer 9

• as we gain self-esteem through our group memberships, if they are threatened our self-esteem will drop
• in order to prevent this - people will focus on the positive aspects of the groups they belong to, but focus on the negatives of other groups = leading to ‘out-of-group-hostility’ prejudice

Question 10

MA: what evidence is there for social identity theory?

Answer 10

Fein and Spencer 1997 research
o Ppt given an IQ test an then told they had either done well (self-esteem enhancing) or failed (self-esteem lowering)
o Later that day ppt thought they were taking part in a separate communication study  Ppt (none of which were Jewish) showed a video of a woman being interviewed for a job – for ½ ppt in the study it was clear she was Jewish, the other ½ she was Christian
o Ppt was Christian
o Woman in both videos was the same and behaved similarly
o Measure of discrimination – how ‘warm’ they felt towards the woman in the video
o In line with SIT, where ppt had a boost of self-esteem they rated the Jewish and non-Jewish candidate as equally warm
o However when they received negative feedback, more likely to rate the Jewish candidate as significantly less warm  threat to self-esteem does lead to denigration of an out-group

Question 11

approaches: what is the socio-cognitive approach? (3)

Answer 11

• we rely on short-cuts to navigate the complexity of the world around us - leads to heavy categorisation
• by ascribing group memberships we start perceiving differences between those groups even if these differences don’t exist
• three main processes are the outcome of this categorisation - out group homogeneity effect, confirmation bias, illusory correlations

Question 12

socio-cognitive approach: what are the three main consequences of categorisation?

Answer 12

• three main processes are the outcome of this categorisation - out group homogeneity effect, confirmation bias, illusory correlations

Question 13

socio-cognitive approach: what is the ‘out group homogeneity effect’? (2)

Answer 13

• Tendency to see in-group as highly diverse (i.e., different beliefs, personalities, ages, occupations) but the out-group members as ‘all alike’.
• An own-race bias refers to the tendency of being more accurate at recognizing faces of your own race than faces of another race

Question 14

socio-cognitive approach: what is ‘conformity bias’? (2)

Answer 14

• people pay more attention to info that supports their stereotypes or beliefs
• it leads people to preferentially attend to and seek out information that confirms it while discounting info that contradicts it

Question 15

socio-cognitive approach: what are ‘illusory correlations’? (2)

Answer 15

• hamilton and clifford, 1976
• an incorrect belief that two events are related when they’re not
• if a member of a minority group (distinct) commits a crime (distinct), people remember it more readily and overestimate how frequently that behaviour is performed by the group

Question 16

approaches: what is the economic perspective?

Answer 16

• when groups compete for limited resources, the groups experience conflict, prejudice, and
  discrimination
• realistic conflict argues that prejudice is an inevitable consequence of groups fighting for limited resources = low SES will degrade other groups they’re competing with