Intergroup Cognition - Racial Bias

Question 1

Describe levels of analysis, two levels of processing?

Answer 1

Implicit / Explicit Distinction

Question 2

Implicit?

Answer 2

What’s uncontrollable (automatic) and not accessible via introspection.
Automatic, unconscious, uncontrollable

Question 3

Explicit?

Answer 3

Controllable and accessible via conscious thought.
Deliberate, intentional, consciously accessible.

Question 4

“…any any knowledge or understanding of the illusion we may gain at the intellectual level remains virtually powerless to diminish the magnitude of the illusion”

What does it mean?

Answer 4

• Subjective awareness may not influence unconscious processing, ex. Visual size and length illusion

Question 5

What do we learn for the colour naming experiment?

Answer 5

Unconscious processes can influence conscious processes?

Question 6

Examples of Social categories, us and them?

Answer 6

• Gender
• Nationality
• Sports team
• Political parties
  -> We are hardwired to cave out different kinds of groups

Question 7

Some functions of Social categories?

Answer 7

• Reasoning (evaluation/attitudes & stereotypes
• Facilitates social interaction (helping, friendships)
• Shaping how we perceive events in the words, in-group vs. Outgrip actions ex different sports team

Question 8

Understanding intergroup bias? 4 questions

Answer 8

• When do such biases begin to form?
• What role does experience play?
• How do such biases change across development?
• Hoe do such biases shape bechviori and other aspects of cognition? (Indirect evidence)

Question 9

Sources of intergroup cognition?

Answer 9

• Experience, to what extend to you get a change to interact with this group and how does that experience change your perception
• Peers, family
• Media
• Biology
  Interaction between our environment and biology (we are hardwired to speak, but where we are born determines what language + culture fills in content)

Question 10

Development of intergroup cognition, Aboud (2003)?

Answer 10

• Ingroup liking emerges before dislike of outgroup (explicitly)
• Age 3/4 for ingroup liking, outgroup dislike after age 7

Question 11

Development of intergroup cognition, Bigler, Jones, & Lobliner (1997)?

Answer 11

• Children seem to spontaneously form categories and prefer ingroup members (by age 6)

Question 12

Effects of Contact?

Answer 12

Interactions with children of different races.
Ask children to describe and ambiguous picture where the interpretation can be either positive or negative (steal the money, return it)
More hostile interpretations towards black transgressor than white transgressor only for ONLY WHITE Schools. Mixed schools or all black school did not see the same pattern.

Question 13

Development of Explicit Social Group Preferences - A paradox! Why?

Answer 13

• Developmental decline in negative attitudes toward the outgrip

Race bias:
- Emerges by age 3 or 4
- Peaks near age 7
- Decline though adolescence

• Developmental increase in negative behaviour toward the outgrip
  (Fewer interracial interactions & freiendships)

Discrimination:
- Housing
- Employment
- Healthcare
- Education

Question 14

Limitations of Explicit Measures?

Answer 14

• Only access conscious thought, things we can introspect on
• Social desirability, we know that it is bad to be racist -> change our response

Question 15

Measuring Implicit Bias with The Implicit Association Test?

Answer 15

• Reaction time measure
• Measures strength of association between concepts

Category A Good / Category B Bad
Example, Race (European, Asian, African American)
Stronger association = Faster, more accurate responses

Question 16

Implicit Preferences and Behaviour (example, racist and gender bias)?

Answer 16

• Friendliness
• Hiring
• Voting
• Medical treatment
  -> Implicit bias is a better predictor of behaviour than explicit

Question 17

Where of these biases come from?

Answer 17

• Learned gradually from parents, peers, media, personal experience -> Insufficient!

Early and automatic
- In-group preference
- Preference for mere familiarity

Question 18

Development of Implicit Social Group Preferences?

Answer 18

• Early acquisition
• Group membership, the status of your in-group matter
• Stable across development, children and adults are demonstrating the same pattern

When your group has high social status there is a clear implicit in-group bias, whereas when your group has a low social status there is no implicit in-group bias. Both still stable throughout development

Question 19

Development of Implicit Social Group Preferences?

Answer 19

• Roots prior to age 6
• Early life experiences are important for acquisition
• How early do such biases form? The messages about race is so embedded in society that children will come across them from a very early age, it’s unavoidable

Question 20

Development of Intergroup Cognition?

Answer 20

• With age explicit intergroup preferences change
• Implicit intergroup preferences remains fairly constant

Question 21

Malleability of Implicit Bias
What to make of the apparent stability of bias across development?

Answer 21

• Forms early, slow to/doesn’t change?
• Reflects shared environments btw children and adults?
• Need to directly examine whetter developmental differences exist in the capacity to change implicit bias, is it easier to intervene with children to change their biases?
  -> just because the biases are stable across development doesn’t mean it is equally easy to change the implicit bias

Question 22

Malleability of Implicit Bias
What to make of the apparent stability of bias across development?

Answer 22

• Forms early, slow to/doesn’t change?
• Reflects shared environments btw children and adults?
• Need to directly examine whetter developmental differences exist in the capacity to change implicit bias, is it easier to intervene with children to change their biases?
  -> just because the biases are stable across development doesn’t mean it is equally easy to change the implicit bias

Question 23

Where do these biases come from?
- A Class Divided example

Answer 23

Teacher have had conversations with her students about racism, but it did not seem like it had any effect. Created an expertise where she divided the class by eye-colour, saying that one is better allowing to discriminate the other. The kids did not challenge the concept, but them followed it. Emily influenced by a few short exemplar “Billy forgot his glasses and he has blue eyes, Jane remembered hers and she has brown eyes, what does this tell us?”

As adults, they did not forget this experience and carried it with them into adulthood. More rememberable than simply taking, they remember the experience of discrimination. When giving pro mission to assert power over someone else people exploit it. People are eager to use structures that benefit them, without questioning the unfairness of how it effect the outgroup.

Noun-labelling, the blue eyed kids instead of kids with blue eyes.
Stereotype threat, Decline in performance

Question 24

• Rudman (2004) identifies 4 sources for implicit intergroup bias? (All you need know from this article)

Answer 24

• Early experiences, first impressions (not early in life)
• Affective experiences, not all experiences are the same and more may be more emotionally charged -> more impactful in shaping one’s implicit biases
• Culture, the broader exposure
• Cognitive consistency, are implicit associations are not independent but interviewed with other pre-existing believes that we have. Cognitive dissonance, people like things to be in harmony. How much we implicitly like a group have to do with how much we identify with the group and vice versa

Question 25

• German & He-man (1999) discuss another source of implicit intergroup bias?

Answer 25

• Psychological Essentialism (Prof, Susan Gelaman)
  Essentialism is a psychological bias, not a metaphysical claim.
  Fundamentally, it’s about how we reason about an obtect’s identity
  A) what kind of thing it is
  B) shapes how we reason about it

Question 26

3 parts of essentialism?

Answer 26

1. People believe (intuitively) that certain categories are
   REAL & DISCOVERED (not invited/created by humans)
   Ie, that it is ROOTED IN NATURE
2. BELIEF that some unobservable property (essence) causes thing to be the way they are
   The ESSENCE causes the observable similarities shared by members of the category (All dogs differ in appearance, but our brain still think that they share an “essence”) What determines what something is is not the outwards appears but what they are inside.
3. BELIEF that everyday words reflect this real structure of the world.
   For example: dog
   Noun-labels are helping us identify things in the world that has an underlying essence

Question 27

How is essentialism regarding identity linked to stability?

Answer 27

Leads to beliefs about the stability of that identity for individuals and groups
- Membership/identity fixed at birth
- Highly resistant to change (immutable)
- Exterior transformations not relevant (no matter how much we change a skunk to be like a cat we will always still say that it is a skunk)

Question 28

Essentialism, when applied to human groups, is false! Examples?

Answer 28

There is no invisible essence that differentiates
*Greeks from Turks,
*Protestants from Catholics,
*Arabs from Israelis,
*Blacks, Whites, Asians, etc.
*Canadians and Americans

Question 29

Essentialism for humans is false yet we nevertheless tend to view some groups though an essentialist lens (identify fixed at birth, immutable, likelihood of other shared properties) Give one example?

Answer 29

Example race VS occupation
- More likely to stereotype when we believe there is a shared essence, if you hare one essence with a group you are also more likely to share other aspects

Question 29

What causes children to essentialism some social groups?

Answer 29

One proposal (discussed in the reading):
Is children hear social groups marked with a noun label, they will tend to believe that the people in those groups are deeply different kinds of people

Question 30

Cues to essentialism?

Answer 30

• Linguistic cues (e.g., noun labels)
  The importance of noun labels
  Verbal predicate condition:
  Rose is 8 years old. Rose eats a lot of carrots. She eats carrots whenever she can.
  Noun label condition:
  Rose is 8 years old. Rose eats a lot of carrots. She is a carrot eater.

Question 31

Questions about the stability of the key property?

Answer 31

Past behavior
(“Did Rose eat a lot of carrots when she was 4 years old?”)

Future behavior
(“Will Rose eat a lot of carrots when she is grown up?”)

Behavior with no family support
(“Would Rose eat a lot of carrots if she grew up in a family where no one liked carrots?”)

Behavior with family opposition
(“Would Rose stop eating a lot of carrots if her family tried to stop her from eating carrots?”)

Question 32

For adults and children, noun labels (compared to other linguistic expressions) seem to do the following?

Answer 32

• Highlight an important/central identity of the object
• Identity seen as relatively enduring and permanent
• Support more inferences, more likely to rely on steroptyping
• In unique and non overlapping with other categories (A fundamental difference between person A and person B, frequency use of noun labels make us think there is a distinct difference between them, otherwise they wouldn’t be used in this way)

Question 33

What impact does language have on Intergroup Cognition?

Answer 33

• Implications for attitude and stereotype development
• Stability / resistance to change
• Impact people with negative stereotypes badly more adversely
• Might have a hard time believing that someone is a positive stereotype did/are something baldy