Lecture 13: Stereotypes & Diversity Flashcards
explain negative self-evaluations in the context of athlete stereotypes
when women were shown sexualized photos of female athletes, they felt jealous and made negative self-evaluations about their own bodies, compared to when they were shown photos of female athletes performing, which made them feel inspired and see the women as role models
–> men’s perceptions of the women were also influenced by which photos they were shown
explain self-fulfilling prophecy
= people’s tendency to seek, interpret, and create information that verifies their own beliefs
explain the Model of Self-fulfilling Prophecy and how it can influence how it might create differences in (for example) athleticism and aggressiveness in girls vs boys
you have expectations about a person –> you behave toward that person in line with your expectations –> the target person responds in line with your behavior towards them –> you see the target person’s behavior as confirming your initial expectations
A study showed that mothers of girls would intervene much more when their daughter is doing something slightly risky compared to when it was a boy. Their beleif about the girls’ ability to safely engage in risky behavior may have an influence on the behavior and the the girls’ beliefs about their abilities. It’s been shown that children as young as 6 years old (boys and girls) already believe that girls are at greater risk for injury than boys, and beliefs like this may obviously have an influence on athleticism and potentially aggressiveness.
explain stereotype threat
= people can experience an apprehension that they may behave in a manner that confirms existing cultural stereotypes and that this apprehension interferes with their ability to perform well
–> when you (subtly) remind people of gender or race differences, this influences their performance on simple tasks compared to the control group of people that were just told they are doing a task
explain studies done on stereotype threat and the “dumb jock” stereotype
it was shown that when you remind (prime; by asking them about their athlete status) student athletes about their athlete status, they performed worse on tests than athletes in the control group who were not primed with their athlete status
explain how the stereotype threat effect works
Some research suggests that this fear of confirming a negative stereotype creates negative expectations about how they would perform on a particular task, which in turn increases arousal and distraction and reduces working memory.
This fear of confirming a negative stereotype about one’s group can lead people to withdraw effort, which in turn leads to underperformance.
provide 4 strategies for reducing prejudice and discrimination in sport settings
- Presence of role models; Examples of counterstereotypes, or people who defy prevailing stereotypes help broaden people’s views about how particular traits may go together
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Equal status contact (between members of different groups); Getting to spend time with/getting to know someone reduces people’s tendency to rely on stereotypes about that person and people who have contact with individuals from different backgrounds tend to show lower levels of prejudice
–> One explanation is that this type of contact helps people understand and empathize with what another person is going through, which allows you to easier overcome prejudice - Pursuit of common goals; uniting team members around the pursuit of a common goal, so that the focus is on that instead of on differences between group members
- Sanction by authority; people in positions of formal or informal authority on teams and in athletic organizations clearly and unequivocally demonstrating that they are opposed to all forms of prejudice and discrimination
explain the study on “Gaming like a girl”, what was done, what the results were and what they concluded
They showed participants video clips of a game where a bread does some tasks, and they had a condition where there was a female voice over, a male voice over and a neutral voice over. They wanted to test whether people would consider the female voice as less competent and making more errors compared to the male/neutral voice condition. They also specified between a novice level and an expert level.
Results:
- Female clips were rated as less competent than male clips
- This difference was stronger in the expert condition
- No significant effects of gender (male vs. female) perceived number of errors and warmth
explain the study on “Throwing like a girl”, what was done, what the results were and what they concluded
see lecture first
explain the difference between stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination
Stereotypes = things people generally tend to think, can be both positive and negative
Prejudice = Hostile or negative feelings about people based on their membership in a certain group
–> always negative
Discrimination = Behavior directed against persons solely because of their membership in a particular group
–> behavioral consequence of prejudice
explain the 2 primary dimensions of the Stereotype Content Model
- ** Competence**; competent, capable, confident, efficient, intelligent, skillful
–> whether you evaluate someone as (not) able to harm you, could they harm me? -
Warmth; warm, friendly, well-intentioned, trustworthy, good-natured, sincere
–> whether you evaluate someone to be likely to harm you, would they harm me?
name the emotional and behavioral outcomes related to the stereotype perceptions as described in the BIAS map
Emotional outcomes:
- pity (high warmth, low competence)
- envy (low warmth, high competence)
- admiration (high warmth, high competence)
- contempt (low warmth, low competence)
Behavioral outcomes:
- active harm (low warmth, middle competence)
- passive harm (middle warmth, low competence)
- active facilitation (high warmth, middle competence)
- passive facilitation (middle warmth, high competence)
what are 3 kinds of cognitive biases
- Confirmation bias: Interpretation of the environment in line with the own beliefs
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Contrast effect: Perceiving stimuli that differ from expectations as being even more different than they really are
–> when we have a certain belief about a group and then we meet someone who is so different from out belief that we just regard them as an exception -
Fundamental attribution error: Internal versus external attributions
–> we tend to attribute our own successes to internal factors (skills, being smart, etc) and our own failures to external factors (the exam being too hard, etc), but we do the opposite when it comes to others
what are 3 consequences of stereotypes
- Negative self-evaluations
- Self-fulfilling prophecy; Tendency to seek, interpret, and create information that verifies one’ own beliefs
- Stereotype threat
explain the study done on stereotype threat that was described in the lecture
Experiment: 2 (gender) x 2 (threat versus no-threat) Design = two tasks across two sports contexts (basketball & tennis);
* Difficult concentration task
* Speed task
In one condition the participants were made aware of the fact that there is a difference in performance across genders, and in the other condition they were not
Results:
Female athletes
performed significantly
worse in the threat
condition only, BUT only in the more difficult task