Lecture 9: Prejudice

Question 1

What are the three different components that are involved in understanding prejudice?

Answer 1

• Cognition (e.g. beliefs, stereotypes)
• Emotion (e.g. prejudice, hostility, dislike)
• Behaviour (e.g. discrimination, bias)

Question 2

What do the terms stereotype and discrimination refer to?

Answer 2

The terms stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination are thrown around and made synonymous, but they actually refer to different things. A stereotype is just a thought that’s not inherently good or bad, it’s a cognitive representation of a group of people. Prejudice can incorporate both stereotypes and discrimination. Often, it’s about the emotional hostility a person feels. Discrimination is your actual behaviour and interactions with other people.

Question 3

Define:

social categorization

Answer 3

The process of perceiving people as members of a social group rather than as individuals. Groups are mainly based on three main categories: gender, ethnicity, and age.

Question 4

What are the benefits of social categorization?

Answer 4

For one it allows us to go beyond the information given. By seeing someone as female or old, it gives us some information and allows us to make assumptions that are going to be helpful. By knowing more about this person, it’ll allow you to further your own goals. And on the flipside, it allows us to ignore irrelevant information. For example, you can categorize someone as a psychology professor. By doing this, you can make some assumptions about how they could help you, for example where a room in a building is or what psychology courses are being offered next semester. You don’t have to know what your professor’s shoe size is in order to get this information, so categorization allows you to ignore the irrelevant information.

Question 5

What are the negative effects of social categorization?

Answer 5

It allows us to exaggerate within-group similarity, i.e. makes us view all members of the group as being very similar to one another, because we are focused on their shared group characteristics (rather than on those things that make them unique individuals). On the flip side, it also exaggerates between-group differences, i.e. we become more aware of the differences between the members of different groups than of the similarities. In both cases, we overlook the fact that both groups have quite a lot in common.

Question 6

How do we see and treat ingroup members?

Answer 6

We tend to see ingroup members as: similar to ourselves, unique among each other, and likeable. We tend to treat ingroup members:

• With generosity and compassion, since what’s good for the group is good for the self.
• We also tend to exhibit “group-enhancing” biases toward ingroup members, i.e. positive behaviour is global, general, and reflects who the group member really is; while negative behaviour is specific, circumstantial, an isolated occurrence.

Question 7

What is the outgroup homogeneity effect and what are some possible explanations for it?

Answer 7

• The outgroup homogeneity effect is our tendency to see outgroup members as: different from ourselves and similar to each other, as well as less likeable. There’s no single explanation for why the outgroup homogeneity effect occurs.
• One contributing factor is that we probably know fewer outgroup members than ingroup members, so you literally don’t see as much diversity in the outgroup.
  
  • The more people are exposed to the outgroup, the weaker this effect becomes.
• When we meet new people, we tend to focus on things that make us different from them; the biggest thing that’s different between the two groups is the fact that the other person belongs to an outgroup.
• The interactions we have between outgroups are often in very constrained situations.
  
  • For example, U of T students and York students often see each other at sporting events, and this is the only time they see the other group of students is during this time. So you think that the other kids are all jerks because they’re constantly booing your own team and being obnoxious. Of course you’d think this way because you don’t see them in any other context.

Question 8

How do we tend to treat outgroup members?

Answer 8

We also tend to treat outgroup members more negatively than ingroup members—even when the groups are completely arbitrary, have no history, no stereotypes, no defining characteristics at all!

Question 10

What is the distinction between ingroup favouritism and outgroup hostility?

Answer 10

People will not dole our harsher punishments to members of the outgroups, while they will give more rewards to people of the ingroup. Outgroup hostility requires the presence of a threat or conflict, such as during a competition. As well, unequal status (whether real or made up) amplifies discrimination.

Question 11

What is a:

stereotype

Answer 11

A cognitive representation or impression of a social group that people form by associating particular characteristics with the group. This may include many different types of information, and the information may be positive or negative, accurate or inaccurate, etc.

• The word stereotype was actually coined by a journalist because it used to refer to a press that could press the same information onto pieces of paper.
• Walt Whitman took this idea and applied it to social situations. He called them “pictures in the head,” simplified mental images of what groups look like and what they do.
• This information is activated automatically and is actually quite hard for us to control.

Question 12

What are the problems with positive stereotypes?

Answer 12

• They treat everyone in the group the same (i.e. overestimated uniformity) and sets unrealistic expectations (rigid expectations).
• Most of the time, stereotypes of most groups contain a mix of both positive and negative information.

Question 13

What is the:

Stereotype Content Model

Fiske et al. (2002)

Answer 13

Question 14

How accurate are stereotypes?

Answer 14

Some stereotypes accurately describe the direction of differences between two groups, though the differences are often exaggerated. For example, there are probably just as many men who are emotional as women. While women are probably emotional, what stereotypes do is emphasize the notion that way more women are emotional than men. Some stereotypes have no basis in reality whatsoever. So…where do they come from?

Question 15

What are the different places stereotypes can come from?

Answer 15

• Personal experiences—e.g. an illusory correlation, which is a relationship that you think exists but in reality doesn’t (or that you think of as having a much stronger relationship than actually is);
• Social learning (e.g. culture, parents)
• Social roles (e.g. gender roles)
• Media portrayals
• Justifying inequalities
• Etc.

Question 16

How can we commit the FAD when it comes to social roles such as gender?

Answer 16

• Social roles often determine the actions people perform. Recall the fundamental attribution error: what implication does this have? The FAD predicts that we will rely on dispositional attributions when we see someone engaging in a behaviour. Our stereotypes of particular groups often reflect the social roles occupied by those groups.
• Gender roles are one of the biggest stereotypes. In many cultures, men traditionally worked outside the home, while women take care of the house and children. These roles demand different traits.
• Employee roles require people to be assertive, rational, and task-oriented; while homemaker roles require people to be gentle, warm, and interpersonally-oriented.
• Seeing individuals behave in their respective roles, without adjusting for the fact that these are the behaviours the roles require, can lead people to conclude that men are assertive, rational, task-oriented by nature, and women are gentle, warm, and interpersonal by nature.
• But why do we have gender stereotypes in addition to homemaker and breadwinner stereotypes? Because the stereotypes we have about the roles aren’t attached to the roles themselves, but to the social groups who tend to take on these social roles.

Question 17

What is Hoffman and Hurst’s (1990) rationalization hypothesis?

Answer 17

• This hypothesis predicts that stereotypes serve to rationalize the sexual division of labor by attributing different personality characteristics to the sexes. It makes sense to say that women are the ones at home taking care of the kids “because” women are warmer and more caring.
• They performed a study where they came up with two fictional groups that existed in a society. The Orinthians were 80% “child raisers” and 20% “city workers,” while the Ackmians were 80% “city workers” and 20% “child raisers.” The child raisers were described as typically nurturant, affectionate, and gentle; and city city workers described as typically competitive and ambitious. The dependent variable was the participants’ guesses about the creatures’ typical psychological characteristics.
• The researchers found that the traits were attached to social groups, not social roles, i.e. they applied stereotypic traits even to those group members who performed the clashing role (e.g. an employed Ackmian would be viewed as more ambitious than an employed Orinthian).

Question 18

Define:

just world belief

Answer 18

The belief that the world is just and that people get what they deserve. Such beliefs make us feel better about things, allows us to rationalize and justify acts from slavery, to the glass-ceiling, to cutting welfare programs—it lets us off the hook morally.

Question 19

What is:

system justification theory

Answer 19

People desire not only to hold favorable attitudes about themselves (ego-justification) and the groups to which they belong (group-justification), but also to hold positive attitudes about the overarching social structure in which they are entwined and find themselves obligated to (system-justification). People are motivated to justify the status quo, the way things currently work. (For example, using stereotypes to rationalize inequality.) This theory can also explain outgroup favoritism, or why people will defend a social system (the status quo) when they do not benefit from it.

Question 20

Why does exposure to people who violate a certain stereotype not always change our stereotypes?

Answer 20

• There are two big reasons. For one, we engage in subtyping: creating a narrower and more specific social group that allows us to maintain our stereotypes about the broader group. This means that we don’t have to throw out all of the information we already knew.
  
  • For example, you can have stereotypes about women, but then have your subtype of women CEOs who are an exception.
• The other reason is the contrast effect, when the person is so exceptional that they can’t really be considered a member of that group.

Question 21

What is the:

ironic rebound effect

Wegner (1987)

Answer 21

This effect describes how it’s counterproductive to tell ourselves just not to do something (e.g. don’t think about a white bear). Not only is it near impossible to suppress an unwanted thought, but doing so can cause it to become more prominent later on! Your conscious thought may be able to focus on everything around you instead of the thing you’re suppressing, but your subconscious has already been alerted and will be trying to pick up on anything about a white bear. (“Oh, look at this water bottle. Isn’t this a nice water bottle? Good thing it’s not a white bear… Dang it!”)

Question 22

What is:

stereotype threat

Answer 22

The fear of confirming other people’s negative stereotypes of your own group. It can be experienced by anyone in a domain in which one encounters stereotype-based expectations of poor performance.

Some examples:

• Women in math;
• Whites in regard to appearing racist;
• Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds on intellectual tasks;
• Men on social sensitivity (compared to women);
• Whites on natural athletic ability (compared to Blacks);
• Whites in math ability (compared to Asians); etc.

Question 24

Why do we care about stereotype threat?

Answer 24

Because it tends to lead to confirmation of the stereotype (i.e. it impairs performance). In a typical stereotype threat study, the stereotype category is first activated (i.e. primed). For example, people filling out a math sheet have to indicate whether they’re a male or a female, or African American. Then they perform the relevant behaviour, such as math problems. This research consistently shows that women who have their stereotype primed before they perform a task do significantly worse than women who don’t.

Question 25

What are the three reasons Schmader, Johns, and Forbes (2008) proposed for why stereotype threat occurs?

Answer 25

They proposed that performance decrements under stereotype threat result from three interconnected factors, all which affect working memory:

• Physiological stress;
• Performance monitoring, i.e. trying to regulate behaviour;
• Emotional regulation, i.e. trying to control emotions that arise when threatened.
• Each factor can limit the quantity and effective allocation of cognitive resources that are necessary for optimal performance.

Question 26

What are stereotype boost and stereotype lift?

Answer 26

Both can result in performance enhancement (rather than impairment). Stereotype boost occurs as the result of a positive ingroup stereotype (and is essentially the opposite of stereotype threat). It’s being reminded that you belong to a group that’s actually good at something. Stereotype lift occurs when downward comparisons are made with a denigrated outgroup (i.e. it is the result of activating a negative outgroup stereotype). There is less research on these two phenomena in comparison to stereotype threat.

Question 27

What are intergroup relations and conflict?

Answer 27

• intergroup relations: The way in which people in groups perceive, think about, feel about, and act toward people in groups. (e.g. The “blue eyed” and “brown eyed” kids)
• conflict: A perceived incompatibility of goals between two or more parties.

Question 28

How did Meier and Hinsz (2004) demonstrate the aggressiveness of groups using the hot sauce study?

Answer 28

Groups are often more aggressive and more competitive than individuals. In this study, participants were either participating as individuals or as a part of a three-person group. The participants first learned that they were going to receive some hot sauce from the other group, and then they got to decide how much hot sauce to retaliate with. On average, individuals retaliated with 58g (on average) of hot sauce while groups retaliated with 93g (on average) of hot sauce.

Question 29

What are the two main reasons groups fight, and the two theories about how conflict over resources arises?

Answer 29

Groups fight over two main things:

• Material resources (land, money, water, food, etc.)
• Social rewards (power, respect, esteem, etc.)

We have two theories about how conflict over resources arises: realistic conflict theory and relative deprivation theory.

Question 30

What is realistic conflict theory and how does Sherif (1966) demonstrate it with his Robber’s Cave Experiment?

Answer 30

• All of these boys are brought to a camp and get to know each other and form their ingroup. Then, they learn that there’s another group of boys across the lake. Then, the researchers set up a series of conflicts and competitions between the groups. Unsurprisingly, the groups didn’t like each other very much.
• The researchers then asked how they could repair the hostility between the two groups. It wasn’t enough to just take away the competition. What they did instead was force the cooperation and integration of the groups. They set up tasks where both groups could only be rewarded if they had to complete a task together.

Question 31

What are the necessary conditions for intergroup cooperation?

Answer 31

Cooperation should:

• Be in the pursuit of a valued common goal, which eliminates competition for material and social resources.
• Provide repeated opportunities to disconfirm out-group stereotypes.
• Produce successful results (if they fail, the conflicting parties are likely to blame each other).
• Take place between equals, at least for the task at hand.
• Be supported and promoted by social norms.

Question 32

Define:

fraternal relative deprivation

Answer 32

The sense that one’s group is not doing as well as other groups.

Question 33

Are groups always focussed on winning material resources?

Answer 33

No, even if you start out fighting over some specific resource, the social side of things (such as seeking dominance and respect) will win out and outweigh the competition for material resources. In other words, being the “winner” is often more important to groups than objective outcomes. In some extreme cases, groups will even choose to reduce their material rewards if it will maximize their advantage over the other group (Brewer, 1979).

For example:

• Option A: Your group gets $20 and the other gets $15.
• Option B: Your group gets $15 and the other gets $5.
• People will choose Option B under some circumstances, even though Option A obviously leads to a greater gain.

Question 34

What changes in perception will lead to further divides?

Answer 34

• The ingroup can do no wrong;
• The outgroup can do no right;
• And the ingroup is all powerful. People become preoccupied with appearing powerful, tough, etc.
• They’ll start to see the other side as being evil, and our side as being good—really extreme thoughts and behaviours.
• mirror image perception: When each group sees its own behaviour as caused by the actions of the other side.
  
  • “We had no choice because they behaved in this way and we were just responding to their behaviour.”

Question 35

How can we move towards resolving intergroup conflict?

Answer 35

Intergroup contact can reduce prejudice and conflict, but sometimes contact alone is not sufficient. Equal status contact, superordinate goals, and common ingroup identity are all important in changing prejudice and stereotypes.