Predjudice Flashcards
Define:
-Prejudice
-Stereotypes
-Discrimination
Prejudice:
Unfavourable attitudes or bias toward a group of people.
Stereotypes:
Oversimplified images or ideas of a group of people
Discrimination:
Unjust behaviour or harmful treatment of a group and it’s members due to stereotypes and prejudice
Forms of discrimination:
-Reluctance to help
-Reverse discrimination
-Tokenism
Reluctance to help:
Passively or actively failing to help other groups to improve their position in society.
Reverse discrimination:
Publicly favouring a minority group in order to avoid accusations of prejudice or discrimination (e.g., affirmative action)
Tokenism:
Publicly making small or trivial concessions to a minority group in order to deflect accusations of prejudice or discrimination (e.g. ‘pride’ logos)
Why may Prejudice and discrimination be difficult to detect?
people may not be aware of their own prejudice
people may censor themselves to provide a socially ‘correct’ written or verbal response
prejudice may also be hidden, indirect, or subtle
What groups are often the targets of prejudice?
Easily categorized because the difference is: Vivid, Widespread, Socially functional, and the target groups themselves occupy low power positions on some attribute in society.
The target is frequently groups based on race, ethnicity, sex, age, sexual orientation and physical and mental health
What is sexism
Sexism = Sexism is prejudice and discrimination against people based on gender
Underlying sexism is widely held beliefs of stereotypes that men should/are generally competent and independent and women warm and expressive.
Unfortunately these stereotypes feed into beliefs about the types of roles or jobs people should do
Define Racism:
What are it’s different forms?
Racism is a prejudged attitude towards someone of a particular race or ethnicity.
-Explicit/old fashioned and modern.
-Explicit and blatant racism (derogatory stereotypes, name calling or abuse, persecution, assault and discrimination) is illegal and thus socially censured, it can now be more difficult to find.
Modern racism is where people experience a conflict between deep-seated aversion towards racial outgroups VERSUS modern values where we believe we should act in a non-prejudiced manner
What is modern racism?
How is it detected?
A type of cognitive dissonance resolution process. The resolution is achieved by avoidance and denial of racism. Denial happens by keeping separate lives, avoidance of the topic of race, denial of being prejudiced, denial of racial disadvantage and thus opposition to affirmative action or other measures to address racial disadvantage.
Unobtrusive measures are needed. These include physiological indices, behavioural measures, and the implicit association test (IAT). An IAT measures subconscious associations between beliefs, evaluations, and stereotypes.
principle underlying this procedure for detecting prejudice is automaticity. We use automatic thinking because it is easy, it requires limited effort, and is efficient.
What is stigma?
What influences the amount of stigma a particular disease may expereince?
Prejudice and stigma are closely linked in that they are both feelings towards people based on their group membership.
While prejudice tends to be associated with race or ethnicity, stigma is mostly associated with mental illness, substance use, physical illnesses (e.g. HIV/AIDS) or other disabilities.
Influenced by
* 1. Visibility/concealability (the degree to which group membership can be hidden)
- Controllability (how controllable people believe group membership to be)
What are the consequences of stigma?
Stereotype threat…
Self fufilling prophecy…
- Decreased self-worth, self-esteem & wellbeing
Stereotype threat
- Stigmatized groups are aware of the negative stereotypes others/society has of them causing people to fear that they will reinforce these stereotype. (black students)
Self-fulfilling prophecy:
Expectation or assumption about a person that influences interactions with that person and eventually leads to a change in line with those expectations (students grades)
WHY ARE PEOPLE PREDJUCED?
Fear of the unfamiliar or unusual
Prior learning from the social environment
Transmission of parental prejudice through modelling, operant conditioning or classical conditioning
Individual differences like an authoritarian personality.
Frustration-aggression hypothesis – turning frustration towards an ‘easy target’ or scapegoat.
Belief congruence.
An outcome of social categorization
How does In group and out of group theory influence prejudice?
Social categorization is the process through which we group individuals based upon social information (age, gender, ethnicity)
This categorization is the basis of in-group and out- group formation
People show favoritism towards in-group members.
What are some studies that have challenged prejudice? How have they done this?
CHALLENGING PREDJUDICE
Prompted by the death of Martin Luther King (1968), teacher Jane Elliot did an experiment with 3rd grade students, dividing the class into two groups based only on eye color.
Blue-eyed students were informed that they were genetically inferior to the brown-eyed students.
Elliott instructed that blue-eyed kids could not play on the playground and they wouldn’t be allowed second helpings for lunch.
Blue-eyed children were also told not to do their homework because even if they answered all the questions, they’d probably forget to bring the assignment back to class.
The idea was to show students what it feels like to be prejudiced against even on something as simple as eye color.
