Prejudice Flashcards
Prejudice
hostile or negative attitude toward people in a distinguishable group based solely on their membership in that group
Components of prejudice
- Cognitive - stereotypes
- Affective - emotions
- Behaviour - discrimination
How do stereotypes work?
- Rely on perceptions of what people with similar characteristics have been like in the past to help us determine how to react to someone else with the same ones
- Thinking about a group → concepts associated with that group becomes more accessible
- Stereotype-consistent information is given more attention and remembered more easily
Positive stereotypes
Harmful or not?
- For person holding stereotype → more maladaptive to mistakenly view someone positively than to mistakenly view them negatively
- For target of stereotype → positive stereotypes mean that you are still being interpreted as a category instead of an individual and possibly mistreated as a result
Stereotype
generalisation about a group of people in which certain traits are assigned to virtually all member of the group, regardless of actual variation among members
Why do we use stereotypes?
Maximise our cognitive time and energy by constructing nuanced, accurate attitudes about some topics while relying on simple, error-prone beliefs about others
Affective Component: Emotions
- Emotional component of prejudice may persist even when a person knows consciously that the prejudice is wrong
- Group stereotypes can be classed along two dimensions: warmth and competence
Discrimination
unjustified negative or harmful action toward a member of a group solely because of his or her membership in that group
Discrimination is activated when:
- Need to make quick decisions under conditions of extreme stress and have little time to stop and analyse
- Person is angered or insulted
People suppress true feelings to:
- Avoid being labeled as racist, sexist, or homophobic by others
- Genuine desire to change and be non-prejudiced
Ways of Identifying Suppressed Prejudices
- Send identical résumés to potential employers and vary only the group membership
- Bogus pipeline — participants hooked to a machine and told that it is a lie detector but the hardware actually did nothing → more racial prejudice expressed when bogus pipeline was used
Ways of Identifying Implicit Prejudices
Does it actually work?
Implicit association test (IAT): test that measures the speed with which people can pair a target face with positive or negative stimuli reflecting unconscious (implicit) prejudices
- May or may not reflect prejudices → could simple capture a stereotype
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
expectation of one’s own or another person’s behaviour that comes true because of the tendency of the person holding it to act in ways that bring it about
Social Identity Threat
threat elicited when people perceive that others are evaluating them as a member of their group instead of as an individual
What are effects of social identity threat?
- Reduces working memory capacity → do not have as many cognitive resources left to enable you to perform at your best
- Less self control in other areas — ate more unhealthy foods and behaved more aggressively
- Feeling more burnout and disengaged
Effects of Prejudice on the Victim
- Self-fulfilling prophecy
- Social identity threat
What is the trigger of social identity threat?
- One trigger of social identity threat is the salience of social identity
- Asian American women do worse on math tests when they are reminded of their gender than when they are reminded of their cultural identity
How to reverse social identity threat?
- Draw on identity that has counter stereotype
- Self-affirmation — reminding yourself realistically of your good qualities or experiences that made you feel successful or proud
Causes of Prejudice
- Pressures to Conform: Normative Rules
- Social Identity Theory: Us versus Them
- Realistic Conflict Theory
Normative conformity
tendency to go along with the group in order to fulfil the group’s expectations and gain acceptance
Institutional discrimination
practices that discriminate, legally or illegally, against a minority group by virtue of its ethnicity, gender, culture, age, sexual orientation, or other target of societal or company prejudice
Social identity
part of a person’s self-concept that is based on his or her identification with any social affiliation
Out-group homogeneity
perception that individuals in the out-group are more similar to each other (homogenous) than they really are, as well as more similar than members of the in-group are
Ethnocentrism
belief that one’s own ethnic group, nation, or religion is superior to all others
In-group bias
tendency to favour members of one’s own group and give them special preference over people who belong to other groups; the group can be temporary, trivial, or significant
Why do people blame the victim?
- Desire to see the world as a fair place
- To relieve oneself from discomfort experienced when suppressing prejudice, people tend to look for information to justify their prejudice
Realistic conflict theory
idea that limited resources lead to conflict between groups and result in increased prejudice and discrimination
How to reduce prejudice?
- Contact hypothesis
- Jigsaw classroom
Contact hypothesis
social interactions between social groups would reduce prejudice
Issues with contact hypothesis:
- Requires each person to directly experience intergroup contact in order to reduce prejudice
- Intergroup interactions (social interactions between members of different groups) tend to be characterised by mistrust and anxiety
- Contact can make intergroup relations more hostile and even increase prejudice
Contact hypothesis will only work when:
- Both groups are of equal status
- Both share a common goal that generates awareness of shared interests and common humanity
- Contact involves intergroup cooperation
- Contact is supported by law or local customs (social norms)
Interdependence
situation that exists when two or more groups need to depend on one another to accomplish a goal that is important to each of them
Jigsaw classroom
classroom setting designed to reduce prejudice and raise the esteem of children b y placing them in small, multiethnic group and making each child dependent on the other children in the group to learn the course material
Jigsaw works because:
- Process of participating in a cooperative group breaks down in-group versus out-group perceptions and allows the individual to develop the cognitive category of “oneness”
- Cooperative strategy places people in “favour-doing” situation → people who act in a way that benefits others subsequently come to feel more favorable toward the people they helped
- Encourages development of empathy
How does Jigsaw classroom encourage development of empathy?
- Students in control → thought that letter carrier would know the boy was sad because gift reminded him of his father leaving
- Students in Jigsaw classroom → developed ability to take perspective of letter carrier (that he would be confused at seeing the boy cry over receiving a nice present because he hadn’t witnessed the farewell scene at the airport)
- Empathy will make it almost impossible to feel prejudice against that person, to bully that person, to humiliate that person
How to ensure intergroup contact?
- Utilise extended contact effect: simply knowing an in-group member has out-group friends is sufficient to reduce prejudice
- Utilise mass media
Two types of mass media contact
- Parasocial contact — getting emotionally connected to and invested in certain characters or celebrities from other social groups
- Vicarious contact — vicariously witnessing intergroup contact occur through vignettes in news and entertainment media
Illusory correlation
tendency to see relationships or correlations between events that are actually unrelated
When does illusory correlation happen?
- when events or people are distinctive or conspicuous
- minority and unusual event
Confirmation bias
Pay more attention, rehearse, and memorise information that reinforce our beliefs
Subtyping
when confronted with contradictions to one’s stereotype, mentally create a subcategory to accommodate the exception without changing the overall stereotype
How do stereotypes form?
- Confirmation bias
- Illusory correlation
- Subtyping
- Self-fulfilling prophecy
