Prejudice Flashcards
Define prejudice.
A preconcieved negative judgement of a group and its individual members.
Define stereotype.
A belief about the personal attributes of a group of people.
Stereotypes are sometimes: (3)
Overgeneralised, inaccurate and resistant to new information.
Define discrimination.
Unjustified negative behaviour towards a group or its members.
How did Allport define prejudice?
An antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalisation.
Why is an accurate stereotype desirable?
Because it is sensitivity to diversity, and lets people know what to expect and how to get along with people in other cultures.
Prejudice is a negative ___, discrimination is negative ___.
Attitude, behaviour.
Define racism.
An individual’s prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behaviour towards people of an ethnicity or race.
Define sexism.
An individual’s prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behaviour towards people of a given gender.
Give some examples of modern prejudice.
Viewing English brand names as more purchasable than Chinese brand names, Aboriginal people are seen as less approachable, and Anglo-Saxon names are more likely to receive job offers.
What do pictures of outgroups that elicit the most disapproval (homeless people, drug addicts) do to the brain?
Activate areas associated with disgust and avoidance.
Which brain areas are associated with automatic prejudice?
The amygdala or other areas associated with fear.
Norms are ___, stereotypes are ___.
Prescriptive, descriptive.
Which is stronger, ethnic stereotypes or gender stereotypes.
Gender stereotypes.
Why do some evolutionary psychologists believe gender stereotypes reflect an innate and stable reality?
The persistence and omnipresence of them.
Do most people (of both sexes) like women more or men more?
Women.
Explain Eagly’s women-are-wonderful effect.
Women are perceived as more understanding, kind and helpful, a favourable stereotype which results in a favourable attitude.
Give an example of benevolent sexism.
Women are much more supportive than men.
Give an example of hostile sexism.
Women are controlling in marriages.
People who endorse benevolent sexism towards women endorse ____ sexism towards men.
Benevolent.
What does an unbalanced sex ratio where there is a male excess predict?
More traditional gender roles and higher violence rates.
What does unequal status breed?
Prejudice.
We ___ the competence of those high in status and ___ those who agreeably accept a lower status.
Respect, like.
What is a social dominance orientation?
A motivation to have your group dominate other social groups.
Define ethnocentric.
Believing in the superiority of your own ethnic and cultural group and having a corresponding disdain for all other groups.
What is an authoritarian personality?
A personality that is disposed to favour obedience to authority and intolerance of outgroups and those lower in status.
What is authoritarianism related to?
Concern with security and control.
What is social dominance related to?
Your group status.
Give two findings that show that religion supports injustice.
Church members display more racial prejudice and those professing traditional or fundamentalist Christian beliefs express more prejudice that more progressive people.
What did Allport have to say about religion.
The role of religion is paradoxical, it makes prejudice and it unmakes prejudice.
Explain realistic group conflict theory.
Prejudice arises from competition between groups for scarce resources.
Explain Gause’s law.
Maximum competition will exist between species with identical needs.
Define social identity.
The ‘we’ aspect of our self-concept that comes from group memberships.
Who proposed social identity theory?
Tajfel.
Give Tafjel’s three observations.
We categorise, we identify, and we compare.
Define ingroup.
A group of people who share a sense of belonging, or a feeling of common identity.
Define outgroup.
A group that people perceive as distinctively different from or apart from their ingroup.
Define ingroup bias.
The tendency to favour your group.
What occurs when people’s personal and social identity become fused?
They are more willing to fight and die for their group.
What does the ingroup bias support and what does it feed.
A positive self-concept and favouritism.
When are we most prone to ingroup bias?
When the ingroup is small and lower in status compared to the outgroup.
Define infrahumanisation.
Denying human attributes to outgroups.
Define terror management.
People’s self-protective emotional and cognitive responses when confronted with reminders of their mortality.
When do people become more accepting of outgroups?
When the need to belong is met.
Stereotyped beliefs and attitudes exist not only because of social conditioning and because they enable people to displace hostilities, but also as:
By-products of normal thinking processes.
Define categorisation.
Organising the world by clustering objects into groups.
When do we find it especially easy to rely on stereotypes? (5)
When we are pressed for time, preoccupied, tired, emotionally aroused, or too young to appreciate diversity.
What is the evidence that prejudice requires racial categorisation?
Prejudiced people take longer to classify people of an ambiguous race.
Define the outgroup homogeneity effect.
Perception of outgroup members as more similar to one another than ingroup members.
What is the own-race bias?
The tendency for people to more accurately recognise faces of their own race.
Give two other names for the own-race bias.
The cross-race effect or the other-race effect.
Define stigma consciousness.
A person’s expectation of being victimised by prejudice or discrimination.
How can perceptions of prejudice be beneficial? (2)
They can buffer self-esteem and enhance feelings of social identity.
What is the group-serving bias?
Explaining away outgroup members’ positive behaviours and attributing negative behaviours to their dispositions.
What is Maass’ linguistic intergroup bias?
Positive behaviours by another ingroup member are often described as general dispositions, but when an outgroup member exhibits the same behaviour it is seen as an isolated act.
When does blaming occur?
When people attribute an outgroup’s failures to the members’ flawed dispositions.
What is the just-world phenomenon?
The tendency of people to believe that the world is just and that people therefore get what they deserve and deserve what they got.
Prejudgments are:
Self-perpetuating.
Prejudgments guide: (2)
Attention and memories.
When are misinterpretations likely?
When people expect an unpleasant encounter with you.
Define subtyping.
Accommodating individuals who deviate from your stereotype by thinking of them as exceptions to the rule.
Define subgrouping.
Accomodating individuals who deviate from your stereotype by forming a new stereotype about this subset of the group.
Define stereotype threat.
A disruptive concern, when facing a negative stereotype, that you will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype.
How does stereotype threat undermine performance? (3)
Stress, self-monitoring and suppressing unwanted thoughts and emotions.
