Prejudice Flashcards
Definition of Prejudice
An attitude, emotion or behaviour towards members of a group which directly or indirectly implies some negativity towards that group.
What kind of process is prejudice?
A group process.
What level is prejudice analysed at?
The level of individual perception, emotion and action.
What studies have shown prejudice?
The rental study, the job study, and the name study.
Why are Allport’s (faulty and inflexible generalisation) and Samson’s (unjustified) definitions wrong? (3)
- To say that an attitude or belief is faulty implies that we have some way of establishing its correctness.
- In including any truth element in the definition stems from the views of the intergroup perception, i.e beauty is in the eye of the beholder, values are held in their implied connotations of value e.g thrifty vs stingy.
- Pre-empts the analyses and functions of prejudiced thinking.
What did Glick’s study of women in society prove?
That even though women were thought of as warm/kind etc it undermined women to define them as subordinate to men.
What are Brown’s comments on his own definition of prejudice? (3)
- Indirect forms of prejudice are hard to specify in advance.
- Prejudice can be taken as synonymous with sexism, racism, homophobia, ageism and the like.
- Prejudice is not to be regarded as just a cognitive or attitudinal phenomenon, it can also engage our emotions as well as finding expression in behaviour.
Why is prejudice a group process? (3)
- It is an orientation towards whole categories of people rather than towards isolated individuals.
- It is most frequently a shared orientation.
- The relationships between these groups play an important role in determining it.
What is the focus of Brown’s analysis?
The individual, i.e the impact that various factors have on the individuals perceptions of, evaluations of and behavioural reactions towards, members of others groups.
What does Brown wish to distinguish between?
Individuals acting as group members and individuals acting as individuals.
What are the main precursors to prejudice? (4)
History, politics, economics, and social structural forces.
A common explanation of prejudice is a _____ personality
Authoritarian.
What is the Freudian explanation of the process of prejudice?
That a child is reared in a strict home, the aggression towards the parents is misplaced onto minority groups. The child develops a rigid “right” and “wrong” view of the world, who is hostile towards outgroup members and anxious towards authority figures.
What was the measure originally used to measure “pre-facist tendencies”?
The F-scale designed by Adorno.
What significance did the F-scale have? (3)
- It had good internal reliability.
- It correlated well with previous measures of intergroup prejudice.
- Interviews attempting to validate it (high and low scores) suggested that high scorers had strict childhoods whereas low scorers had a balanced childhood.
What early experiment conducted by Rokeach tried to examine the association between authoritarianism and mental rigidity?
A mental arithmetic experiment, where participants were taught a certain way then tested with a problem that could either be solved the way they were taught or solved a much simpler way. Rokeach and Adorno found confirmation of a link between egocentrism and high mental rigidity, however Brown concluded that a link between authoritarianism and mental rigidity only existed when the testing situation was important for participants.
What characteristics do more authoritarian people seem to have?
Intolerance of ambiguity, less integrative complexity, increased uncertainty avoidance, greater need for cognitive closure and heightened feelings of fear and threat amongst more conservatively orientated individuals.
What were the 3 main issues of the F-scale?
- They used unrepresentative samples, most of the 2000 respondents came from middle class organisations.
- All items were worded in such a way that agreement with them indicated an authoritarian response.
- In the interviews, the interviewers knew in advance the score of the individual.
What suggests direct socialisation of attitudes rather than an indirect shaping of a prejudiced personality by parental style?
The fact that there is a correlation between the ethnocentrism of children and their mothers, and the mothers attitudes towards authoritarian child rearing practices but no association between the mothers child rearing attitudes and their children’s prejudice levels.
Altemeyer created the RWA scale which balances the direction of it’s wording (corrects the acquiescence response set of the F-scale), what are it’s 3 main measures of the authoritarian character?
- Submission to authority
- Aggression to deviants or outsiders
- Conventionalism (adherence to orthodox moral codes)
What significance does the RWA have? (3)
- High internal reliability
- Good test/retest reliability
- Valid as it correlates with predictively and positively with a wide range of out group prejudice measures.
Altemeyer has evidence for the social learning theory is? (3)
- High RWA scorers tend to learn to be authoritarian in response to social environments.
- RWA scores correlate more strongly with authority tapping situations than their parents.
- RWA scores can change over the lifetime, e.g university decreases them while parenthood increases them.