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.
Flaws of the RWA? (2)
- Questions are double or treble barrelled (confusing).
2. Sub scales aren’t distinguished.
Rokeach devised what measures? (2)
- Opinionation- extreme social attitude statements (worded in a left wing and right wing way), measures intolerance.
- Dogmatism- aimed to tap general authoritarianism.
What is the Social Dominance theory?
All forms of prejudice and discrimination are simply manifestations of a universal human tendency to form group-based structures of social dominance. The members of some groups have the means and the desire to subjugate members of others. This theory also proposes that members of socially subordinate groups very often acquiesce to, or even actively collaborate in, their own oppression.
Sidenias and Pratto (social dominance theory) believe which 2 groups are significant everywhere?
- Age
2. Gender
What is a measure of the Social Dominance Theory?
The Social Dominance Orientation (SDO)
What does SDO derive from?
Ideographic life experiences and situational factors.
What unique point do Sidenias and Pratto have?
That a high SDO score is not a pathology.
What are the 4 limitations to explaining the variation and occurrence of prejudice by references to individual differences in personality?
- It underestimates the power and importance of the immediate social situation in shaping peoples attitudes.
- It is an extension of the argument to a broader cultural or societal level.
- It’s inability to explain the uniformity of prejudiced attitudes across whole groups of people.
- The historical specificity of prejudice.
When would personality factors be important?
At the extremes i.e extremely tolerable and the bigot.
Why do we categorise people?
To be more efficient at judging people.
What was the hypothesised effect of categorisation?
- Members of different groups will be seen as more different from each other than they really are. This was proved.
- Members of the same group will be seen as more similar than they really are. However this was not proved.
What is intergroup discrimination?
When people begin to favour their group over others.
What is the minimal group paradigm?
Just the knowledge of being placed in one group instead of another e.g Klee and Kandinsky
What is the maximising difference strategy?
When you chose what is best for your group even if you yourself gets less.
What is the positive/negative asymmetry effect?
When people put more emphasis on a persons bad behaviours rather than their good ones.
What did Gluckman notice about cross cutting structures?
That it may alleviate internal tensions but heighten aggression towards those with no kinship ties at all.
What is the additive pattern?
The 2 dimensions of a category come together to form the most favourable evaluations of double ingroupers, least favourable of double outgroupers, and intermediate evaluations of those in the overlapping cases.
What is a category conjunction effect?
Where the double ingroup serves as a baseline and any categorical deviation from that causes a decrease in liking.
What are the effects of having many overlapping groups?
Initially they found that the simultaneous presence of several category dimensions tended to reduce the amount of bias shown towards someone who was an outgroup member on at least one dimension. There was no greater bias if that person was an outgrouper on all dimensions than if he or she was an outgrouper on one dimension but an ingrouper on the remainder.
What is perceived intergroup homogeneity/ outgroup homogeneity effect?
Bias towards seeing outgroups as the same but ingroups as different.
Who displays ingroup homogeneity the most?
Minority groups, i.e group identity is more important for minority group members and they will therefore change their attitudes to be in line with the group.
What main insights were given into categorisation by Bruner? (2)
- Fit- those which best fit the situation the person is in
2. Those which are most accessible
What are some of the factors that Campbell said defined people in groups (entitativity)? (3)
- Common fate
- Similarity
- Proximity
What is the meta contrast ratio?
Categorisation depending on the context someone is in, i.e switching from “teacher” to “english”.
Is being in a minority a reliable form of distinctiveness?
No
What is priming?
An event making a category more readily available to you.
What is the ingroup over exclusion effect?
When it is easier to misclassify a real ingrouper as a member of an outgroup rather than run the risk of letting in a member of the outgroup.
What is belief incongruence?
A perception that the people concerned hold a belief systems incompatible with our own.
Sales(1973) has argued, that in times of societal threat we might expect people to choose to read more:
Astrological books
Without categorisation:
Prejudice wouldn’t exist
One criticism of belief congruence theory is that the race-belief paradigm:
Does not present a proper intergroup situation to participants
Reichers (2004, p. 42) concern with theories that posit the inevitability on unequal status relations is not that they are true:
But that they might become so
Linville and colleagues (1989) found that over the period of a semester members of a university course rated inter-group members as being increasingly
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