Prejudice and Discrimination Flashcards
Attitudes and behavior - Three-component attitude model
- Cognitive - Beliefs about the object
- Affective - Strong feelings about the object and its characteristics
- Conative - Intentions to behave in a certain way
Targets of P&D - Sexism
Men (competent, independent) v. women (warm and expressive) - The rest is common knowledge
Glass ceiling - Invisible barrier which prevents women (or minorities) from attaining top leadership positions
Glass cliff - Tendency for women rather than men to be appointed to precarious leadership positions associated with a high probability of failure/criticism
Face-ism - In the media, women are usually portrayed showing their full body, where men are portrayed showing their face
Targets of P&D - Racism
Focus on new racism:
- People are confused between deep-seated emotional antipathy towards racial outgrips and our modern egalitarian values
- Where racism is less present in social relations (going to the same school), it is much more present in terms of social distance (getting married)
Measuring racism is difficult because we know it’s wrong, we try to correct it, yet we try through:
- Automaticity (see the process of categorization)
- Observation (larger shocks to black than white participants)
- Implicit association test (IAT)
Other targets
Ageism - They are relatively worthless and powerless members of the community and as such they are treated poorly and diminished
Homosexuals - The more traditional, the more prejudiced
Physical or mental handicap - Failure to meet special requirements, patronizing attitudes, speech and behavior, overlooking/emphasising the illness
Forms of discrimination
- Reluctance to help
- Tokenism - Publicly making small concessions to deflect later accusation of P&D (can have negative consequences, ‘Have I been chosen because I’m black? Or because I deserve it?’
- Reverse discrimination
Social stigma
Stigmatised people possess (or are believed to possess) some attribute that conveys a social identity which is devalued a particular context:
- Uncontrollable! But people feel otherwise so they try to do so and fail and feel sad
- There is an advantage to stigma in social comparison
- Stigma also serves a system justification function, as a justification of the status quo
- It helps us avoid poor social exchange partners which may threaten our access to resources
Other effects
- Low self-esteem
- Reverse discrimination and tokenism can lead people to question their worth or feel a sense of injustice and deprivation
- Stereotype threat - Stigmatized individuals are worried that through their behavior they may convey certain stereotypes - This increases anxiety and impair task performance
- Failure - Because you are disadvantaged since you don’t have access to the same resources
- Attributional ambiguity - Failure to take credit for one’s achievement
- Self-fulfilling prophecy
- Dehumanisation, violence and genocide
P&D - Why?
- Because of an inherent fear of the unfamiliar and unusual
- Frustration-aggression
- Authoritarian personality
- Dogmatism and closed-mindedness
- Right wing authoritarianism
- Social dominance theory
- Belief congruence
Why? Because frustration-aggression
All frustration leads to aggression, and aggression comes from frustration:
- When the agent of frustration can not be turned against
- Displacement to another target (usually a scapegoat)
- Increased by the presence of situational cues
- There is no objective frustration, only subjective
- Frustration is not always the cause
- Frustration can explain crowd behavior - It can be transmitted
Why? Because authoritarian personality
A syndrome of personality characteristics originating in childhood which predisposes people to be prejudiced:
- If the child has been punished more
- Creates ethnocentrism
- Actually, culture and interracial contact is a better explanation
Why? Dogmatism
Cognitive style which is rigid and intolerant and predisposes people to be prejudiced
Why? Social dominance theory
Prejudice is attributed to an individual’s acceptance of an ideology which legitimizes in-group serving hierarchy and dominance
Why? Belief congruence theory
To explain negative behavior, we turn to stereotypes, because it is incongruent with our expectations
