Prejudice And Discrimination Flashcards
Stereotype quotes
- “…..widely shared generalisations about members of a social group….” (Hilton and Von Hippel, 1996).
- “…stereotypes function to organise and facilitate the processing of information about members of different social and/or ethnic groups” (Amodio and Devine, 2005)
Stereotypes
- Underlying cognitive structures (schemas) that shape our judgments and perceptions
- Organised sets of information, characteristics, first impressions and idiosyncratic personal constructs
- Overall impressions of other people often dominated by stereotypes
- Impressions often dominated by key central characteristics (impression formation – central traits)
Impression formation
- Certain information more important in forming an impression
- Asch’s (1946) configural model – Gestalt based
- Central and peripheral traits (Asch, 1946; Kelley, 1950).
- First vs. more recent impressions count
- Accounting for the primacy - recency effect (Asch, 1946; Luchins, 1957).
- Earlier information is the ‘real’ person – most typical
- Attention greatest when making initial impressions (Anderson, 1975)
- Early information affects ‘meaning’ of later information (Asch, 1946)
Asch 1946
Warm/Cold and Polite/Blunt as central traits
Stereotype formation
- Asch’s (1946) model of unified impression formation
- Central and Peripheral traits
- Algebraic model: average information received
- Configural model: certain elements dominate and can influence interpretation of others
- cognitive dissonance - reappraise discrepant elements
- Drive for unified and organised impression shapes mental processing
Impression formation
- Haire and Grune (1950) – Describe a ‘working man’ from stereotype consistent information
- Difficult to integrate one piece of inconsistent information – intelligence
- Information ignored, distorted, participants took a long time or promoted him to supervisor
Stereotyping function
•Cognitive
•Save energy
- Simplifies how we think about social world
•Make predictions
-Use category to make dispositional inferences about others
•Motivational - maintain a positive self-esteem
- for social identity & self -concept
- through comparison with less competent others
Stereotyping process
- Assign individual to a group - categorise
- Based on salient and/or accessible characteristic e.g. gender, race, age
- Activate belief that all members of this group behave in same way
- Infer that individual member must posses stereotypical characteristics of the category
- Respond to individual on this basis
Impression formation
•Illusory correlation – as perception (Hamilton and Gifford, 1976)
•A relationship when none exists or exaggeration of relationship
•Associative meaning – based on schemas
•Minority groups and negative attributes
•Paired distinctiveness
•Minority groups (less of them) and negative events (occur less)
BUT
•Only with memory based judgements as memory required?
•Perhaps not illusory – perhaps rational and functionally adaptive to favour ingroup (Oakes, Haslam & Turner, 1994)
Stereotype features
- People use these readily to categorise people, particularly when social tensions and conflict exist
- These are acquired at an early age
- Change is slow and generally in response to wider social change
- Stereotypes are not necessarily inaccurate or wrong and help to make sense of particular intergroup associations
Princeton Trilogy
- Katz and Braly (1933) – assign traits to members of ethnic and national groups
- Adjective checklist 84 traits, e.g., lazy,
- High consensus in stereotype attribution
- Even if groups generally unfamiliar
- Favourable evaluation of own group (consistent with Ethnocentrism and Social Identity Theory)
Princeton Trilogy
1.Gilbert (1951)
2.Karlins, Coffman & Walters (1969)
– Same procedure and same set of adjectives
•Participants were reluctant to participate
•Stereotypes communicated much less negative
-> Stereotypes have faded over the years?
BUT
oAmbiguity of the instructions given
oNo assessment of prejudice
oAdjective list outdated
Stereotype content
African Americans
Source: Dovidio et al 1996
African Americans
Stereotype content
- Further studies e.g., Madon et al. (2001): replicated Princeton Trilogy
- Stereotypes have changed in content over time
- Increase in consensus
- Become more favourable
- Due to?
- Structural and societal changes
- Increased intergroup contact
- Fiske et al (2002): stereotype content model identifies universal principles regarding aspects of content
- Primary dimensions of warmth and competence underlie emotional and behavioural responses
- Perceived Status -> Competence
- Competition -> Warmth
- Different combinations produce different emotional and behavioural responses
Stereotype content model
Fiske et al 2002
Warmth and competence
Implicit association test
- Project Implicit (Nosek et al., 2007)
- 68% participants implicit preference for white race
- Generally stronger effect sizes than self report measures
- Controversial – as people often find racism!
Implicit association test
- Results driven by either of two categories
- Own race preference? Or more?
- European Amer pref also found in Asians, Hispanics and Mixed race ps
- African Amer ps do not demonstrate implicit pref for own race
- Personal attitude or cultural knowledge? (Uhlmann, Poehlman and Nosek, in press)
- Debate continues – primarily personal
- Both – attitudes shaped and influenced by culture
