Prejudice and discrimination Flashcards
What is the definition of prejudice?
Preconceived judgement/opinion, formed without adequately considering relevant evidence. Especially unfavourable judgements based on group membership
Allport - “Being down on what you are not up on”
What is the definition of discrimination?
Prejudiced/unfair treatment of a person/group e.g. race or sex discrimination
How is discrimination dealt with in places like the UK?
We have protected characteristics in the UK (sex, gender reassignment, race, age, religion, pregnancy, disability) and any discrimination against individuals in these categories is illegal
What is the difference between racism and racialism?
Racialism is prejudicial stereotyping on the basis of race
Racism is the belief that one race is superior over another
How has racial prejudice changed in the UK/US?
Overt racial prejudice was waning slowly until 2001 i.e. fewer people were aware of/willing to express their prejudice
Around cultural events such as 9/11 there have been slight increases, but the overall trend is downwards
Crude racial stereotypes of black people are decaying far more rapidly
What did Hetey & Eberhardt (2014) mean when they described racism as a “vicious cycle”?
For example, when a penal institution is perceived to have a higher rate of black inmates, people would use this as an argument to increase their support for more punitive policies i.e. punishing black people more for crimes
What is meant by ethnicity and ethnocentrism?
Ethnicity - Membership of a community with shared historical roots and a common language, religion and culture; not necessarily race, race is just one type of ethnicity
Ethnocentrism - Prejudice against any ethnic group other than one’s own
What is sexism?
Prejudice on the basis of gender stereotypes (which may be unconscious, and thus changing these attitudes can be very difficult) - such stereotypes involve assuming that particular groups have particular characteristics e.g. “all professors are male”
What are 2 other major types of prejudice?
Ageism and homophobia
What is meant by “Modern Racism”?
Covert, or symbolic opposition to policies or practices designed to help a specific racial group, as a result of hidden prejudice. It is essentially a kind of cognitive dissonance resolution process i.e. have racist beliefs but society’s moral code and pressure to behave in a non-prejudiced way creates dissonance –> add in a cognition that they are essentially denying the existence of racism
What is the Modern Racism scale?
Designed by McConahay (1981) to investigate modern racism
Items on the scale include “Discrimination against blacks is no longer a problem in the US” - someone demonstrating modern racism would agree with this statement
How does the modern racism scale correlate with other measures of prejudice?
Scores correlate well with the scores of the Implicit Association Test (used to reveal underlying stereotypical assumptions relating to a category, and correlates poorly with scales measuring overt prejudice). The IAT is a much more subtle method of assessing prejudice
Why is the IAT gaining popularity?
Introduced by Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz (1998) it is attracting a lot of research primarily because it cannot be faked unlike many of the other attitude scales. It is currently being used in work on implicit attitudes activated without conscious awareness by memory of past experiences
Describe how the implicit association test could be used to measure implicit prejudice against black people
Respondent presented with images of black faces and white faces, interspersed with pleasant and unpleasant words mixed in a random order.
TASK 1 - Respond as quickly as possible by pressing a particular key whenever a black face/unpleasant word is presented, and a different key whenever a white face/pleasant word presented (congruence when someone has modern racism)
TASK 2 - Press one key for black face/pleasant word, and a different key for white face/unpleasant word (people with modern racism find this task harder than task 1. The difference between average response latencies (reaction times) in these 2 tasks provides a measure of implicit attitudes
What did Greenwald, Banaji &Nosek (2015) do?
Overview of meta-analyses concluded that implicit associations don’t very strongly predict real prejudice, but effects are large enough to explain discriminatory impacts that are societally significant either in terms of how many people are simultaneously affected, or because they can repeatedly affect single persons
Outline the studies conducted by Charlesworth & Banaji (2019) into implicit biases
Conducted 4.4 million of the implicit bias tests in the US on the internet (2007-2016), and found that explicit bias declined much more steadily over the years while implicit biases do still seem to exist unconsciously for most domains, there was very little decrease. Domains such as sexuality, skin tone and race did show slightly more of a decline in implicit bias as well as explicit
What is meant by stereotype threat?
Impairment of performance manifesting in people who belong to a prejudiced group, resulting from perceived likelihood of being judged according to a negative stereotype, or concern about confirming a negative stereotype (i.e. worries that their behaviour will become a “self-fulfilling prophecy”)
Describe the study conducted by Steele and Aronson (1995) into stereotype threat
Black and white US students were asked to indicate their ethnicity on a form and a verbal reasoning test was then administered. In the stereotype threat condition ppts were led to believe that the test was “diagnostic of intellectual ability” while in the control it was presented as a simple lab experiment. Black students underperformed only in the ST condition
What did Steele & Aronson’s (1995) results suggest as causes for stereotype threat?
Arousal and anxiety
Self-monitoring causing distraction - see the same thing in individuals with stage fright, when they become preoccupied with what their audience are thinking at the expense of their performance, even though they were actually more than capable of performing well under different circumstances.
Effort devoted to suppressing negative ideation can also distract attention
Outline 2 similar experiments done into stereotype threat?
Horton et al (2010) - age ST in memory and physical tasks (requiring speed and dexterity)
Osborne (2007) - gender ST (and also stereotype lift) in maths tests
Outline the stereotype threat study conducted by Osborne (2007)
Male and female students asked to indicate their sex before taking a maths test
In the high-ST condition, gender stereotype of women being less mathematically able led to females performing more poorly. Negligible difference between genders in the low-ST condition
In the high-ST condition the stereotype lift effect occurred for males - when a group is assumed to be better at a task, they perform better when that stereotype is enforced
What are 3 theories for the cause of prejudice?
Innate - evidence that we have an inherent fear of the unfamiliar which might set a mould for negative attitudes towards groups which are different from our own
Mere exposure effect - Familiarity with something improves attitudes towards it
Learning during early life (Allport & Tajfel) - early learning provides a framework that colours all subsequent information/experiences of a target group
What is the crudest model to explain prejudice?
Dollard et al (1939) - The frustration-aggression model; in its strongest form it hypothesises that frustration ALWAYS leads to aggression and aggression is ALWAYS the result of frustration. Frustration is defined as the blocking/prevention of potentially rewarding/goal-directed behaviour. Evidence from animal and human studies
What are the 5 key stages proposed by the frustration-aggression model to explain prejudice?
1) Personal goals
2) Psychic energy activated to achieve goals –> state of psychological readiness
3) Frustration/impeding of goal achievement
4) Frustration-induced undissipated arousal, system remains in disequilibrium, but source of frustration too powerful
5) Location of scapegoat, catharsis achieved by displacing aggression
How did Hovland & Sears (1940) provide support for the frustration-aggression model of prejudice?
Found correlation between annual lynchings in south USA and the value of the cotton harvest (1882-1930). r=-.64, which is a very strong negative correlation i.e. when cotton value went down (leaving white rural farmers frustrated), lynchings went up
Black people became the scapegoat, because farmers unable to take aggression out on the low cotton value
What did Baumeister et al (1998) suggest regarding the frustration-aggression model?
The weak form of the model, that frustration USUALLY leads to aggression, provides a partial explanation of prejudice and discrimination - found that frustration in experimental tasks did not consistently increase prejudice scores.
How did Berkowitz (1974) revise the frustration-aggression hypothesis?
With social cues and cognitive mediators (e.g. heat can be a mediator which facilitates individual and collective aggression) –> essentially, suggests that frustration will lead to aggression when social cues/mediators are present; subjective frustration is just one of an array of aversive events that can produce an instigation to aggress
How did Bianchi et al (2018) support the modified form of the frustration-aggression hypothesis?
During economic downturns in the US (example of a mediator), more negative explicit and implicit attitudes towards black people were identified.
What is arguably the most important and influential theory of prejudice?
The authoritarian personality theory
The philosopher Sartre first suggested that it was absurd that someone could be both anti-semitic i.e. prejudiced, and still be a “normal” person in other ways.
Empirical evidence for this idea was provided by Adorno et al (1950)
What did Adorno et al (1950) describe?
Described a personality syndrome believed to predispose certain people to be authoritarian, originating in childhood
How did the Authoritarian personality theory start?
With the A-S scale (Anti-Semitism)
Used phrases that would seem normal to someone anti-Semitic but actually contained negative language e.g. “The trouble with letting jews into a nice neighbourhood is that they give it a typically Jewish atmosphere”
Items on the scale were all subtle in this way (although in those days ideas of implicit attitudes and modern racism were not yet thought of)
How was the A-S scale developed?
Developed the E scale (ethnocentrism i.e. measuring prejudice towards black people and foreigners in general i.e. all out-groups don’t personally belong to)
Massive positive correlation with the A-S scale (0.80) –> showed that prejudice against outgroups is a generalised trait i.e. anti-Semitism doesn’t exist in isolation from prejudice against other groups
