Prejudice, Discrimination and Stereotypes

Question 1

When did studies about prejudice, discrimination and stereotypes start?

Answer 1

After the holocaust

Question 2

What is traditional prejudice?

Answer 2

prejudice against a group that is consciously acknowledged and openly expressed by the individual and/or supported by government and law

Question 3

What is modern prejudice?

Answer 3

• actively opposing racism/ discrimination of minority groups, but treating outgroup members differently, either intentionally or unconsciously – often with devastating consequences
• implicit bias

Question 4

What is Beattie, Cohen and McGuire’s (2010) implicit bias test?

Answer 4

• Created fake CVs of equal quality but some associated with Anglo-Saxon (British) sounding names and others with ethnic minority names
• Shown to white and black recruiters in a simulated shortlisting task
• In general, white participants more likely to select white applicants and Black applicants more likely to select black applicants – even though CVs matched for quality
• The more unconsciously biased the more likely they are to offer the job to the member of their own race

Question 5

What are microaggressions?

Answer 5

• Racial microaggressions are brief daily verbal, behavioural, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults towards people of colour (Sue et al, 2007)
• E.g. asking a British born Asian whether they miss ‘home’ or ‘where they are from originally’
• example of modern prejudice

Question 6

What was Clark and Clark’s (1947) internal racism experiment and what were the results?

Answer 6

• Black and white children were given two different dolls, one white and one black and asked the following questions:
• Q. Give me the doll you would like to play with (67% black children chose White doll)
• Q. give me the doll that is the nice doll (59% black children chose white doll)
• Q. Give me the doll that is the bad doll (17% black children chose white doll)
• Q. Give me the doll that is the nice colour (60% of black children chose the white doll)
• Results:
• Found White children overwhelmingly preferred the white doll
• Most black children gave responses that were similar to the white children

Question 7

What is the problem with the Clark and Clark experiment?

Answer 7

Ethical issues to whether we should be asking children these questions

Question 8

What is prejudice?

Answer 8

(affective component): typically negative feeling towards a member of a group because of their membership

Question 9

What are stereotypes?

Answer 9

(cognitive component): a fixed, over generalized belief about a particular group or class of people

• Typically come from what people are presented in in the world, often media
• Even positive stereotypes are harmful because if you don’t fit in line with your groups stereotype (e.g. Asian that is not good at maths) it may feel like you are as not as much part of the group
• E.g. the Sun’s title ‘1 in 5 Brit Muslims’ sympathy for jihadis’ is not based on actual data. They only asked people who were more likely to believe that (e.g. had gone to Syria)

Question 10

What is discrimination?

Answer 10

(behavioural component): Actual violence or action with a negative impact on a minority group

Question 11

What is the motivational approach?

Answer 11

Being prejudiced and discriminating against an out-group fulfils a major psychological benefit to our function: it makes use feel more positive about ourselves and the groups to which we belong

Question 12

What are the three different perspectives that attempt to explain the origins of prejudice, discrimination and stereotypes?

Answer 12

• Motivational Perspective
• Socio-cognitive perspective
• Economic perspective

Question 13

What is Tajfel (1979) social identity theory?

Answer 13

• Argues that as well as personal identity, we have a social identity
• Social identity is derived from our group membership
• We gain self-esteem from group membership. Consequently, we feel a sense of anger or upset if our group member is criticised
• Things associated with these groups will reflect well (if they do well) or poorly on you affecting sense of self
• Self esteem comes in part from your group membership

Question 14

What does the motivational approach argue?

Answer 14

Drawing on SIT, Motivational approach argues that when group membership is criticised, self-esteem will drop. In order to restore this threatened self-esteem, people will:

• Focus on the positive aspects of the groups to which they do belong
• Focus on the negative aspects of the groups to which they do not belong and treat out-group badly
• This out-group hostility is the genesis of prejudice

Question 15

What is Fein and Spencer (1997)’s experiment for evidence of SIT as an explanation of prejudice?

Answer 15

• participants given an IQ test and then told that they had either done v. well (self-esteem enhancing) or failed (self-esteem lowering)
• Later participants (none of whom were Jewish) showed a video of a woman being interviewed for a job. For ½ Ps the woman appeared to be Jewish, for the other half she was non-Jewish
• Behaviour was identical in both videos
• Measure of discrimination: how warm they felt towards the woman in the video
• When participants received positive feedback about their IQ they rated the Jewish and Non-Jewish candidate equally
• When participants received negative feedback they rated the Jewish woman lower
• In line with SIT, where participants had had a boost to their self esteem , they rated the Jewish and non-Jewish candidate as equally warm
• However when they received negative feedback, more likely to rate the Jewish candidate as significantly less warm.

Question 16

What is the socio-cognitive approach?

Answer 16

• Built on idea that we rely on heuristics – mental shortcuts to navigate through the complexity of the world around us
• One useful and inevitable short cut is categorisation – having readily available categories saves mental effort and reduces cognitive load
• Classify things in the group around us to make things more predictable
• Many people try to perceive differences between groups based on superficialities even when there is no basis for the differences

Question 17

What are the consequences of cognitive classification?

Answer 17

• The mere act of ascribing group membership to an individual results in people starting to perceive differences between those groups (even when absolutely no differences exist
• Just the mental classification of people into groups is sufficient to lead to a number of processes:
• Out-group homogeneity effect
• Confirmation bias
• Illusory correlations

Question 18

What’s the out-group homogeneity effect?

Answer 18

• Tendency to see in-group as highly diverse (i.e. different beliefs, personalities, ages, occupations) but the out-group members as ‘all alike’
• E.g. saying that all women can’t drive

Question 19

What’s the confirmation bias?

Answer 19

• A process where people pay more attention to and remember information that tends to support their underlying stereotypes or beliefs
• It leads people to preferentially attend to and seek out information that confirms it while discounting information that contradicts it (Sekaquaptewa & Vergas, 1995; Plant, Kling & Smith, 2004)
• E.g. when you are ill and look stuff up and only focus on the things that confirm it is serious and ignore stuff that is not serious

Question 20

What was Duncan’s confirmation bias study?

Answer 20

• In one classic study, Duncan showed White participants a short video in which either a White man ‘ambiguously shoves’ a black man or a Black man ‘ambiguously shoves’ a White man
• Participants perceived the behaviour as mere ‘horsing around’ when done by another White person but became a ‘violent gesture’ when done by a black person (Duncan, 1976)

Question 21

What did Wilson, Hugenberg & Rule (2017) find in regards in confirmation bias?

Answer 21

found that people tended to perceive young Black men as taller, heavier and more muscular than similarly sized white men (based on photographs) and hence, via the conformation bias, more physically threatening
- this in fact is not true

Question 22

What is the illusory bias?

Answer 22

• An incorrect belief that two events are related when they are actually not
• Negativity bias
• Distinctive (low frequency – unusual) events capture attention
   Minority members are, by definition, low frequency
   Negative events (e.g. crimes) are also salient
• Negative behaviours from minority members are doubly distinct
• If a member of a minority group (distinct) commits a crime (distinct), people remember it more readily and overestimate how frequently that behaviour is performed by the group

Question 23

What is the economic perspective?

Answer 23

• When groups compete for limited resources the groups experience conflict, prejudice and discrimination
• Limited resources include jobs and welfare
• Prejudice and discrimination should be the strongest among groups that stand to lose the most if another group succeeds

Question 24

What was Sherrif et al. (1996) Robber’s cave experiment?

Answer 24

• Two groups 11 year old boys were taken to a summer camp in Robber’s Cave state Park, Oklahoma
• Phase 1 –‘forming of 2 groups’: the boys were randomly divided into tow groups (neither knew of the other’s existence): two separate cabins bonding with each other while swimming and hiking, both groups chose a name for their shirts and flags
• Phase 2 – ‘creating of conflict’: the groups were brought together for a five-day tournament where only one group could win. The other group is now an obstacle to resources. This led to conflict, stealing and burning the other group’s flag
• Phase 3 – ‘making peace’: the researchers created larger goals (superordinate goals) that made the group of boys have to depend on each-other in order to succeed