Prejudice, stereotyping, discrimination and conflict Flashcards
Lecture 12
Define prejudice, discrimination and stereotypes
Prejudice:
- A negative attitude or affective response towards a group and its individual members.
- Sometimes also includes a positive response.
Discrimination:
- Unfair treatment /behaviour towards individuals based on their group memberships.
Stereotype:
- The belief that certain attributes are characteristic of an entire group of people.
What are stereotypes?
Stereotypes are beliefs that all members of a certain group (race, gender, sexual orientation, occupation) have a given trait or characteristic just because they belong to that group.
Can also be defined as general beliefs about a particular group (as with the stereotype content model) - these may or may not be true as a whole and certainly wouldn’t be true of every member of the group.
Causes of stereotypes
Cognitive miser:
- This perspectice holds that people do not seek to maximise their decision making for accuracy, rather they find a ‘good enough’ solutions and base their decision on that.
- As such, shortcuts like stereotypes and ‘good enough’.
In other words:
- At any given point the brain processes a ton of information.
- It has adaptive value to be able to process this information more quickly.
- Thus, we tend to be cognitive misers.
- Stereotyping aids this process, but at a trade-off in accuracy.
Research shows that activating stereotypes creates quicker decision making.
Stereotype activation also improved performance on a separate task when participants were asked for complete dual tasks (one which involved giving descriptions of people).
People who are high in need for structure are more likely to rely on stereotypes.
People are more likely to use stereotypes when the brain is taxed. This includes:
- tiredness.
- timepressure.
- congitive load.
- morality salience (especially if high in need for structure).
They also report a greater liking for stereotypes.
Stereotype content model (Fiske et al 2002)
Groups are stereotypes on two dimensions:
- Warmth (likeable, kind, polite, friendly, sincere, genuine, trustworthy).
- Competence (intelligent, able, thorough, efficient).
High warmth/low competence groups are pitied.
High warmth/high competence groups are admired.
Low warmth/high competence groups are envived.
Low warmth/low competence groups elicit comtempt (and/or disgust).
Perceived warmth predicts ‘active behaviours’:
- Groups perceived as low in warmth will tend to receive active harm.
- Groups perceived as high in warmth will receive active facilitation.
Perceived competence maps onto ‘passive behaviours’:
- if perceived as low in competence, passive harm occurs.
- Passive aid occurs if perceived as high in competence.
Passive harm: neglect, withdraw, being ignored or avoided.
Active harm: attacking, fighting, trying to damage.
Passive faciliation: helping when convenient, easy or when beneficial.
Active faciliation: helping without reservation.
E.g.
The elderly:
- Stereotyped as low competence/high warmth.
- Emotion they elicit: pity.
- Behaviours they elicit: passive harm and active faciliation (i.e. fervent attempts to help mixed with avoidance and neglect).
Successful business people:
- High competence/low warmth.
- Emotion they elicit: envy.
- Behaviours they elicit: active harm and passive faciliation (i.e. relucant helping mixed with attacks).
Stereotype threat
People tend to act in ways that are consistent with the stereotypes of their group when the stereotype is activated:
- Asian women do better at math when their Asian identity is activated; but worse when their woman identity is.
- White men jump lower when primed with their white identity.
- British boys actually do worse in math when primed with their male gender.
Factors related to prejudice
Evolutionary approaches: different groups contain different pathogens, viruses and germs. Prejudice has evolved out of the early risk of being exposed to different groups which you do not have the antibodies to resist.
- Competition also tends to increase prejudice (realistic conflict theory, relative deprivation theory, etc.).
- Mortality salience: thoughts of death increase negatively towards people who are different.
- Social identity threats: if your group is perceived negatively, you might respond by being hostile towards another group to protect self esteem.
Personality traits linked to prejudice
Social dominance orientation: the idea that some groups are deserving of being lower in social status than others and that this is natural.
Right wing authoritarianism: people who show a strong tendency to follow authority.
Intolerance of ambiguity: people who show a strong preference for things to be clear-cut, and ‘either or’. These people are uncomfortable with grey areas and mitigating factors.
Ways to reduce prejudice
Contact hypothesis:
- Gordon Allport proposed that a lot of prejudice could be reduced if different groups spent more time with each other (had more ‘contact’).
- There is a lot of research supporting this explanation.
- But almost all of it focuses on majority groups’ attitudes towards minorities.
- And it isn’t entirely clear why contact has an effect.
- It also isn’t clear if the improved attitudes extend to the entire out-group or just the people contact has occurred with.
There is some evidence that just imagined contact can reduce prejudice.
Experimental directions:
“We would like you to take a minute to imagine yourself meeting [an outgroup] stranger for the first time. Imagine that the interaction is positive, relaxed and comfortable”.
- Leads to more positive outgroup views.
- reduces anxiety when interacting with outgroups.
- reduces stereotype threat (for ingroup and outgroup).
I-sharing:
- Starts with the assumption that the universe/the human condition is a bit isolating.
- We crave closeness with others (to know and be known).
- But, we can’t really experience life as someone else, no matter how much we love them or want to.
- And we know that they can never, truly, entirely ‘get us’ either.
- A result of this is that people will respond favourable to shared subjective experiences with other people.
- This will create a sense of closeness, a bond, and the idea that you share a connection (are got and gotten) by another person.
- And it doesn’t matter really have ‘trivial’ it might be.
- People will be paired with someone else, with the group (outgroup member, etc).
- They will then respond to questions like that and matches will occur (often rigged by experimenter and there is no other person).
- Has been found to:
- Make people like dissimilar to others as much as similar to others.
- Reduce conformity in a classic Asch paradigm.
- Increase selflessness (like helpping with a boring task).
- Reduce prejudice towards outgroup members.
- These are especially true for people who are feeling ‘existentially isolated’ before the studies.
- This is a measure of how much you feel like other people understand you, and is not the same as being lonely.
Super-ordinate goals:
- If two groups share a common goal, or conditions are otherwise created to promote cooperation, this has been found to reduce prejudice.
Types of racism
Hostile racism is direct, open, very negative reactions and views towards people of a different race.
Modern racism is a more subtle, sometimes hidden, negative attitudes or reaction to people of a different race.
Define aggression
No single accepted definitions:
- Any behaviour directed towards another individual with the immediate intent to cause harm.
- In addition, the perpetrator must believe that the behaviour will harm the target, and that the target is motivated to avoid the behaviour.
Anderson & Bushman, 2002
Difficulties studying aggression
The only way to demonstrate causality is through experiments.
But is unethical to manipulate aggression -> you can’t tell people to kill, punch, kick others as a manipulation.
So, you can study behaviour naturally.
Or you need to study aggression in odd ways (noise blasts, force when punching objects, etc).
Social/cultural barriers:
- Wars are often part of a cultural fabric, involving heros, etc.
- Honest research in this area could invoke a strong blowback.
Social learning and aggression
Social learning theory: the idea that people learn by observing and modelling the behaviour of others.
Aggression is learned through observation (observational learning).
Bobo doll studies.
Culture and aggression
Culture influences aggression in a variety of ways:
1. It provides different means/tools for murder (e.g. US (guns) vs UK (knife)).
2. It provides different norms for when violence if more tolerated.
Culture of honor: in some cultures there is a high ‘culture of honor’ for men. In these cultures, it is more accepted to be violent if it restores your honor (e.g. towards a woman who has cheated on you).
Dehumanisation and aggression
Dehumanisation typically emerges in more subtle ways.
Infrahumanisation: we attribute ingroups more emotions that are unique to human than outgroups (Leyens et al, 2000).
Animalisatic dehumanisation: denying a person traits (or groups) that people perceive to be unique to humans as opposed to animals.
Mechanistic dehumanisation: denying a person or group traits that people perceive to be unique to humans as opposed to machines or objects (Haslam, 2006).
Factors increasing dehumanisation:
- People high in social dominance orientation.
- Belief the group actually is dehumanising to its own people.
- Sense of threat/conflict.
- Lower status groups are much more likely to be dehumanised.
(Kteily and Bruneau, 2017).
Studies showing link:
Dehumanisation is associated with a variety of aggressive actions. For example:
- Bandura et al (1975):
- 2 participants had to decide whether or not to punish a 3rd participant.
- When the 3rd participants was described in dehumanising ways, they were more likely to punish him for mistakes.
- The punishment was electric shock. - Greitemeyer et al. (2002):
- Violent games increases dehumanisation and violence. - Dehumanisation across cultures predicts hostility towards dehumanised groups (Ktiely et al, 2017).
Mirror image effect
Bronfenbrenner:
- Studied US and Russia relations for decades.
- Found that both sides of conflict tend to perceive the other side in very similar ways.
- The Americans and Soviet Union used nearly identical language to dehumanise and otherwise belittle each other. Each side did their best to distort the actual image of othe other side so that the other side lost its humanity, and become a caricature representation at its best, and a source of evil to be exterminated at its worst.
