PSY2001 S2 W2 Prejudice & Discrimination Flashcards
What is Prejudice?
Single-component definition?
Crandall & Eshelman 2003
a negative evaluation of a social group or an individual that is significantly based on the individual’s group membership
What is the general publics thoughts on prejudice?
We think it is less a problem now even though it still is.
41.5% of Australians deny that “Australians from a British background enjoy a privileged position in our sosicety” (Dunn & Nelson, 2011)
Trump deny his tweets were racist and Laurance Fox saying that her country is the most tolerant and loveing in Europe.
What happened on the 31/01/2025?
Trump’s Executive Order 14173 on “Ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity”
Revokes previous executive orders aimed at establishing initiative to promote equal opportunity, diversity nad inclduiosn in federal government workplace. Sets out actions aimed at deterring diversity, equality and inclusion initiatives in the private sector.
How much discrimination and prejudice happens in Britain?
(Abrams, et al. 2018)
Large-scale national survey measuring discrimination and prejudice experienced by people with protected characteristics:
64% report experience prejudice - Black ethnic background
70% report experience prejudice - Muslims
61% report experience prejudice - Mental health conditions.
What is the traditional definition of prejudice?
Traditional three-component definitions
Consistent with the tripartite model of attitudes (Allport, 1954)
Cognitive (belief about a group)
Affective (strong feelings (usually -) about a group)
Conative (intentions to behave in certain ways towards the group
What is discrimination compared to prejudice ?
Discrimination is our behaviour.
Prejudice is what we feel/believe/intention
What is discrimination?
Dovidio, et al. 2010
Inappropriate ad potentially unfair treatment of individuals due to group membership.
Negative behaviour towards an outgroup or it’s members
Less positive behaviour towards an outgroup relative to the ingroup
What are the 3 forms of discrimination?
Pincus, 1996
____ differential/harmful impact on specific groups of people
Indidivual - actions that are intended to have //
Institutional - institutional policies and the behaviours of indidividuals that run institutions that are intended to have //
Structural - policies that appear neutral in terms of intent, but that have negative //
What is an example of a individual discrimination?
individual action with intention to create harm. Photo of a playground in Hove, Holocaust Memorial Day (Jan 2020)
What is an example of institutional discrimination?
In March 2017, the European Court of Justice ruled that companies could ban individuals from wearing ‘religious symbols’ (including headscarves, hijabs)
What is an example of structural discrimination?
In 2017, the European Court of Justice ruled that the requirement for police officers in Greece to be >1.7m tall is unlawful (and amounts to sex discrimination) – different ethnic groups and women are generally shorter
What is the ISMs
Terminology used to describe prejudice and/or discrimination against specific groups.
Sexism, ableism, racism, ageism, anti-seminitism, heterosexism (sexual prejudice)
What is intergroup bias?
Hewstone et al. 2002
The systematic tendency to evaluate one’s own membership group (the in-group) or its members more favourably than a non-membership group (the out-group) or its members
What does intergroup bias encompasses?
Mackie and Smith (1998)
Cognition (stereotyping)
Attitude (prejudice)
Behaviour (discrimination)
What may explain prejudice, discrimination and ingroup bias exist?
Indidivdual difference: individual attitudes towards different outgroups tended to be positively correlated. If one person has a negative attitude towards one outgroup, they are more likely to have a negative attitude towards a different outgroup.
What are approaches that implicate personality and indidivdial differences? - explaining why prejudice exists
Frustration aggression hypothesis
The Authoritarian Personality
What is the basic premise of the frstratio aggression hypothesis?
Dollard et al. 1939
fixed amount of psychic energy to enact our goals. Achieving our goal keeps us in balanced psychological state. If goals are frustrated, unspent energy leaves us in a state of psychological imbalance. we rebalance through acts of aggression directed at scapegoat (less powerful social group)
What are the critiques of the frustration-aggression model?
Frustration isn’t necessary for nor does it inevitable lead to aggression so this approach can only explain some instances of intercrop aggression.
In taking an individual approach, the frustration-aggression hypothesis ignore social context so this approach can’t account for differences in prejudice towards particular social groups.
What is the Authoritarian Personality?
Adorno et al. 1950
Punitive ‘authoritarian’ parenting style results in children developing a specific set of beliefs (e.G. ethnocentrism - preference of own over other groups & intolerance of minorities)
It also leads to increased aggression in the child, which is then projected on to minority groups.
What are critiques of the authoritarian personality?
Acquiescence bias in the F-scale ( used to measure authoritarian personality) - no items were reversed, tendency to respond ‘yes’ would inflate correlations between items.
Psychoanalytic constructs (e.g. projectionà are hard to test empirically.
Ignores situational effects on prejudice
Can prejudice increase due to situational effects?
Yes, prejudice increased towards muslins after 9/11 and towards south east Asian during covid
What approaches emphasise the intercrop context?
Realistic conflict theory
Social identity theory
What is the realistic conflict theory?
Sheriff, 1966
conflict and competition for limited resources leads to prejudice and discrimination.
What is the famous research evidence for the realistic conflict theory?
Robber’s Cave studies (Sherif, 1966)
What is the Robber’s Cave studies?
field experiment involving 12 year old boys at a summer camp in robbers cave, oklahoma. Evaluated whether conflict between two groups can result in prejudice and discrimination and be resolved through co-operation towards superordinate goals.
What were critiques of the Robber’s Cave studies?
Are conflict and competition necessary for prejudice and discrimination?
Ethical issues: “Morally it was the wrong thing to do.”
What is the social identity theory?
Turner & Tajfel 1986
Society consists of different social groups with specific power/status relations. Slef-concept: personal identity and social identity (our membership and identification with specific groups) and Engaging in favourable comparisons/behaviours that beneft the ingroup relative to the outgroup (ingroup favouritism) cna help us maintain positive self-concept.
If we look good, then I look good.
What is some evidence of the social identity theory?
Tajfel et al. Minimal group theory - 1971
What is the minimal group studies?
PPTs assigned to a group based on a meaningless distinction (preference for paintings klee/Kandinsky).
Tasked with allocating points/money to a member of their ingroup and a member of the outgroup, on various matrices.
Participants tended to favour ingroup in a way that maximised the ingroup profit while also maximising the difference between groups in favour of the ingroup.
What is maximum differentiation?
Max difference of 6 benefits the ingroup =/= maximum
What is ingroup/joint profit?
Most point for the ingroup but you give more to outgroup
How do we recognising prejudice and discrimination?
2 faces of prejudice and discrimination - transitional and modern forms of bais
What are traditional forms of bias?
overt, blatant, obvious, arn’t confined to history
What are modern forms of bias?
Covert, subtle and ambigous
Traditional prejudice and discrimination might manifest how?
Use of ethnophaulisms (ethnic slurs, racial epithets)
Overt discrimination (segregation)
Persecution (violence and genocide
How does modern prejudice manifest as?
Resentment about ‘positive discrimination’
Denial of continuing discrimination
Antagonism about perceived group demands
Defence of traditional values
Denial of positive emotions
Exaggerated cultural differences
How do we measure prejudice?
Explicit measure and implicit measure
What are some explicit measures of prejudice?
Semantic differentials (PPTs rate target group according to pairs of opposing evaluative words
Likert scales (prejudice questionnaires that tap into traditional or modern forms of prejudice)
Blatant Prejudice scale
Subtle prejudice scale
Traditional sexism scale
Modern sexism scale
What are some implicit measures of prejudice and bias?
Behavioural measures (behavioural observations (seating distance, eye contact, body posture, approach and avoidance measure)
Affective measures - implicit association test - we are faster to classify things that are related in memory than thing that are unrealted
How does modern discrimination manifest as ?
a range of often subtle behaviour
Indidividual discrimination - microaggressions
Institutional - tokenism
What is a microaggression
Racial microaggressions are brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color. Perpetrators of microaggressions are often unaware that they engage in such communications when they interact with racial/ethnic minorities
What are different forms of microaggressions?
Microinvalidation
Microinsults
Microassaults
What are microinvalidation ?
actions (often unconscious) that invalidate the experiences, thoughts or feelings of people of colour (e.g. “I don’t see colour” )
What are microinsults?
actions (often unconscious) that demean racial identity or are otherwise rude or insensitive (e.g, asking a person of colour how they got their job; following a person of colour around a shop)
What are microassaults?
Racially-motivated actions (often conscious) meant to cause hurt (e.g. name calling, use of racial epithets, purposeful discriminatory behaviour)
What is tokenism?
Hogg and Vaughn 2018
“The practice of publicly making small concessions to a minority group in order to deflect accusations of prejudice and discrimination”
What is tokenism?
Wriht & Taylor, 1998
“an intergroup context in which very few members of a disadvantaged group are accepted into positions usually reserved for members of the advantaged group, while access is systematically denied for the vast majority of qualified disadvantaged group members”
What is the glass gliff?
Women are more likely to be placed in precarious leadership roles (i.e., where there is a high risk of failure).
What is some evidence of the glass cliff?
Ryan and Haslman 2005
Archival study of FTSE 100 companies before and after the appointment of a male or female board member.
Companies appointing women on the board were more likely to have performed consistently poorly in the preceding 5 months, relative to those that appointed men
Similar results in the domain of politics re hard to win seats (Ryan, Haslam & Kulich, 2010)
What does prejudice refer to?
Unfavourable attitudes towards another group and it’s members
Rafael, a young black man, has just popped to the shops to pick up some milk. While he walks around the shop, he notices that the security guard is following him. This is an example of what?
Microinsult
How does prejudice and discrimination manifest as?
Prejudice and discrimination may manifest both in more traditional ‘overt’ ways but also in more modern ‘covert’ ways- and this distinction is captured in different measures of prejudice and bias
What is an explanation for prejudice?
Explanations for prejudice include approaches that implicate personality and individual differences (e.g. Adorno et al.’s Authoritarian Personality approach) or emphasise the intergroup context (e.g., Sherif’s Realistic Conflict Theory)
