Reducing Prejudice Flashcards
Superordinate Goals
Creating situations where members of different groups must work together to achieve a shared goal
E.g. group work, where tasks are too large to be done alone
Superordinate Goals
Robbers Cave study - description
11 schoolboys split into 2 groups (named their own groups and regarded the other group as opponents)
Faked problems where the boys had to work together to solve them (broken down truck/water supply)
Friendship emerged and hostility disappeared
Robbers Cave study
Evaluation
S: influential and highly relevant to reduction
W: short term and different from real world conflicts
participants were children, hard to generalise to adults
Superordinate Goals
Evaluation
Supporting research: all children, adults harder to tackle
Research studies are artificial, may be difficult to create SG in real world contexts
Education
Improving awareness of prejudice, particularly during childhood
E.g. stimulations/role play of prejudice
Education
Jane Elliot, ‘blue eyes, brown eyes’ - Description
Made schoolchildren aware of how it felt to be discriminated against
Children took turns to receive privileges (extra play time) by their eye colour
Elliot favoured the group on top (“better behaved”, “more intelligent”)
Education
Jane Elliot, ‘blue eyes, brown eyes’ - Results
Prejudice emerged
Name calling towards out group
Those labelled inferior did worse at a card sorting task
Suggests discrimination may harm academic performance
Education
Evaluation
S: Elliot’s technique raised awareness: many years later suggested it had long term benefits
W: Nearly everyone goes through school and is exposed to anti-prejudice, but we still live in a world with a lot of prejudice
Contact Hypothesis
If conflicting groups have closer contact and communication, they will treat each other as individuals and feel less prejudiced
E.g. projects bringing different religious groups together
Contact Hypothesis Key Factors (SPICE) Cook 1978
Support from authorities Personal acquaintance Introduction to non stereo typical individuals Cooperation between groups Equal status
Contact Hypothesis
Jigsaw Technique
Students put into groups
In each group, students have different things to remember which they need to feed back to the group
The group members all rely on each other to complete the task (superordinate goals)
Contact Hypothesis
Evaluation
Jigsaw Technique: for the classroom, doesn’t represent adults
Contact alone isn’t enough
