Social Psych Exam 3 - final Flashcards
Biases against others
- Prejudice: attitude/emotional component
- Stereotyping: thought/belief component
- Discrimination: behavioral component
Prejudice
- Generalized attitude toward members of a social group
- Generally negative attitudes
Explicit: social norms shape which forms of prejudice people tend to find problematic
Implicit: Attitudes towards groups are conditioned
Stereotyping
- Beliefs about a group
- Traits are thought to be characteristic of the entire group
- Positive or negative traits
Established from shared beliefs within culture (learned from media, peers, parents, observations, etc)
Descriptive “this group is like ____” - often negative
Prescriptive “this group should be like ___” - often positive - however could be problematic
Discrimination
- Unfair treatment of members of a particular group simply because of their membership
Interpersonal discrimination: explicit or implicit
Organizational/institutional/systematic discrimination: policies/procedures in an organization that systematically disadvantage some groups
Privilege
unearned favored state conferred simply because of one’s race, gender, social class, sexual orientation, etc
Motivation to deny privilege: Violates our sense that society functions fairly & that everyone has what they deserve
Social inequalities
Unequal status, behavior –> attitudes rationalize inferior status of lower-status groups in society
Social Dominance Orientation
Motivation to have one’s group dominate other social groups
* View people in terms of hierarchies
* Once inequalities exist, prejudice helps justify the economic & social superiority of those who have wealth & power
Group-based dominance vs Opposition to equality
Social Sources of Prejudice
Conformity - frequent & repetitive exposure to hate speech leads to desensitization & increasing outgroup prejudice
Social norm intervention
Race
The concept that some people are distinct from others because of physical appearance, typically skin color
- categorization based on physical appearance
- social construction
- very large genetic diversity within a “racial category”
- flawed & destructive construct
Ethnic group
people whose ancestors were born in the same region. Usually share a language, culture, and/or religion
Scapegoat Theory
prejudice is the result of one group blaming another innocent group for its problems; Frustration and aggression
Realistic Group Conflict Theory
prejudice arises from competition between groups for scarce resources; economic theory
- intergroup competition over resources often results in animosity – but does not always result in overt conflict
- Includes competition over cultural resources
Motivational sources of prejudice
- Frustration and Aggression (scapegoat theory)
- Economic theory, competition (Realistic group conflict theory)
- Social Identity theory
Realistic Group Conflict Theory Situational Antecedents
- Group desiring to increase resources at the expense of another group
- Perception of or actual scarcity of resources
- Subordinate groups advocating for fairer distribution of societal resources
–> Backlash to growing power of marginalized groups
Social Identity
part of the self-concept that consists of our group memberships
* We Categorize into ingroups vs. outgroups
* We Identify with our ingroup
* We Compare against the outgroup
Minimal groups: ingroup preference, but no outgroup hate
Group status + self-esteem
Cognitive sources of bias
- People don’t have enough cognitive resources to keep track of what is going on around them (e.g., attentional blindness)
- cognitive misers: People don’t expend enough mental capacity on judging others
- schemas and heuristics - used by people which affect how they perceive, judge, and treat others
Theories:
- Activation of one element of a schema activates the whole schema (stereotype)
- Schemas are applied to incoming information (encoding) and to remembered information (retrieval)
Distinctiveness & Illusory Correlations
- Distinctiveness captures attention
- easy to associate minority-group members w/ negative traits
- people tend to associate novel groups with rare attributes (behaviors that set them apart from the population at large)
Prototypicality
extent to which someone fits the observer’s concept of the essential features characteristic of that category
Hypodescent
a person of mixed race is classified as a member of the minority or socially subordinate group
Subtyping
creating a subgroup within a stereotyped group, exception to the group
Costs of Racial Color Blindness
- When people avoided referring to race in situations, others perceived them as more racially biased
- Color blindness makes children less likely to identify overt instances of bias
- not an effective tool for reducing bias
- People exposed to arguments promoting color blindness have been shown to subsequently display a greater degree of both explicit and implicit racial bias
Remedies to prejudice
Colorblindness vs multiculturalism
- multiculturalism has more positive outcomes for people of color compared to color blindness
(Recognizes that race should not dictate outcomes—without denying that race represents a distinctive social identity that is real and often does matter in society)
* However, both approaches have some potential pitfalls
Essentialism
view that group differences are based in sort of natural and deep differences within people
* Leads us to really think of the boundary between groups as very rigid and strong
* Linked to prejudice when there are status differences
- Racial essentialism
- Gender essentialism
Social Trap
when groups each rationally pursue its own self-interest to the destruction of its own self-interest and that of other groups
* Mutually destructive behavior
Examples:
* Prisoner’s Dilemma (card game)
* Tragedy of the Commons (marbles game)
