Social Psych Exam 3 - final BACKWARDS Flashcards
Prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination
Biases against others
Generalized attitudes (usually negative) towards members of a social group
Can be explicit or implicit
Prejudice
Beliefs about a group
Traits are thought to be characteristic of the entire group
Established from shared beliefs within culture (learned from media, peers, parents, observations, etc)
Descriptive or Prescriptive
Stereotyping
Unfair treatment of members of a particular group simply because of their membership
interpersonal vs organizational/systematic
Discrimination
unearned favored state, often denied because violates our belief of the world as fair
Privilege
Unequal status, behavior –> attitudes rationalize inferior status of lower-status groups in society
Social inequalities
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
Social dominance orientation
Conformity
Social Norm intervention
Social Sources of Prejudice
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
Race
people whose ancestors were born in the same region. Usually share a language, culture, and/or religion
Ethnic group
prejudice is the result of one group blaming another innocent group for its problems; Frustration and aggression
Scapegoat 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
Realistic Group Conflict Theory
Frustration and Aggression (scapegoat theory)
Economic theory, competition (Realistic group conflict theory)
Social Identity theory
Motivational sources of prejudice
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
Realistic Group Conflict Theory Situational Antecedents
part of the self-concept that consists of our group memberships
-Categorize into ingroups vs. outgroups
-Identify with our ingroup
-We Compare against the outgroup
Minimal groups: ingroup preference, but no outgroup hate
Group status + self-esteem
Social identity
-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)
Cognitive sources of bias
Separate/dissimilar characteristics 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)
Distinctiveness & Illusory Correlations
extent to which someone fits the observer’s concept of the essential features characteristic of that category
Prototypicality
a person of mixed race is classified as a member of the minority or socially subordinate group
Hypodescent
subgroup within stereotyped group, “exception”
Subtyping
-When people avoid referring to race in situations, perceived as more racially biased
-makes children less likely to identify overt instances of bias
-People exposed to these arguments display greater degree of explicit and implicit racial bias
Costs of racial color blindness
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
Remedies to prejudice
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
Essentialism
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)
Social trap
