Social: Social Identity Theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1979, 1986) Flashcards
What does Prejudice mean?
Dislike towards an individual or group based on characteristics not experience.
What is Discrimination?
Acting upon prejudicial thoughts.
What is the in-group?
The group we belong to.
What is the out-group?
The rest.
Where does prejudice arise in SIDT?
Promoting members of in-group over out-group in order to boost status and self-esteem. Comparison against other groups needed to maintain self-esteem.
What are the cognitive processes of SIDT?
- Social categorisation
- Social identification
- Social comparison
Social Categorisation?
Seeing ourselves and others as members of social groups, e.g. gender, race, religion, school.
Social Identification?
Adopt norms and attitudes of group we’ve categorised ourselves as belonging to.
Social Comparison?
Compare our group to others; regard products of in-group as better than products of out-group (leads to prejudice).
What are “Minimal group” studies?
Groups that had minimal possible reason to feel loyal to.
What was Tajfel et al.’s (1970) study?
- Recruited Bristol schoolboys 14-15.
- Divided them into groups randomly, but told them it was becasue people over or under-estimated dots on a screen, or they’d shown preference to paintings from Klee or Kandinsky.
- Asked to assign points from matrices (Points converted to money; 10 points = 1p).
What were the 2 arrangements the boys could choose?
- Max joint profit = awarded most money to both groups (but out-group get more).
- Max difference = rewards more to in-group than outgroup (even if they made less money than max joint profit).
Results?
Would choose max dif even if they were worse off than max joint profit.
Tajfel et al. conclusions?
Outgroup discrim easily triggered, just by perceiving some else to be outgroup. Also, boys chose to be competitive even when there was fair option.
