stereotypes Flashcards
Tajfel (1981)
stereotypes learned in early childhood through normal socialisation rather than direct experience. Research suggests children use of stereotypes and expression of negative attitudes towards out-groups peak at around age 7 and decline by 8/9. may reflect cognitive developmental changes that affect the way children understand the meaning of categories and attributes, and change in role-taking skills (aboud 1998, durkin 1995).
outgroups and in-groups
Images of another group (outgroup) are less favourable than iamges of own group (in-group) and provide a positive evaluation of yourself. When someone is categorised as a member of a particular group the schema of that group (stereotype) influences the impression of that person.
autotimacity of stereotypes
Stereotypes are automatically and unconsciously activated in particular contexts so have automaticity. Particular cues can automatically activate a categorisation which in turn automatically engages the appropriate stereotype. Eg Devine 1989 presnted people with negative African american primes eg lazy too quickly for people to be aware of them and found ptps interpreted a subsequent neutral act, by someone called Donald in ways consistent with negative stereotypes of African americans.
Whether someone scored high or low on a racial prejudice scale did not affect susceptibility to preconscious priming – an effect replicated by Fazio et al (1995). Other research has, however, shown that the effect is more marked for people who score high on unobtrusive measures of possessing racist attitudes (Lepore and Brown, 1997).
property of automaticity exploited by implicit association test
elicits hidden prejudices (greenwald et al 1998,2002). Implicit biases can be expressed towards various types of people eg the obses by teachman et al 2003 gave connecticut beachgoers a newspaper article that said obesity was caused by genetics or by overeating and lack of exercise. The IAT was then administered where ptps decided whether words paired with adjective ‘good’ or ‘bad’ were appropriately paired so pairing of ‘thin people’ and ‘good’ and ‘fat people’ and ‘bad’ would be expected to be responded to quicker than ‘fat people’ and ‘good’. Ptps also did a questionnaire measuring their attitudes towards obesity and obese people. Ptps claimed to have no biases twoards fat people their responses suggested oherwise. People associated ‘fat people’ with more negative attributes than positive ones. Bias was greater when people primed to think obesity was caused by controllable factors eg overeating.
follow up IAT study
the implicit test was prefaced by stories which evoked sympathy towards fat people, or evoked sympathy towards people who use wheelchairs (what the researchers called a comparable ‘stigmatised’ group) or were neutral. 90 women participated at Yale University. Reading empathic stories about fat people did not reduce implicit fat bias, compared with reading neutral stories. When overweight participants were added to this sample, there was evidence of in-group bias. Fat people were more likely to show less implicit bias after reading the empathetic material. The results suggest that while people may claim that they do not hold negative (stereotypical) views of fat people, their implicit cognitions and behaviour suggest otherwise. IAT can reveal our attitudes and views of brands and products (Maison et al, 2004), recent research has cast serious doubt on its validity in revealing racial bias (Oswald et al, 2013, 2015; Greenwald et al, 2014). Meta-analyses have found that IAT scores are not good predictors of racial discrimination (Oswald et al, 2015). Some argue the IAT will not measure stable attitudes, only temporary ones - payne at al 2017. word ‘implict’ = controversial as could be argued IAT measures same concepts as questionnaires in a different way.
Fiske’s stereotype content model
Attempts to explain how and why we hold stereotypes. When we meet someone we are unfamilar with and who belongs to different category of person we don’t belong to we ask 2 qus - do they intend to cause harm and are they capable of causing harm? These are reflctd in model’s positioning of two stereotype dimensions - warmth and competence. Warmth = how friendly, sincere, trustworthy, sociable and warm a person is. People who cooperate = warm if they compete = cold. Competence = how skilful, confident and capable they are. Model proposes a matrix of high and low warmth and competence. Groups high in warmth and competence = in in-group and groups low in both incl homeless and poor. Categories of people who fall somewhere inbetween incl elderly and qualified and rich out-groups as they tend to elicit ambivalent emotions eg elderly = high warmth and low competence and professionals = low warmth and high competence. Younger people are more likely to hold negative views of the elderly who violate these prescriptive stereotypes than middle-aged people – they rate them as significantly lower in warmth and competence (North and Fiske, 2013). Younger participants were less concerned about the violations made by people of the same age or by middle-aged individuals.
further evidence for stereotype content model
In the US, Latino and African American immigrants are rated lowest on both dimensions, European immigrants are rated similarly to indigenous US individuals and Canadians are rated the highest (Lee and Fiske, 2006). Individuals asked to describe fictional immigrants who were competitive or not or who were high or low in status judged competitive immigrants to be low in warmth. They also judged the high-status group to be competent, judged both status groups to be equally warm, admired uncompetitive, high-status groups, envied high-status, competitive groups and pitied uncompetitive, low-status groups (Caprariello et al, 2009).
Fiske argued that the SCM can explain and predict societal inequalities
in health, income and mobility (Durante et al, 2013). She suggests, the model argues that ambivalence helps maintain these inequalities. She and her research group observed an association between lower stereotype ambivalence and national peace/conflict (Durante et al, 2017). In a study of 4,344 individuals from 38 nations, those from highly conflicted or highly peaceful countries were likely to hold lower ambivalent stereotypes whereas those countries falling in between are more ambivalent.
priming of stereotypes - stereotype threat
When people are negatively primed with an unflattering stereotype the targeted sample has a reduced positive view of themselves and exhibit the stereotype they are primed with - those unprimed don’t do this behaviour. Steele and colleagues argue underachievement is a psychological response to stereotypes that characterise your in-group as inferior to a ou-group on a specific task in a specific domain. Also they coined the term ‘stereotype threat’. The negative stereotype is a cognitive and emotional burden that impedes performance. Stereotype threat has 2 consequences - anxiety about confirming the stereotype and disengagement with task and domain. This leads to underachievement.
stereotype threat - weber et al 2020
nvestigated whether watching sexist comedy – invoking a stereotype threat – would impair German-speaking women’s cognitive performance compared with a group that watched non-sexist comedy. results = mixed. In two studies, there was a significant, negative effect: the women performed worse after watching the sexist comedy. In two other studies the effect was inconsistent.
Lots of original research done with african american students in american schooling system. Eg they perform less well than white counterparts in tests where negative stereotypes about african americans were made relevant. (steele and Aronson 1995). May be due to the potential recognition that failure could confirm a negative stereotype of their in-group.
stereotypes - physical appearance
powerful cue to category membership eg skin colour for race and stereotypes on behaviour. Blair et al 2004 studied facial features of 216 black and white prison inmates, predicting that Afro-centric features might influence sentencing decisions. They found that those with stereotypically Afro-centric features were more likely to receive harsher sentences than those with less Afro-centric physical characteristics. Although bias and stereotyping were not evident in sentencing, subtle forms of stereotyping were significantly influencing sentencing decisions.
physical appearance - stillman et al 2010
found people were able to accurately estimate degree of violence committed by sex offenders by looking at their faces. 97 undergraduates saw photos of 87 registered sex offenders for 2 secs and asked to rate how likely person is to be violent on 4 point scale. Judgements then compared with actual degree of violence in criminals offence. When judgements = accurate faces rated as violent were younger, heavier brow, looked more masculine and appeared physically strong. But errors as happy, well groomed individulkas judged less likely to be violent and angry and digusted expressions on faces associated with greater violence.
schemata of social groups
characterise large nos of people in terms of a small no of properties that submerges the variety of differences that exist between people. Shared schemata of social groups are best described as stereotypes as are closely related to prejudice, discrimination and intergroup relations.
Principle aim of social psych research into stereotype threat (ST) is to discover what psychological variables affect individuals vulnerability to this effect. Some basic issues and processes have been identified.
1 - domain identificaton - ST only occurs in individuals which performing well in a domain is important - steele 1997. aronson et al 1999 measured white male students’ identification with maths and asked them to complete a maths test either in the context of the stereotype that Asians are superior at maths (stereotype threat condition) or not (control condition). Performance on the maths test was significantly worse in the stereotype threat condition, but only for participants who identified highly with the maths domain (even when controlling for previous standardised aptitude test (SAT) scores). this study provides evidence for domain-specific identification and demonstrates that stereotype threat can affect traditionally non-stigmatised groups (American white male students).
2- Cognitive load - possible ST effect more pronounced when people under high cognitive load as there is extra pressure to disconform to negative stereotypes. Spencer et al 1999 - two experimental studies of high achieving male and females american uni students. Women are belived to experince ST in maths related domains. Ptps in first stiudy did either easuy or hard maths test no difference in performance in male or female on easy test but females worse on hard test. increased cognitive load of stereotype threat impeded performance on a task that also demanded greater cognitive capacity. Second study showed gender difference in performance on difficult test was accentuated when test was explicity introduced in terms of gender differences in maths ability. Finding supports idea performance differences do indeed result from stereotype threat rather than from real differences between males and females maths ability.
3- Self-categorisation with the stereotyped group - Research suggests that priming the social identity of the stigmatised group will automatically prime the negative stereotype and in turn affect performance in a stereotype-consistent manner. One study supports this in the maths performance of Asian American women (Shih et al, 1999). In contrast to the negative connotations of being female in the maths domain, Shih et al reasoned that Asian American identity is associated with a positive stereotype of maths ability. female Asian-Americans who were primed with their Asian American identity significantly outperformed participants who were primed instead with their gender identity (‘women’).
Individual level of identification with the stereotyped group- Schmader (2002) showed that the extent to which a person identifies with a relevant category also affects how strongly the stereotype influences their performance. White American students completed a maths test in either a gender-relevant domain or a gender-irrelevant domain. In the gender-irrelevant domain there was no difference between men’s and women’s performances on the test but in the gender-relevant domain, only the female participants who identified highly with their gender underperformed compared with males. This means vulnerability to stereotype threat seems to depend on whether people see themselves as representative of the stereotyped category.
Aronson et al 2002 - ST
did an intervention study to trial a method of helping students resist their responses to stereotype threat. Ptps = african american and caucasian male and female undergraduates. In lab study involving a pen-pal mentoring system for younger students. They were randomly divided into 3 groups. Attitude change techniques used to teach them and help them internalise idea that intelligence is malleable (interevention- specific group) or people have different intelligence orientations (intervention onky group). 3rd group no intervention control. Reuslts showed after several weeks students in intervention specific group. (where the negative stereotype was challenged) reported greater academic identification and enjoyment and higher grades compared with the other intervention style and the control group. This was particularly the case for African American students whose academic performance and identification were depressed as a reaction to stereotype threat in the other conditions. It is interesting to note that there were no differences between groups on stereotype threat scores per se, suggesting that the specific intervention changed the participants’ responses to stereotype threat and not their perceptions of it.
