Stereotyping and Prejudice- Bright Flashcards
Intergroup Relations refers to
The term Intergroup Relations refers to the way in which people in groups perceive, think about,
feel about, and act toward people in other groups. Sometimes such responses can involve biased
perceptions.
Define stereotypes, prejudice adn discrimination
In particular, Stereotypes are simplified, but widely shared beliefs about the
characteristics of groups and their members. Prejudice describes a negative attitude or affective
response towards a certain group and its individual members. Discrimination involves negative,
unfair, and/or harmful behaviour directed towards members of a particular group based on their
membership in that group.
Mere Exposure Effect (Zajonc,
1968)
There is some evidence that higher animals, including humans, have an inherent fear of the
unfamiliar and unusual, which might set the mould for negative attitudes towards groups that are
considered different in certain ways. There is also evidence for the Mere Exposure Effect (Zajonc,
1968), in which people’s attitudes towards various stimuli (e.g. other people) become more positive
as a direct function of repeated exposure or familiarity with the stimulus. In other words, because we
are more often exposed to people who are like us because they are part of our ingroup, over time we
may develop more positive attitudes toward them. Certain groups are the enduring victims of
stereotyping and prejudice because they are formed by social categorisations that are vivid,
omnipresent and socially functional, and the target groups themselves occupy low power positions in
society. These groups are those based on race, ethnicity, sex, age, sexual orientation, and physical
and mental health.
Outgroup Homogeneity Effect, Own-Race Effect, Subtyping
Asian pp look the same
On a cognitive level, when it comes to the outgroup, people often perceive members to be more
similar than they really are (Outgroup Homogeneity Effect), including having difficulty
distinguishing between group members on a perceptual level (Own-Race Effect). Encountering
contradictory evidence about group members may not necessarily change our ideas about the group,
because we treat the evidence as an exception that proves the rule (Subtyping). In addition,
behaviour consistent with a stereotype is often attributed to the dispositions of the group members,
whereas behaviour that is inconsistent with a stereotype is often attributed to the situation.
Reasons for occurance of steretyping and prejudice
1. Similar to rules in social cognition goal 2. Fein and Spencer 1997
Stereotyping and Prejudice can occur for a number of reasons.
On the one hand, we generally
categorize information along simple dimensions, often when processing is done automatically rather
than systematically. This applies to inanimate objects, but also to people.
On the other hand,
stereotyping can have motivational reasons, such that associating with a majority ingroup can lead to
feelings of superiority when constrasting with the minority outgroup.
Support for the latter notion
comes from a study by Fein and Spencer (1997). They gave participants positive or negative
feedback about their performance on a test of social and verbal skills as a way to temporarily bolster
or threaten their self-esteem. These participants then took part on what they thought was a second
experiment in which they evaluated a job applicant. All participants received a photograph, her
resume and a videotape of a job interview. Half the participants were given information that
suggested that the woman was Jewish based on her name (Julie Goldberg) or not (Maria
D’Agostino). The study had two results: First, participants who had received negative feedback rated
the applicant to be less qualified when they assumed she was Jewish than when she was not. Second,
when those participants were given an opportunity to belittle the Jewish woman they later showed an
increase in self-esteem, such that the more negatively had evaluated her, the better they felt about
themselves.
Dual Process Theories
Mental processes can be …
As noted above, in addition to this motivational function, stereotypes can also occur because they
involve relatively little cognitive effort, and therefore are an easy although often inaccurate way of
categorizing information. Highly relevant in this context are Dual Process Theories, which have
their roots in the assumption that mental processes can be divided into two general classes: those that
operate automatically and those that operate in a controlled fashion (Posner & Snyder, 1975; Shiffrin
& Schneider, 1977).
In social cognition, automatic processes are typically characterized in terms of
four operating conditions: (intentionality, cognitive sources, stop/not, concious awareness)
(1) they are elicited unintentionally;
(2) they require little amounts of
cognitive resources;
(3) they cannot be stopped voluntarily; and
(4) they occur outside of conscious
awareness (Bargh, 1994).
Conversely, controlled processes are characterized as those that
(1) are initiated intentionally;
(2) require considerable amounts of cognitive resources;
(3) can be stopped
voluntarily; and
(4) operate within conscious awareness.
An automatic level knowledge about racial
stereotypes is culturally shared, even by people who do not endorse such stereotypes, and that
activation of such stereotypes is an automatic process
Devine (1989)-Priming
Devine (1989) conducted important work to show that on an automatic level knowledge about racial
stereotypes is culturally shared, even by people who do not endorse such stereotypes, and that
activation of such stereotypes is an automatic process. In her experiments participants were presented
with words stereotypically associated with Black Americans (e.g., blacks, lazy, ghetto, plantation),
but this was done outside of participants’ awareness, i.e., they were primed with this information.
Some participants received a high percentage of such words (80%), which others received a much
lower percentage (20%). Following the prime, in an ostensibly unrelated second experiment,
participants read a brief scenario and were asked to form an impression of a target person who
engaged in ambiguously hostile behaviour (“Donald”). The results showed that participants who had
received 80% of primes related to the black stereotype rated Donald to be more hostile and
unfriendly than those who had only received 20%. Whether participants indicated to be high or low
on prejudice did not matter, suggesting that the priming had an automatic effect.
Importantly, however, in a subsequent task participants low on the Modern Racism Scale wrote down less negative thoughts about Black Americans, which suggests that through effortful, controlled processing it is possible to counteract stereotypes.
racial bias
in decisions to shoot.
Correll, Park, Judd and Wittenbrink (2002)
In the context of automatic stereotype activation, research has provided robust evidence of racial bias
in decisions to shoot. Correll, Park, Judd and Wittenbrink (2002) devised a videogame in which
participants had to decide whether or not to “shoot” target persons, some of whom were white men
whereas others were black men. Some held guns while others held harmless objects such as a wallet
or mobile phone). If the target held a gun they were quicker to press the “shoot” key if he was black
than if he was white. If the target held a harmless object, they took longer to press the “don’t shoot”
key if he was black than if he was white. In addition, participants were more likely to mistakenly
“shoot” an unarmed target if he was black than if he white. In essence, participants seem to process stereotype-consistent targets (armed Blacks and unarmed Whites) more easily than counterstereotypic targets (unarmed Blacks and armed Whites).
Implicit
Association Test
(IAT, Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998)
The notion of automaticity is related to the idea that categories and their stereotypical attributes are
implicitly linked in memory. Thus, concealed prejudice can be detected by unobtrusive methods that
reveal underlying stereotypical associations. This idea is the basis of the popular Implicit
Association Test (IAT, Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). It measures attitudes and beliefs
that people may be unwilling or unable to report. The IAT may be especially interesting if it shows
that you have an implicit attitude that you did not know about. For example, you may believe that
women and men should be equally associated with science, but your automatic associations could
show that you (like many others) associate men with science more than you associate women with science. The test compares reaction times when outgroup pictures (or words) and positive items are
in the same response category versus when outgroup pictures (or words) and negative items are in
the same category. A typical IAT procedure consists of five blocks. In these blocks, participants have
to react as quickly as possible to words that appear on a computer screen by pushing two buttons that
refer to a certain category. The words to be categorized are the target words and positive or negative
words. Participants have to indicate whether a word is a target word or is positive or negative. The
more easily they associate a target word with a positive word, the more positive the association, as
reflected by reaction times. Initially IAT responses were interpreted as reflecting a person’s ‘true’
automatic attitude. However, subsequent work showed that rather than being fixed and stable, IAT
effects are quite malleable (Blair, 2002). For example, if one is motivated to get along with a black
person in an experiment, IAT responses are reduced. In addition, concerns have been raised that the
IAT does not necessarily predict real-life behaviour (Oswald, Mitchell, Blanton, Jaccard, & Tetlock,
2013), although it has also been pointed out that even small IAT effects can have societally large
effects (Greenwald, Banaji & Nosek, 2015).
Stereotype Threat
Because stigmatised groups know exactly the negative stereotypes that others have of them, they
may experience what Steele and Aronson (1995) have called Stereotype Threat. Stigmatised
individuals are aware that others may judge and treat them stereotypically, and thus, on tasks that
really matter to them, they worry that through their behaviour they may confirm the stereotype.
These concerns not only increase anxiety but can also impair task performance. For example, an
academically ambitious woman, aware of stereotypes of women being worse in sciences than men,
may be extremely anxious when answering a question in a lecture. She may be worried that the
slightest mistake would be interpreted stereotypically. Research has shown that this anxiety may
impact adversely on behaviour. Black and White students anticipated taking a ‘very difficult’ test
that was defined as being ‘diagnostic of intellectual ability’ or as ‘just a laboratory exercise.’ They
then completed a number of measures designed to assess awareness of racial stereotypes. For
example, they completed ambiguous sentence fragments. As predicted, Black students who were
anticipating a difficult test that was diagnostic of intellectual ability were more likely than other
participants to complete the fragments with race-related words (e.g. race, inferior). In addition, Black
students actually performed worse on these tests than White students of equivalent scholastic
aptitude.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Rosenthal and
Jacobson’s (1968) Biases lead to biased result
Rosenthal and Jacobson measured the children’s intelligence level at the end of the first year, and at
the start and end of the second year. They found that in both years the bloomers showed a
significantly greater gain than the non-bloomers, suggesting that the expectations alone led teachers
to treat the children differently, which subsequently brought out different behaviours in the children
themselves. Another classic study of self-fulfilling prophecy was conducted by Word, Zanna and
Cooper (1974). In a first experiment, White participants were asked to act as job interviewers and
interviewed Black and White applicants. They were found to treat the Black and White applicants very differely, inclduing more speech errors…
Confirmation Bias
Extrovert and introvert
The tendency to seek to confirm our intiial hypotheeses and beliefs
Extended contact with outgroup members reduce biases
