Topic 24: Prejudice and Stigmatisation

Question 1

What is social categorisation?

Answer 1

Alleged knowledge of a person’s group membership (e.g. he/she, muslim, old, white etc.)

Question 2

What are the attitudes towards social categorisation?

Answer 2

A: Prejudice - Feelings towards individuals based on knowledge of their group membership
B: Discrimination - Action
C: Stereotype - Belief

Question 3

What are the different stereotypic beliefs about women?

Answer 3

Women often liked or disliked depending on context:
Positive beliefs: better caretakers, more socially skilled, less aggressive
Negative beliefs: less logical, less competent (especially in STEM), less ambitious, more neurotic

Question 4

What did Glick & Fiske study?

Answer 4

They studied both types of stereotypic beliefs (positive and negative) and discovered that they tend to co-occur:
Hostile sexism: negative attitudes towards women
Benevolent sexism: positive attitudes towards women
Ambivalent sexism: describes the state of being high in both HS and BS.
Showed that HS and BS are positively correlated.

Question 5

Where do prejudiced attitudes come from?

Answer 5

Personality-based preparedness
‘Normal’ cognitive biases
‘Normal’ motivational biases
‘Normal’ cultural transfer

Question 6

What is the role of personality in prejudice?

Answer 6

some people are more receptive for prejudiced attitudes.
Adorno (1950): related this to a so-called ‘authoritarian personality’:
- Usually had overly strict, punishing parents
- Express a strong belief in power, dominance and discipline
- Struggle to tolerate ambiguity or uncertainty

Question 7

What are the limitations of a personality-based account?

Answer 7

• Underestimates ‘normality’ of prejudice and stereotyping
• Underestimates cultural and situational determinants of prejudice
• Unable to explain sudden changes in group-based attitudes e.g. following 9/11.

Question 8

What is the role of ‘normal’ cognitive biases in prejudice?

Answer 8

Human mind has numerous cognitive biases that make it susceptible for stereotyping/prejudice, such as:
Accentuation Bias
Correspondence Bias
Illusory Correlations

Question 9

What is accentuation bias?

Answer 9

people consider others who belong to the same group more similar (within group assimilation) than people who belong to different groups - (between-group contrast)

Question 10

What is correspondence bias?

Answer 10

humans tend to see others’ behaviour as reflecting their inner dispositions (rather than social roles/situational pressures)

Question 11

What is illusory correlations?

Answer 11

humans inclined to associate members of minority groups with uncommon attributes and members of majority groups with common attributes (even when no actual association exists)

Question 12

What is the role of ‘normal’ motivational biases on prejudice?

Answer 12

Human mind has numerous motivational biases that make it susceptible for stereotyping/prejudice, such as:
Need for distinctiveness
Need to belong
Need for self-enhancement

Question 13

What is need for distinctiveness?

Answer 13

people aspire to optimal balance of inclusion and distinctiveness. - group membership allows them to fit in (with ingroup members) and stand out (compared to outgroup members)

Question 14

What is need to belong?

Answer 14

humans aspire to belong by forming groups - group membership prompts them to prefer ingroup members over outgroup members

Question 15

What is need for self enhancement?

Answer 15

humans are motivated to perceive themselves positively and better than others. - easily inclined to attribute positive qualities to ingroups, negative qualities to outgroups

Question 16

What is the role of cultural transfer on prejudice?

Answer 16

Stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination form element of cultural heritage
Is passed on from one generation to the next through:
Communication
Observation
Imitation

Question 17

What are potent sources for cultural transfer?

Answer 17

Caretakers
Peers
Media portrayals

Question 18

What are the consequences for targets of acquiring stereotypic thoughts/feelings?

Answer 18

Blatant Discrimination:
Stigmatised individuals face differential treatment in many public places such as schools, universities courtrooms, the workplace
Often face dehumanisation - denying a person the capacity to act in a goal-directed manner, to hold moral values and/or to suffer as oneself

Subtle Discrimination:
Receive less help/support in educational/work settings
Encounter tokenism e.g. hiring a woman merely to fill a gender quota
Are affected by biased impression formation (stereotypic expectations influence how info about them is sought out, attended to, interpreted and remembered) - often resulting in the self-perpetuation of stereotyping (people accumulate stereotype-confirming evidence and discount disconfirming evidence)
E.g. if you were to talk to a woman you would tailor the conversation to what you think she would be interested in such as her children, or if a man maybe about his car or job.
Targets additionally burdened by worrying about the views of others: stereotype threat

Question 19

What are the consequences for perpetrators acquiring stereotypic thoughts/feelings?

Answer 19

Psychological benefits:
Can be quite cognitively economical which simplifies our social world

Harder to think of each individual as their own unique self rather than generalising to some extent.

Allows them to reduce uncertainty which in turn, induces feelings of predictability - so if we are able to guess which category a person belongs to we can predict them better, reducing uncertainty.

Self-esteem regulation: we can use our knowledge about other groups to regulate our self-esteem - e.g. when Black professor gives praise to student, student focuses on their professional role, when Black professor criticises, they focus of racial status. So, protects perpetrator’s positive self-image.

System justification: justifies unequal distribution of resources

Kernel of truth: occasionally facilitates understanding of real-world differences
Creation of self-fulfilling prophecies

Question 20

What are examples of stereotypes and its relation to early acquisition and subsequent maintenance?

Answer 20

Stereotypes and prejudice acquired at early age and shaped throughout adulthood
By the time children are ⅚ years of age, they already display stereotyping based on a wide range of social categories
Pre-schoolers, for instance, tend to assume that a physically aggressive story character is male rather than female.

Question 21

What is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?

Answer 21

A phenomenon whereby observers bring about what they expect to perceive.

2 experiments conducted by Word and colleagues 1974: on the claim that Black applicants simply ‘do worse’ than white applicants in interviews
Results: white interviewees in non-immediate condition reciprocated with less immediacy behaviour, produced more speech errors and had less positive attitudes about the interviewer = came across more negative.

Question 22

What are the consequences for societies that group-based attitudes have?

Answer 22

Continuous debate what is just vs. unjust prejudice/stereotyping/discrimination
Discriminate sociality is typical for human life: nepotism (favouring kin), tribalism (favouring own group), sexism, racism
historical/cultural contexts determine which forms of discriminative sociality are deemed unjust: many forms of discriminate sociality considered normal - not seen as prejudice/discrimination.

Question 23

What are the strategies for prejudice reduction?

Answer 23

Common strategy 1: attempts to interrupt/reduce cultural transfer - in order to change stereotypic beliefs about pivotal social groups e.g. banning harmful gender stereotypes in ads.

Common strategy 2: facilitate contact between people across group boundaries - in order to induce person individuation rather than person categorisation e.g. intergroup contact.

Question 24

What study is an example of creating intergroup contact/friendship which reduced prejudice?

Answer 24

The Robbers Cave experiment by Sherif et al.