Week 2 - Social Cognition and Prejudice

Question 1

According to Fiske & Taylor., (2013), what is social cognition?

Answer 1

“The study of how people make sense of other people and themselves, focusing on how ordinary people think and feel about others”.

Question 2

How do we typically make sense of others?

Answer 2

• by applying labels to them
• these labels can be very powerful

Question 3

What is the bottom-up process?

Answer 3

Trying to bring together different pieces of information.

Question 4

When the top-down process?

Answer 4

Identifies the big picture and all of its components.

Question 5

RE-WRITE Dual-process models:

Question 6

IMPRESSION FORMATION (re-write)

Question 7

What is the Elaboration likelihood model of persuasion?

Answer 7

• assume that individuals differ in how detailed they process content.
• there is a need for cognition e.g., “I find satisfaction in deliberating hard and for long hours”.

Question 7

What did Allison et al., (2017) study on persuasion?

Answer 7

• studied crowdfunding of business ventures, using the elaboration likelihood model as a framework.
• Turned 300+ real ventures into a funding experiment.

Question 8

What is prejudice according to Brown., (2010)?

Answer 8

Any attitude, emotion or behaviour towards members of a group, which directly or indirectly implies some negativity or antipathy towards this group.

Question 9

What is a stereotype?

Answer 9

Thoughts, propositions, and ideas made up about a certain label.

Question 10

According to Cuddy et al., (2008), what does a stereotype contain?

Answer 10

• the stuff that complements prejudice.
• based on rationally unsupported generalisations, and they can prevent us from seeing individuals for who they are.

Question 11

What is discrimination?

Answer 11

• making a difference between people based on their group membership.
• actual behavioural outcome of prejudice and stereotypes.

Question 12

What is unfair about prejudice and stereotypes?

Answer 12

• wrong inference of individual attributes
• denial of individual attributes

Question 13

What is a popular study in social psychology in association with the consequences of prejudice?

Answer 13

The London riots (2011)

Question 14

What are the consequences of prejudice at the level of the perceiver?

Answer 14

Readiness to respond to target according to stereotype content.

Question 15

What are the consequences of prejudice at the level of the victim?

Answer 15

-stereotypes overshadow social interactions and turn into self-fulfilling prophecies.
- “behavioural confirmation”: you treat people according to a stereotype, and they act accordingly (Synder et al., 1997)

Question 16

Developmental explanations of prejudice, according to Crocetti et al., (2021):

Answer 16

• the interplay of education, upbringing, and personality.
• prejudice levels stabilised by adolescence.
• teenage years is typically when we emerge will full view.

Question 17

Cognitive explanations of prejudice:

Answer 17

• schemata for objects, scripts for situations, stereotypes for groups.
• function approach

Question 18

Social explanations of prejudice, according to Pratto et al., (1999):

Answer 18

‘The Social Dominance Theory’
- powerful instrument to cement inequalities in a society.

Question 19

What is the Social Dominance Theory, according to Pratto et al., (1995)?

Answer 19

• group-based inequalities that are maintained through 3 types of intergroup behaviours (aggregated individual discrimination, behavioural asymmetry, and institutional discrimination)

Question 20

What are the behaviours in the Social Dominance Theory fed by, and fed back to?

Answer 20

• hierarchy-enhancing e.g., racist ideologies.
• hierarchy-attenuating: e.g., socialism, multiculturalism.

Question 21

What are two study examples of explicit prejudice measures?

Answer 21

• f-scale (Adorno et al., 1950)
• symbolic racism 2000 scale (Henry & Sears., 2002)

Question 22

What did the F-scale suggest? (Adorno et al., 1950)

Answer 22

“Homosexuals are hardly better than criminal and ought to be severely punished”.
“Young people sometimes get rebellious ideas, but as they grow up they ought to get over them and settle down”.

Question 23

What did the Symbolic racism 2000 scale suggest? (Henry & Sears., 2002):

Answer 23

“Over the past few years, blacks have gotten more economically than they deserve”
“It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well of as whites”

Question 24

Implicit Association Test (Greenwald et al., 1989):

Answer 24

• related to priming procedures
• makes use of semantic associations in memory
• ppts respond to 2 different social categories and to positive/negative attributes in a reaction time task
• if implicit association exists, then ppt should respond faster when category and attribute share the same response key