week 5

Question 1

Prejudice based upon

Answer 1

Race
Ethnicity
Gender
Sexuality
Nationality
Age
Ability
Class

Question 2

Prejudice

Answer 2

antipathy, or a derogatory social attitude, towards particular social groups or their members, combined with the feeling and expression of negative affect.
An attitude or orientation that devalues a group

Question 3

Social discrimination

Answer 3

explicit display of negative or disadvantaging behaviour towards particular social groups or their members.

Question 4

Origins

Answer 4

Initial focus on racial differences in the U.S.

Between the 20s and 30s, there is a shift from race differences to race prejudice:
Focus on the discriminators.
Concern with prejudice reduction.

Prejudice is one of the problems of our times for which everyone has a theory, but no one has an answer (Adorno et al., 1950).

Question 5

Nature of prejudice

Answer 5

Ethnic prejudice is an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization. It may be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group as a whole, or toward an individual because he is a member of that group.’
(Allport, 1954; p. 9).

Question 6

Social psychological explanations

Answer 6

Individualistic: the authoritarian personality theory- social dominance orientation
Intergroup relation approach: realistic conflict theory-social identity theory

Question 7

Prejudiced personality

Answer 7

People with negative attitudes toward one outgroup also tend to have negative attitudes toward other groups

Question 8

Authoritarian personality theory

Answer 8

Highly influenced by the psychodynamic theory.
Human behaviour – a dynamic interplay of conscious and unconscious motivations.
Prejudice as a manifestation of a particular pathological personality.
Authoritarian parenting:
Extremely strict parents.
Children concerned with obedience to parents.
Conformity to social norms.
Conflicting feelings of admiration and aggression towards the parents.

Question 9

Resolution

Answer 9

Negative feelings are displaced onto weaker groups (‘scapegoats’).
Scapegoating – Tendency to blame someone else for one’s own problems(Baumeister & Vohs, 2007).
Parents (authority figures) loved and respected.
Personality syndrome – Reflected in a person’s social attitudes, rigid regard for social conventions, simplistic thinking, etc.

Question 10

Measuring the authoritarian personality

Answer 10

The California F-scale(Adorno et al., 1947) – personality test.

People’s susceptibility to fascist ideas:
Authoritarian submission (high degree of submissiveness to authority).

Conventionalism (desire to adhere to ingroup norms).

Authoritarian aggression (intolerance of those who violate conventional values).

Several limitations, including:
Use of unrepresentative samples.
Interviewer bias in the clinic interviews.

Question 11

Right-wing authoritarianism

Answer 11

Research on F-scale declined in the 60s and 70s.

Reviewed in the 80s, with the Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale.

The social environment reinforces obedience, conventionalism, and aggression.

Personality variable – still widely used to predict social attitudes (e.g., support for capital punishment) and prejudice towards social groups.

Question 12

Renewed interest in individual differences in prejudice

Answer 12

Social Dominance Theory: All human societies tend to be structured as systems of group-based hierarchies (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999).

Universal tendency (in stable societies) to be organized hierarchically (one social group holds disproportionate power over the others).

Question 13

Social dominance orientation (Pratto et al., 1994)

Answer 13

SDO scale measure acceptance of and desire for group based social hierarchy.

People with higher SDO tend to be more sexist, racist and prejudiced towards immigrants.

14 items, on a very negative (1) to very positive (7) scale:
‘Some people are just more worthy than others’.
‘This country would be better off if we cared less about how equal all people were’.

Question 14

Legitimizing myths

Answer 14

Social order is maintained by discrimination
This is supported by legitimizing myths – those values, beliefs, or cultural ideologies that provide moral and intellectual justification for group inequality and oppression

Question 15

Measuring explicit/implicit prejudice

Answer 15

explicit: Collection of attitudes that the holder is aware of having and is able to express consciously.

Assessed via a self-report measure such as a survey.

implicit: Collection of attitudes that the holder is not consciously aware of having it.

Implicit Association Test.

Question 16

Limitations of individualistic approaches

Answer 16

Methodological individualism – subjective individual motivation to explain a social phenomena.

Assume that individuals are prejudiced (e.g., a personality trait), failing to consider the role of social contexts.

Ignores the intergroup context in which the prejudice is embedded.

Question 17

Intergroup context

Answer 17

Intergroup relations refer to relations between two or more groups and their respective members. Whenever individuals belonging to one group interact, collectively or individually, with another group or its members in terms of their group identifications, we have an instance of intergroup behaviour. (Sherif, 1962; p.5).

Question 18

Prejudice is directed at groups

Answer 18

The particular relationship between social groups influences the attitudes and behaviour of its members (Sherif, 1966).

Ethnocentrism – The tendency to judge ingroup attributes as superior to those of the outgroup and, more generally, to judge outgroups from an ingroup perspective

Question 19

Realistic Conflict Theory

Answer 19

Supported by The Robbers Cave Experiment.
Intergroup conflict – competition over limited resources.
Bringing hostile groups together is not enough to reduce intergroup prejudice.
Superordinate goals – which can only be achieved by both groups acting together.

Question 21

Minimal Group Paradigm

Answer 21

The mere categorization in terms of an ingroup and an outgroup created instances of discrimination between the members of the different groups (Tajfel, Flament, Billig, & Bundy, 1971).

MGP – Minimal conditions that are required for discrimination to occur between groups.

Question 22

Social Identity Theory

Answer 22

SIT ‘starts’ from the realistic intergroup conflict theory.

Attempts to explain intergroup relations (attitudes and behaviours) as a function of group-based self-definitions.

SI is the part of our self-concept corresponding to group memberships and the value and emotional significance of those memberships (Spears & Tausch, 2015).

Question 23

How does SIT explain prejudice?

Answer 23

Social categorization: people categorize themselves as belonging to certain social groups.

Social identification: identification with those categories.

Social comparison: through social comparison, people evaluate their salient in-group relative to relevant out-groups.

Positive distinctiveness: people seek to maintain positive social identities. In-group bias.

Question 24

Perceived Identity Threat

Answer 24

Perceived threats distinctiveness may lead to increased efforts at differentiation.

The perception of threat is what is important.
Realistic threats: to the ingroup’s power, resources, or well-being.
Symbolic threats: to the ingroup’s values, identity, or way of life. (Stephan, Ybarra, & Rios, 2015)

Question 25

Existential Threat

Answer 25

Group threats can be existential, encompassing the fear of group annihilation (Reicher et al., 2008; Portice & Reicher, 2018).

Collective-level concern for the ingroup’s present and future existence as a main drive of anti-immigrant attitudes (Hirschberger et al., 2016).
Threats to culture, symbols, beliefs…

Question 26

Potentialities and limits of SIT

Answer 26

SIT as a starting point for understanding individual experience, attitudes and behaviour in terms of the person’s membership in social groupings.

Shows how group membership can lead to negative behaviour (e.g., prejudice), but…

It does not fully explain the criteria we use to distinguish the groups.
It cannot explain the meaning we give to these distinctions.
It does not explain how multiple identities interact, and new identities are created.
It neglects how identity construction is influenced by social context and power relations.

Question 27

New’ racism: the denial of prejudice

Answer 27

Modern racism
Symbolic racism
Aversive racism & Subtle racism

Deeply held prejudices conflict with more inclusive norms.

‘New’ racism is not directly expressed but might appeal to widely shared norms.

Racism is simultaneously expressed and denied (Billig, 2012).

Question 28

Ideological and rhetorical aspects

Answer 28

Propose to look at “common places”, or those everyday phrases which express values and ideologies (Billig, 1985; 1987; 2012).

Advanced justification – speaker seeks to deflect criticism, but also lay claim to membership of a moral community of the unprejudiced.

Claim to rational discourse and an implicit defence against any criticism of being irrational.

This semantic shift should not be interpreted as indicating a decline in nationalism or racism.

Question 29

Micro-aggressions

Answer 29

75% of Black Americans reported daily discrimination (APA, 2016)
Micro-aggression – can be intentional or unintentional
Three forms (Sue et al., 2007):
Micro-assaults
Micro-invalidations
Micro-insults
Microaggressions are cumulative in nature
Regular experience of microaggressions have multiple negative effects on wellbeing and life outcomes (Salvatore & Shelton, 2007; Nadal et al., 2014)

Question 30

Micro-interventions (Sue et al., 2019)

Answer 30

Goals of micro-interventions:
Make the “invisible” visible
Disarm the microaggression
Educate the offender
Seek external support when needed

Question 31

The contact hypothesis

Answer 31

Contact between members of opposing groups is likely to be the most effective way to reduce prejudice (Allport, 1954).
Seems to be particularly effective in combating prejudice based on disability (Paluck et al., 2019)
But… Might contact also increase prejudice? When is contact effective in reducing prejudice?

Question 32

Optimal conditions

Answer 32

Acquaintance potential: contact must allow relationships to develop, Increase knowledge of outgroup, Positive relationships are rewarding
Equal status: equal status during the intergroup contact, Contact between individuals of similar social status
Cooperation: contact activity should involve working together
Mutual benefit, the outcome must be positive
Normative climate: it occurs in a supportive climate, contact should be supported by authorities, power to promote change

Question 33

Imagined Contact

Answer 33

Imagined contact encourages positive intergroup behaviour

Meta-analysis shows evidence that this approach is especially effective in children (Miles & Crisp, 2013)

Useful in hostile or segregated contexts.

Can be implemented easily.

Small effects reported (Brown & Paterson, 2016)

Question 34

Extended (vicarious) contact

Answer 34

Based on contact hypothesis but does not involve face-to-face contact.

Indirect cross-group experience

Extended contact reduces intergroup anxiety.

Meta-analysis shows evidence of this approach (Zhou et al., 2019).

But, research has suggested it only works when a member of the “outgroup is already known

Question 35

VR interventions

Answer 35

Virtual reality is a promising new form of intervention against prejudiced beliefs (see Tassanari et al., 2022 for review)

Example: Reducing negative attitudes towards those with psychosis (Formosa at al., 2018).

Simulate positive symptoms of psychosis
Measure pre and post knowledge, attitudes and empathy
Results: Higher scores post-test across all three measures

Whilst useful VR can also increase prejudice (Stelzman & Scheiferdecker, 2021)