week 5 - prejudice Flashcards
What is prejudice?
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)
What is social discrimination?
explicit displays of negative or disadvantaging behaviour towards particular social groups or their members
what are the two approaches to prejudice via social psychology, alongside their related theories?
Individualistic approaches
- the authoritarian personality theory
- social dominance orientation
intergroup relations approaches
- realistic conflict theory
- social identity theory
What is prejudiced personality?
people with negative attitudes towards one outgroup also tend to have negative attitudes towards other groups (allport, 1954)
two facets of personality
- the authoritarian personality
- social dominance orientation
What is Authoritarian Personality Theory? (Adorno et al., 1950)
- human behaviour: a dynamic interplay of conscious and unconscious motivators
- 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 parent
resolution
negative feelings are displaced on to weaker groups (‘scapegoats’)
- scapegoating: the tendency to blame someone else for one’s own problems
parents (authority figures) loved and respected
- personality syndrome: reflected in a person’s social attitudes, rigid regard for social conventions, simplistic thinking etc
What theory is Authoritarian Personality Theory influenced by?
Psychodynamic theory
How is the authoritarian personality measured?
Via the California F-sale (Adorno et al., 1947) - personality test
Measures 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)
What are some limitations of using the California F-scale as a personality test?
- use of unrepresentative samples
- interviewer bias in the clinic interviews
What is Right-Wing Authoritarianism (Altmeyer, 1981)
- 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
What is Social Dominance Orientation? (Pratto et al., 1994)
- the SDO scale measures acceptance of and desire for group based social hierarchy
- people with higher SDO tend to be more sexist, racist, and prejudiced towards immigrants
- consists of 14 items, on a very negative (1) to very positive (7) scale:
for example:
- ‘some people are just more worthy than others’
- ‘this country would be better off if we cared less about how equal all people were’
what are Legitimizing Myths?
‘social order is maintained by discrimination (including institutional discrimination)
- this is supported by legitimizing myths - those values, beliefs or cultural ideologies that provide moral and intellectual justification for group inequality and opression (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999)
What is explicit/implicit prejudice and how is it measured?
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
- assessed via implicit association test
What are some limitations of individualistic approaches to assessing prejudice?
- 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
what are intergroup relations?
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)
What is ethnocentrism?
- the particular relationships between social groups influences the attitudes and behaviour of its members
- ethnocentrism: the tendency to judge ingroup attributes as superior to those of the outgroup and, more generally, to judge outgroups from an ingroup perspective (Spears & Tausch, 2020)