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Prejudice
Prejudice and Discrimination
 | Historically, attempts to explain
prejudice and discrimination have come from poets, philosophers, and historians.
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| Current attempts to understand prejudice
in social psychology have involved the social, interpersonal, and cognitive roots of
prejudice.
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Prejudice and Social Cognition
| Prejudice is defined as negative
attitudes toward the members of specific social groups.
 | A prejudicial attitude is linked with
evaluation.
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| Prejudice may be a blanket condemnation
or rejection.
 | "Dogs drool, cats rule."
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| Sexism is prejudice that is based on
gender.
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| Prejudice is at least partially an
outcome of using mental shortcuts in evaluating people because of limited processing
capacity, or social cognition.
| A schema is a type of mental
organizational framework.
| John believes that women are bad at math
tasks. He tends to notice when a woman fails at a math-oriented task, but rarely notices
success. He is also good at bringing the failures to mind. He is using a prejudicial
schema.
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| Attitudes consists of feelings, beliefs,
and behavior.
| The affective component of prejudice
involves the negative emotions of prejudiced people in the presence of disliked groups.
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| Most people tend to focus on the
affective component of prejudice.
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Discrimination
| Prejudice is associated with attitudes,
while discrimination is associated with behavior.
| Negative actions directed toward members
of a social group.
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| Discrimination is best described as
actions resulting from prejudicial beliefs, from avoidance to exclusion, to aggression.
| You may have discrimination without
prejudice or vice-versa.
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| Excessively praising a minimal
accomplishment is a subtle form of prejudice.
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Tokenism
| Tokenism is allowing members of a
specific group to participate in an activity or event solely to satisfy requirements of
diversity.
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| Chacko found that women who
believed that they had been hired because of their gender had lower job satisfaction.
| Others found that persons hired for these
reasons receive lower performance ratings from others. Because others tend to attribute
the achievements to special hiring and not to hard work. "Perhaps they aren’t
capable of the job."
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| This is particularly damaging because it
gives an excuse for bigoted people to deny prejudice.
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Reverse Discrimination
| Treating members of a group favorably
based on their membership in the group.
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| Chidester found that students more
favorably evaluated African-Americans than Caucasians in "get acquainted"
situations.
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| Fajardo's study (1985;
evaluations of essays by black and white students), showed how reverse discrimination can
backfire.
| White teachers were asked to grade essays
which were poor, moderate, or excellent. They rated the essays supposedly done by blacks
as more favorable. Strongest if they were of moderate quality, with uncertainty.
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| One problem with reverse discrimination
is that it can lead to a false sense of ability which is later shattered.
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Realistic Conflict Theory
| Realistic conflict says that prejudice
arises from competition for scarce resources.
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| Studies suggest that persistent
competition leads to negative portrayals of competitors.
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| Hoviland and Sears showed a correlation
between lynching of blacks and negative economic conditions, demonstrating group conflict.
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Us-versus-them Effect
| Social categorization is the process
of dividing the world into distinct groups, ingroups, and outgroups. This is demonstrated
often.
| Race, religion, occupation, and income
level are examples of social categories.
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| The ingroup is viewed in positive terms
while the outgroup is viewed in negative terms. This is the ultimate attribution error.
| We are more likely to take account of
external circumstances for members of the ingroup.
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| One reason is that people enhance their
self-esteem by identifying with particular groups, and one can view one's own group as
superior.
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| To avoid becoming prejudiced through
social categorization, belong to as many different types of groups as possible.
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Social Learning Theory
| Children learn prejudice from parents and
peers and continue to express prejudice because they are directly rewarded for doing so.
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| Social norms are rules that
suggest what actions are not appropriate in a given group.
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| Influences upon social learning include
parents, friends, mass media.
| Ex., Alice is washing the dishes and asks
her brother to help by drying up. Her brother Bobby says that dishes are women's work,
which makes their father smile. Bobby sees the smile and walks away.
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Stereotypes
| A stereotype is a cognitive framework
consisting of knowledge about specific social groups. It is a type of a schema.
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| Fosters prejudice because information
that is inconsistent with the stereotype is harder to retain.
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| Information relevant to a stereotype is
processed more quickly than information unrelated to it.
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| Stereotype becomes self-confirming.
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Illusory Correlation
| The tendency to perceive a relationship
between two variables where none exists.
| If 10% of Group A (200 members) are found
to be criminals, and 10% of Group B (10,000 members), evidence suggests that you will form
less favorable impressions of Group A.
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| African-Americans and crime are linked
(with a higher than actual correlation) because being African-American and committing
crimes are both relatively infrequent events.
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| Note that in the U. S. minorities do
commit higher proportions of violent crimes than predicted on the basis of these numbers.
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| Illusionary correlations leads to an
assumption that it is even higher. Also, this ignores the many other factors present
(poverty, growing up in a violent environment).
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| To circumvent, promote thorough and
extensive processing of social information and paying attention to group size.
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Affective States and Illusory
Correlation
Affective states affect the extent to
which people make illusory correlation.
| Videos of positive (funny), negative
(child abuse) and neutral (volcano) create affective states.
| Two social groups, A and B. Both have 2
good to 1 bad behaviors, but there are twice as many sentences written about A.
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| Those is a neutral mood reported liking
members of A more than B, and perceived stronger relationships between group membership
and the frequency of desirable and undesirable behaviors.
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| If they are in a bad or good mood they
are less likely to make illusory correlations, because they have been found to interfere
with ongoing cognitive activity. This is suggested by cognitive interpretation.
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| Ellen has just received a low grade on a
test, while Sue has received a high grade. Harry got an average grade, which he expected.
Harry is most likely to make an illusory correlation.
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Outgroups and Ingroups
| Outgroup homogeneity refers to the
perception that members of a group, not your own, are relatively similar to one another.
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| Ingroup differentiation hypothesis is the
perception that members of one's own group are much more varied than other groups.
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| Outgroup homogeneity perpetuate
discrimination, stereotypes, and prejudice.
| You see those older or younger than
yourself as more similar to one another in terms of personal traits.
| generation gap
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| People tend to be more accurate in
recognizing the faces of strangers from their own group than strangers from another racial
group. Stronger among whites.
| You all look alike!
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Parents and Prejudice
| Majority of evidence suggests that
prejudice is learned.
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| Discouraging child role models from
expressing prejudicial beliefs or behaviors is one technique for reducing prejudice. The
difficulty of this is that few role models believe that they are prejudiced.
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| Evidence shows that prejudice is harmful
to prejudiced people as well as their targets, through stress from the unrealistic worries
about the perceived ill intentions of the outgroup
| Ex., Harris study demonstrated that boys
who believed that their play partner was hyperactive enjoyed their play period less.
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Contact Hypothesis
| As contact between groups increases,
prejudice decreases by countering the illusion of outgroup homogeneity.
| Increased contact leads to increased
perceptions of similarity.
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| Large amounts of disconfirming evidence
will alter a stereotype.
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| Increased contact may help counter the
illusion of outgroup homogeneity.
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| Conditions:
| The interacting groups must be similar in
social, economic, or task-related status.
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| The groups need to cooperate.
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| Contact is informal and individual.
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| Setting in which existing norms favor
group equality.
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| The persons involved must view one
another as typical of their respective groups.
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| Contact between groups that differ in
social or task-related status may not be beneficial because communication is difficult.
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"Us" Versus
"Them" in the Gaertner et al. (1989) study
| Group boundaries are flexible.
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| Recategorization is the process of
shifting group boundaries under certain situations.
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| Gaertner found that the most effective
way to remove prejudice against other individuals is to have all the individuals work
together as a team - common ingroup identity model.
| When people view themselves as members of
a group rather than as individuals, increased positive contacts are facilitated.
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| Weakening us-them boundaries leads to
reduced prejudice.
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| Cooperative interaction increases
the tendency of the two groups to perceive themselves as one entity and reduced feelings
of bias toward the former outgroup.
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Attribute-driven and Category-driven
Processing
| Category-driven processing is the
tendency to think of others in terms of their group membership. Stereotyping is one
example.
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| One way to reduce the impact of
stereotypes is to encourage people to think carefully about other people (attribute-driven
processing).
| Chris believes that men are naturally bad
at math problems. Rewarding Chris for correctly guessing how well a sample of men
will do on a math problem would decrease category-driven processing and reduce the
stereotype.
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| Chris would have told you that women
cannot do math problems, until a reward was offered for the most accurate guess at how
well a sample of women would do on math problems. Chris did not make use of the stereotype
because there was a reason to think carefully about the individual women.
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| Outcome-biased inferences are inferences
about characteristics that are based on the result of an action, rather than the action.
They may lead to a lessening of stereotypes if the action outcomes run counter to a
prevailing stereotype.
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| Affirmative programs may decrease
stereotypes about disadvantaged groups because they improve the action outcomes for that
group.
| A change in the outcomes actually
experienced by the stereotyped groups may serve to undermine the stereotypes and weaken
prejudice.
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Affirmative Action Programs and
Stereotypes
| Affirmative action programs may not
weaken stereotypes.
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| Publicity may call people’s
attention to the possibility that different criteria are applied for different groups.
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| Therefore, the positive outcomes are not
a consequence of the groups and this effect is reduced.
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Sexism
| In many cultures, the traits of
decisiveness, confidence and ambition are seen as most representative of males,
| While females and males are both viewed
in terms of positive and negative traits, females are generally viewed more negatively
than males.
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| Males are more aggressive and the two
sexes use different techniques for influencing others.
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| Stereotypes vastly overstate the number
and size of male-female differences.
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| Viewing women in terms of expected traits
is harmful to them because traits assigned to women are often incompatible with traits
thought necessary in valued jobs.
| Women are most often harmed in job
applications because they are not viewed as having leadership traits.
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| Van Vianen and Willemsen studied
job candidates.
| Successful female job candidates tended
to be rated as having traits viewed as masculine.
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| The masculine-feminine dimension is a
more important factor for job interviewers when the candidate is female.
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Women and Jobs
| In many countries, legal discrimination
against women has been replaced by subtle discrimination.
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| Women are "handicapped" in job
situations by having lower career expectations.
| Women tend to express lower
self-confidence.
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| Research on attributions of
achievement about male and female job success indicates that success by females is
often viewed as luck.
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| Leadership by females is often viewed
with negative affect because it contradicts popular gender stereotypes and is unexpected.
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| The women leaders received more negative
nonverbal cues from other members of the group, such as contrasting facial reactions to
identical actions by female and male leaders.
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