lesson 9: minority inclusion in diverse societies

minority groups

groups in society that have, in some way, a lower status, that are disadvantaged of stigmatized in society

• these are often also numerical minorities, but not necessarily

• used to denote some form of disadvantage or lower status

majority groups

relatively privileged, advantaged group members (that are usually the numerical majority)

inclusion

used to denote 2 sets of outcomes (traditionally researched separately)

1. Intergroup harmony

2. Support for social change towards equality

intergroup harmony

o   Outcomes like attitudes towards other groups, orientation in general about interacting with them (avoiding or seeking contact?)

o   How do we feel about these groups? How do we live together in a relatively harmonious or conflictual society (segregated or having contact?)?

support for social change towards equality

o   Any range of actions or support for actions that would ultimately achieve greater equality in society

o   Examples: protesting, signing demonstrations, also just supporting others or policies

o   Often referred to as collective action

intergroup contact experiences

-        People from different groups that come in contact with each other

-        This is one of the most widely studied concepts in social psychology

intergroup contact hypothesis

contact between groups will improve intergroup relations, in particular when certain conditions are met in the context of the interaction (optimal conditions of contact):

·       Equal status

·       Cooperation (or a least the absence of conflict)

·       Common goals

·       Institutional support

positive contact

-        Many minority group members regularly experience pos contact in their daily life’s

-        These pos experiences can range from casual friendly interactions and encounters to really intimate and enduring friendships and higher quality contact

negative contact

-        Minority group member in particular experience neg contact

-        Their minority status often makes them targets for neg or hostile treatment

social identity approach

-        People derive self-worth in part from their membership in valued social groups

-        When one perceives ones in-group as devalued in an intergroup setting or society at large → this triggers social identity threat 

negative intergoup contact

triggers social identity threat, associated with:

o   Anxiety, discomfort, vigilance

o   Compensatory strategies to ward off neg treatment

Also when they feel at risk

positive intergroup contact

can convey to minority group members that their minority identity is valued and that they’re seen as equals (friendship in particular)

o   Feeling of belonging

o   Reduced anxiety

o   Better school achievement

contact

more than just casual, fleeting, friendly interactions

intergroup contact

often seen as golden standard of perfect contact

o   If someone is your friend, they should threat you as equal, you shouldn’t have fights …

o   But, especially for minorities, friendships are great and these things are true, but your friend might still make jokes about minority groups or drop micro-aggression into the conversation…  they can still doubt if they’re seen as equals

neg contact

can cast a long shadow, overshadowing friendly interactions and thus impacting the contact orientation of minority group members and by extension their social inclusion in intergroup contexts

school diversity approaches

refer to the institutional values and rules that govern how different groups interact within the school and that create more of less supportive and inclusive diversity changes

Valuing, ignoring or rejecting cultural differences

multicultural approach

valuing

seeing different identities as an asset and respecting and valuing them

colorblindness

ignoring

most common in the US, “we don’t see color, even in the face of unequal treatment → there can’t be different treatment, because nobody sees color”

assimilation

rejecting

mandate that you have to speak a certain language at school, banning the headscarf …

(un)equal treatment of students

o   To what extend is there a focus on that everybody should be treated equally?

o   Policies that focus on equal treatment often covary with the multicultural policy, but in principle they could be separate

experiencing discrimination

at any point (whether it was in an in- or decreasing way), was always harmful for school outcomes as example

equal treatment

“the rules are applied equally to all students”

multiculturalism

“in my school, different cultures and religions are treated with respect” or “in my school, they take strong action against racism and discrimination”

positive diversity climate

minority perceptions that unequal treatment in condemned and cultural differences is recognized/valued

these climates are beneficial, they were associated with higher school belonging and also more task-engagement (being motivated to work and study) and they were also associated with kind of buffering or minimizing the impact of discrimination when it occurred

person-centered methods

identify latent subgroups within a population or sample (less common way to look at things in social psychology)

here: what kind of actions are people taking?

who are allies?

• Lowest level of prejudice

• Most likely to perceive that Muslims face systemic disadvantage in Belgium

• Have friend who are Muslim and/or have an immigrant background

• Most likely to have and immigrant background themselves

level of prejudice

etnic bias

difference in how they rate Belgian versus Muslim people

Sedative effect of pos intergroup contact

minority experiences of pos contact can undermine their support for social change

o   Draws attention away from inequality or make it seem less possible (“I have great friends, everybody treats me fine, so maybe inequality isn’t such a big problem in society or for me personal”)

o   Leads to (false) expectations of fair treatment

negative intergroup contant and support for change

Minority experiences of neg contact can promote their support for social change (makes you more aware or angry …)

omitted-variable problem

• imagine you’re researching lung-cancer and you find an association/link between drinking a lot of coffee and lung-cancer → you might conclude that there’s a neg link between them and we should drink less coffee to prevent lung-cancer

• This ignores the effect that maybe in this sample the people that are drinking coffee are also the people who are smoking a lot of cigarettes

• So it’s actually the cigarette smoking that’s causing the lung-cancer

• But if you take smoking out of the model (if you don’t consider that), you might get to a completely different conclusion

This is what can happen when we only look at pos interactions instead of also the neg ones, especially for minority groups

system-fairness beliefs

beliefs that the system/society one finds themselves in is fair

palliative effect of system justification

Benefits of looking at the bright side of life: reduced threat and uncertainty, increased life satisfaction …

One of the mechanisms that can explain that when you have pos relations, more friendships …, you come to see the society as fairer and therefore you act less

system fairness beliefs and negative contact

• The more you had neg experiences, the more you support social change

• But limited evidence was found that this worked via system fairness (only found in 1 of the samples

system fairness beliefs and positive contact

a bit more complicated

• the more pos contact you had, the fairer you thought society was and this indirectly affected supporting social change (less support for social change)

• Directly: both pos and neg associations between pos contact and support for social change, depending on the group, the country and depending on the outcome

positive intergroup contact

as a tool for intergroup harmony, and for social change:

-        Reliability associated with majority support for social change

-        Doesn’t reliable undermine and may promote minority support for social change

intergroup context

What kind of contact you have matters, what kind of friends you have

• Majority friends who are willing to discuss and denounce inequality do NOT undermine minority support for social change

top-down norms

policies in the country, region … you live in

• They inform intergroup attitudes and behaviors directly

• it’s also associated with the experiences we have

more inclusive/equal policies

• more equal access to rights for migrants … are associated with more pos attitudes among the population

• you’re simply more likely to have more pos and more equal interactions