9 - stereotyping + prejudice

A of stereotype + prejudice

affect (prejudice) → ppl’s feelings abt social groups they interact with

B of stereotype + prejudice

behaviour (discrim) → ppl’s unjustified negative action towards a group member simply due to their group membership

C of stereotypes + prejudice

cognition (stereotypes) → ppl’s pos/neg beliefs about social groups

why do ppl stereotype?

Fiske & Taylor, 1984 → we’re ‘cognitive misers’, we receive a lot of sensory info and to quickly process it we think of ppl as group members rather than individuals

social identity

collection of diff group memberships (e.g., nationality, race, religion)

social identity theory

ppl want to belong to “good” groups as it enhances self-esteem and social value.

issues w/modern racism scale (McConahay et al, 1981)

it’s a self-report measure and ppl will be dishonest as they don’t want to be perceived negatively. they want to remain socially desirable

IAT (Greenwald et al 1998)

ppl have automatic associations w/white = good, black = bad (congruent). when shown faces and told to identify by clicking these options it’s a fast RT. when this is flipped black = good, white = bad (incongruent) RT is slower

concerns abt IAT validity

• weak self-report correlation → ppl may be unaware of unconscious bias

• test-retest reliability → ppl score differently when taking test again

• predictive validity → doesn’t accurately predict real life behaviour

brain regions involved in prejudice

• FFA: identifying race from faces

• amygdala → learned neg evaluation of racial outgroup

• ACC → conflict b/t neg racial attitude vs. social norm

• DLPFC → suppression of negative evaluation of racial outgroup

Golby et al (2001): remembering faces (fMRI)

• Black ppl better at remembering both Black + White faces. white ppl barely remembered Black faces

• greater FFA activation for ingroup faces

N170 (Bentin et al., 1996)

an EEG signal component that reflects the neural processing of faces. reflects FFA activity (Horovitz et al., 2004)

example of EEG study that looked at racial prejudice

Krosch & Amodio (2019) scarcity study. looked at N170 component as well

Hermann et al., (2017)

found that N170 increased FFA activation to outfroup faces. suggesting it activates to smth different

Gimenez-Fernandes et al (2020)

when ppl held > prejudice towards outgroups, it increases N170 amp compared to when they had < prejudice

Phelps et al (2000): IAT & racial prejudice → experiment 1

• pps didIAT → had slower RT for incongruent trials

• showed white pps Black and White faces in a scanner and played a shocking to startle them. startle response was stronger when shown Black faces

• amygdala activation to Black faces positively correlated w/: IAT + startle response

Phelps et al (2000): amygdala + racial prejudice → experiment 2

found thay amygdala activity is learned negative evaluation of Black men. but when shown familiar and well-liked Black men there was no diff in amygdala activation b//t Black vs. White faces

Wheeler & Fiske (2005) → amygdala + racial prejudice (fMRI)

found that racial prejudice is associated with increased amygdala activity, reflecting emotional responses and social evaluations that can occur unconsciously.

why is racial prejudice a difficult topic to study?

• Behavioural measures can be unreliable

• Amygdala’s function is well known, but its activity depends on: goal, motivation, experience

• inconsistent results across studies

• Carefully designed experiments with well-controlled stimuli are needed