Task 6 summary

Define social categorisation

• Classifying people as part of a group

• based on shared attributions such as ethnicity, physical features

Distinguish between prejudice and discrimination (give two examples in society)

Prejudice: negative feeling towards members of a particular group

Discrimination: unjustified negative behaviour toward a person based on their membership to a group or social category

Examples include the basis of race, gender and ethnicity

three causes of prejudice explained

• Social influence: learnt from family, peers, friends, media. if the prejudice learnt is shown to be negative it can be taken on board by an individual

• Intergroup competition: competing for scarce but valued resources lead to seeing others as a threat and creating prejudice

• Social categorisation: unconsciously identifying people as being part of the in or out group leads to prejudice for those in the outgroup

• Just world phenomenon: assumptions that everything happens for a reason. dispositional attributions for outcomes of other people or make us feel people deserve bad things happen to them because the world is fair.

three ways to reduce prejudice

• intergroup contact: contact between opposing groups allows people to see the outgroup individuals

• superordinate goals: having goals both groups want to achieve but can only be achieved together

• mutual interdependance: when groups have to depend on one another to meet their goals -creates a co-dependant relationship

• Equal status contact: people from both groups who are of similiar status interacting in a situation where they are of equal footing

social identity theory

suggests how people develop a sense of self in terms of group membership

identify three mental processes for evaluating other according to tajfel and turners (1975) theory

social categorisation

social identity

social comparison

Cognitive dissonance

Mental discomfort Due to inconsistency between attitudes, beliefs and behaviours

Resulting in the altering of in either attitude, belief or

behaviour to reduce the discomfort

Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) investigated cognitive dissonance. Outline the difference in the procedure used for participants in the control group and the experimental groups

The control group were not asked to tell the waiting student that the experimental tasks were enjoyable/ lots of fun.

(Both/$1 and $20) experimental groups were instructed to tell the student/confederate in the waiting room that 1 the experiment was a lot of fun/enjoyable/interesting

Explain the limitations of the study with reference to generalisability to the population.

Results are not generalisable to the population/the study has low generalisability (1) The sample was made up of only males (1) From a single/first year course (1) The population would include females from other courses

Outline the tripartite model of attitude structure and provide an

example of each part related to environmental issues

Describe Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance

define belief

the mental acceptance of or conviction in the truth, reality, or validity of something, regardless of whether it has absolute factual proof