Chapter 3 - Stereotypes and Prejudice

Flashcards on Stereotypes and Prejudice

Prejudice

A hostile or negative attitude toward people based solely on their membership in a certain group.

Stereotypes

Categories leading to beliefs or generalizations about a group of people, where certain traits are assigned to all its members, regardless of actual variation among them.

Social Categorization

Categories are an adaptive mechanism humans use to make sense of the social world; this categorization is quick, effortless, and spontaneous.

Cognitive Miser

Process where humans save effort by taking shortcuts to provide needed information quickly.

Gender Stereotypes (Women)

Stereotypes that portray women as warm, empathic, emotional, and talkative.

Gender Stereotypes (Men)

Stereotypes that portray men as competent, agentic, emotionally-constrained, and sometimes aggressive.

Ambivalent Sexism

Hostile and benevolent sexism both legitimize discrimination against women.

Discrimination

Unjustified negative or harmful action toward a member of a group solely because of their membership in that group.

Microaggressions

Subtle put-downs, indignities, or actions that communicate negative or hostile messages to members of a marginalized group.

Shooter Bias

The tendency for White participants to be more likely to pull the trigger in a video game when a man is Black compared to when he is White, regardless of whether he is holding a gun.

Blatant Biases

Conscious beliefs, feelings, and behaviors that people are willing to admit, often openly favoring their own group over others.

Subtle Biases

Unexamined and sometimes unconscious biases with real consequences that can be ambiguous, ambivalent, automatic, and implicit.

Stereotype Content Model (SCM)

Model that categorizes stereotypes based on warmth (friendliness, trustworthiness, likability) and competence (capability, assertiveness, respect).

Implicit Association Test (IAT)

Measuring mistakes in categorization and speed of reaction to pairs of words as a test of associations between those; used to detect implicit biases.

Internalization of Stereotypes

Risk of people internalizing society’s views on the inferiority of one’s group.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

A prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, due to the terms of the prophecy itself.

Stereotype Threat / Social Identity Threat

Apprehension experienced by members of a group who worry that their behavior might confirm a cultural stereotype.

Origins of Prejudice - Three Main Sources

Socialization, motivational factors, and cognitive processes.

Social Origins of Prejudice

Authoritarian beliefs, culture and religion, and pressures and normative rules to conform.

Motivational Origins of Prejudice

Frustration and aggression, competition for scarce resources and realistic conflict theory, social identity theory, threats to self-esteem, and just world beliefs.

Cognitive Origins of Prejudice

Categorization as a by-product of normal thinking processes and illusory correlations between distinctive events and groups.

Illusory Correlations

The frequency of their co-occurrence of distinctive events and groups is overestimated.

Reducing Prejudice

Contact, cooperation, and interdependence.

Contact Hypothesis - Underlying Assumption

Contact leads to better relationships.

Contact Hypothesis - Conditions for Reducing Prejudice

Equal status of groups, shared common goals, interests, and interdependence, and contact supported by local customs, norms, law, and authorities.

Conflict Resolution

Shared goals, interdependence to reach those, equal status, friendly informal setting, exposure to multiple members of the other group, and support of equality by social norms/authorities.