EXAM 3 SOCIOLOGY

Prejudice

Attitude towards people based on group membership

-in relation to specific social identities

-prejudice can be positive

Social identity

Part of our identity that stems from our membership in social groups

-Examples: Race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, gender, sec, secual orientation, national origin, first language, disability, age, religious or spiritual affiliation (from circle)

-others are weight, etc…

Identity circle

1. Idntities you think about most often

2. Identities you think about least often

3. Your own identities you would like to learn more about

4. Identities that have the strongest effect on how you perceive yourself

5. Identities that have the greatest affect on how others perceive you

Abby’s identity

White, scottish-american, middle class, cis female, lesbian, english-speaking, able bodied, 22-year old, agnostic woman

3 components of prejudice

1. Prejudice; affective

2. Discrimination; behavioral

3. Stereotypes: cognitive

Explicit attitudes

Attitudes that we consciously endorse and can easily report

Implicit attitudes

Attitudes that are involuntary, uncontrollable, and at times unconscious

Implicit association test (IAT)

the speed of which we cateogrize positive and negative reactions to target groups

-Speed reflects the link between group membership and evaluations (an attitude)

Which of the following best illustrates an implicit

When Randi experiences a flash of discomfort around her lesbian friends

Discrimination

Differential, often negative, actions direct toward people in different social groups

Implicit prejudice in high stakes situation

Automatic vs. Controlled thinking (Eberhardt)

Ambivalent Sexism (Glick and Fiske) study

Theory that prejudice toward men and women consists of both negative and positive ideologies

-prejudice can be seemingly positive

Benevolent sexism example

Men holding a door→ women are special and the caregivers and that we are superior to them and need extra special attention to care for them

Hostile sexism

-Most women fail to appreciate all that men do for them

-Women seek to gain power by getting control over men

-Men act like babies when they are sick

-When men act to “help” women, they are often trying to prove they are better than women

Benevolent sexism examples

-Women should be cherished and protected by men

-Many women have a quality of purity that few men possess

-Men are more willing to take risks than women

-Every woman needs a male partner who will cherish her

idea that women and children are frail and a little helpless. Although positive, can predict discrimination increases (?)

Sexism within a country predicts discrimination against women in that country

benevolent sexism is correlated with gender equity

A benevolent sexist would endorse which of the following statements?

“Women should stay home because they are too precious and sweet to waste on the working world”

stereotypes

Beliefs and expectations we hold about what members of different social groups are like

May be: Accurate or inaccurate, positive or negative, agreed or rejected by members of the group.

A stereotype may be accurate (averages)

Self-fulfilling prophecy

Muntoni and Retelsdorf study

-Behavioral confirmation; two people where one person has an expectation, acts a certain way so the other person fulfulls the expectation. (girls are better at reading)

-Helps us think about how the stereotype creates a difference

Consequences of stereotypes

Study that judge individual group members consistent with stereotypes

undergraduate students majoring in edcuation watched video vignettes of an elemenary child acting aggressively

-IV: Children’s race DV: Person rated the child’s hostility

-RESULTS: Child who was black is perceived as having a higher hostilitu rating (Likert five point scale)

Stereotype threat

A disruptive concern, when facing a negative stereotype, that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype

-concern harms performance and the stereotype is fulfilled

-Example: woman going to parallel park → causes woman to park poorly

Do you think that the teachers realized they were judging the targets consisten with race stereotypes

common answer: NO

-It is unlikely that the teachers in the studies that stereotypes were shaping their judgments and evaluations

Stereotype vulnerability and women’s math performance

Gender difference largely expected=women underperform

Gender difference not expected = Women have same score as men

-Test needs to be hard in order to SHOW that there are differences in performance under conditions

How does stereotype threat undermine performance?

-Stress impairs brain activity

-Self-monitoring- worrying about making mistakes-disrupts focused attention

-Suppressing unwanted thoughts and emotions takes energy and disrupts working memory

self monitoring

looking at outside yourself. Seeing if you made a mistake, fixating on mistakes = disruption of focus at hand. DIFFERENT than stress

Disidentification

Disidentification with stereotyped domain (Math is not important for my future work)

-When we experience stereotype threat, we don’t want to be that stereotype=no longer like math and want to major in math, hence reproducing the stereotype

Realistic group conflict theory

Prejudice arises from competition between groups for scarce resources

social identity theory

-categorize, identify, compare

-Personal identity definition of self, social identity via social categorization facilitates distinct social groups, we or they (in group or out of group)← → intergroup comparison comes in, either satisfied or DISSATISFIED social identity

-CONSEQUENCES TO THIS → ingroup bias

Ingroup bias

our tendency to favor one’s own group

Minimal group paradigm group (Tajfel and Billig study)→ participants are high school, British, and presented abstract art →rivalry of two paintings

Outgroup homogeneity effect

Perception of outgroup members as more similar to one another than are ingroup members

Own race bias

The tendency for people to more accurately recognize faces of their own race

-ALSO occurs with age and gender identity (?)

when you put people into categories….

….It might make it easier to talk to them…. but has downstream negative effects

Distinctiveness

Extreme examples capture attention, distort judgments, and lead to illusory correlations

-Picture of islam as a big circle, but a small corner overlaps with terrorism and between that → 9/11 hijackers

Group-serving bias (attributions)

Explaining away outgroup members’ positive behaviors; also attributing negative behaviors to their dispositions (while excusing such behavior by one’s own group)

Just-world phenomenon: (attributions)

The tendency of people to believe that the world is just and that people therefore get what they deserve and deserve what they get

conformity

changing one’s behavior or blief in response to real or imagined group pressure

• Real pressure, (friends going out on friday night)

• can be positive or negative, can put people out of danger (no jaywalking=less danger)

• Tone of voice, how we talk to the other person, etc… (helpful for making friends?)

Informational social influence

Normative scial influence

Informational social influence

Based on the desire to be correct; use others as a source of information

• Typically leads to private acceptance

• Sherif (norm formation study)

Sherif study

Autokinetic effect

• Our eyes are constantly moving so you don’t adapt to stimuli you are looking at

• sees how far it moves (doesn’t actually move)

• If people are presented with an ambigous stimulus, will percpetions be affected by others?

• Persons estimate distance, first while alone, then in a group → showed LESS movement in part 2 and 3 as well as when participants are increased

chameleon effect

Mimicking someone else’s behavior

-we shift behaviors (yawning)

When informational conformity backfires; mass hysteria

Suggestibility to problems that spreads throughout a large group of people

• Emotional contagion

Emotional contagion

Wheaton, prikhidko, and messner

April and may 2020 undegrad psych students

• Emotional contagion

• Covid-19 threat scale, depression, anxiety, stress, and OCD symptoms

Correlations with emotional contagion

• Covid threat r=0.32

• Depression, andxiety stress, OCD symptoms measured

informational social influence

When will people conform to informational social influence?

• The situation is ambigous

• The situation is a crisis

• Other people are experts

Line estimation task

If people are presented with an unambigous stimulus, will they resist conforming?

Probably public compliance

when the answers of the line test were anonymous and written down, the answers were more variable

-don’t want to socially want us to be the odd one out