Ch. 9 - Prejudice

Prejudice

a preconceived negative judgment of a group and its individual members

• Prejudiced people may dislike those different from themselves and behave toward them in a discriminatory manner, believing them ignorant and dangerous

Social/ideological explanations of prejudice

• Explains prejudice as resulting from a generalized attitude or trait that varies within individuals

  • Some people are predisposed to be prejudiced because they have more of trait/attitude X

• In social psychology, we assume that people are socialized into having these individual differences in traits

Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA)

• Measures

  • Authoritarian submission

  • Authoritarian aggression

  • conventionalism/traditionalism

• Thought to result from parenting style, peer influence, and perceived threats to the ingroup

• Example scale items

  • Our country desperately needs a leader who will do what must be done to destroy the radical new ways that are ruining us

  • The “old-fashioned ways” and the “old-fashioned values” still show the best way to live

  • The only way our country can get through the crisis ahead is to get back to our values, put some tough leaders in power, and silence the troublemakers spreading bad ideas

Economic/resource based explanation of prejudice

Explains prejudice as resulting conflict when multiple groups vie for resources

• Realistic group conflict theory 

• Predicts: hostility and conflict between groups greatest when resources are scarce

Robbers cave experiment summary

• Intergroup conflict can be easily induced, even against a novel group, when resources are scarce or perceived to be scarce

• Can capture the idea that groups live in a society where resources are scarce, where there (maybe) are material incentives to not get along

Discrimination

unjustified negative behavior toward a group or its members

• Where prejudice is a negative attitude, discrimination is negative behavior

Prejudice - implicit and explicit

Prejudice illustrated our dual attitude system—that is, we, can have different explicit (conscious) and implicit (automatic) attitudes toward the same target

• Even when explicit attitudes change dramatically with education implicit attitudes may linger

Racial prejudice

• Explicit attitudes can change very quickly; the bigger problem today is more subtle racial prejudice

  • Employment discrimination

  • Favoritism, such as with airbnb, uber, and lyft

  • Traffic stops

  • Patronization—overpraising accomplishment, overcriticizing mistakes, bending over backward to seem unprejudiced

• Automatic (implicit) prejudice matters

  • In some situations, can have life or death consequences

  • Brain activity in the amygdala, a region that underlies fear and aggression, facilitates automatic responding 

Gender prejudice

• Gender stereotypes are beliefs about how women and men actually behave

  • Strong gender stereotypes exist

  • Members of the stereotyped group often accept the stereotypes

• Sexism can take both benevolent and hostile forms

  • Benevolent sexism may still impede gender equality

LGBT prejudice

• Most of the world’s gay and lesbian people cannot comfortably disclose who they are and whom they love

• Though it appears to be rapidly diminishing, anti-gay prejudice in Western countries endures through:

  • Job discrimination

  • Mixed support for same-sex marriage

  • Harassment

  • Rejection of friends or family members

• Do disparaging attitudes and discriminatory practices against gay and lesbian people cause actual harm?

  • State policies predict gay people’s health and well-being

  • Community attitudes also predict LGBT health

  • Two quasi-experiments confirm the toxicity of gay stigma and the benefits of its removal

What are the social sources of prejudice?

People differing in social status and their desire to justify and maintain those differences

Social dominance orientation

a motivation to have one’s group dominate other social groups

• Being in a dominant, high-status position tends to promote this orientation and justification 

• Opposite are preferences for egalitarianism

• Example scale items:

  • Some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups

  • It’s not a problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others

  • If certain groups stayed in their place, we would have fewer problems

Socialization

• Other sources of prejudice include our acquired values and attitudes

  • Children’s prejudices often mirror those perceived in their mothers

• Those with an authoritarian personality may be especially prone to prejudice

  • Personality is disposed to favor obedience to authority and intolerance of outgroups and those lower in status

Socialization - religion and racial prejudice

• Religion is often invoked to sanctify the present order, including racial prejudice

  • Use of religion to support injustice helps explain a pair of findings concerning North American Christianity 

    • White church members express more racial prejudice than nonmembers

    • Those professing fundamentalist beliefs express more prejudice than those professing progressive beliefs

• Correlation does not mean causation

  • There may be no causal connection between religion and prejudice

  • Perhaps prejudice causes religion

  • Perhaps religion causes prejudice

• Other findings refute religion as cause of prejudice

  • Faithful attenders are less prejudiced

  • Intrinsically religious are less prejudiced 

  • Clergy are less prejudiced

socialization - conformity

• If prejudice is socially accepted, many people will follow the path of least resistance and conform to the fashion

• If prejudice is not depth ingrained in personality, than as fashions change and new norms evolve, prejudice can diminish (ex: interracial marriage and same sex marriage)

Systemic supports

• Social institutions may promote prejudice through overt policies or by massively reinforcing the status quo (ex: banks and mortgages)

• Media portrayals often strengthen stereotypes

• Institutional supports for prejudice are often unintended and unnoticed

  • Ex: magazine and newspaper bias in photography toward men’s faces but women’s bodies

What are the motivational sources of prejudices?

• Frustration breeds hostility

• People prefer to see themselves in groups rather than others

Realistic group conflict theory

the theory that prejudice arises from competition between groups for scarce resources

Social identity

the “we” aspect of our self-concept; the part of our answer to “who am I” that comes from our group memberships

Ingroups vs outgroups

Ingroup - “us” - a group of people who share a sense of belonging or common identity

Outgroup - “them” - a group that people perceive as distinctly different from or apart from their ingroup

Ingroup bias

the tendency to favor one’s own group

• Supports a positive self concept

• Feeds favoritism

The Minimal Group Paradigm

• Group memberships are experimentally defined by seemingly arbitrary or meaningless criteria

  • Ex: “over-estimators” vs “under-estimators”

• The mere fact of being in an “us/them” situation is enough to produce ethnocentrism

  • We give more to the ingroup than the outgroup even if that means giving less to the ingroup

  • It’s the relative ingroup-outgroup difference that counts

What are the cognitive sources of prejudice?

• How does the way we think about the world influence our stereotypes?

  • How do our stereotypes affect our everyday judgments

• In addition to social and motivational impulses, normal thinking processes can also prompt stereotyped beliefs and prejudicial attitudes

  • How we simplify our complex worlds

The cognitive perspective: why stereotypes?

• Explains prejudice as resulting from our cognitive capacities to categorize as well as how our memory and learning systems work

• Stereotypes are functional “mental shortcuts” that simplify a complex social environment

  • Stereotypes are efficient - dividing people into categories saves mental resources (keeping track of one vs many)

• But stereotypes result in: 

  • Accentuation of ingroup similarity and outgroup difference

  • The outgroup homogeneity effect

Why do we have negative outgroup stereotypes?

• Rare events stand out more than common ones

  • A mime vs businessman walks by

  • A man holding a python vs a man holding a phone

• The co-occurrence of two paired events is even more salient

  • A mime holding a python

• Therefore, we perceive a correspondence (correlation) between low-frequency events, even when none actually exists

  • Mimes hold pythons, they're insane!

Illustory Correlation via Paired Distinctiveness

• Showed participants a series of 39 sentences describing positive (desirable) and negative (undesirable) behaviors

  • People in the sentences were said to come from group A or group B

  • Twice as many sentences describing group A behaviors than group B behaviors

  • Twice as many sentences describing desirable than undesirable behaviors

  • However, no actual correlation between group A vs B and desirable vs undesirable behaviors 

• Despite lack of association between being in group B and doing bad things, participants remembered group B as having been responsible for more of the negative behaviors

• And participants felt more positively about group A than group B

• Shortcoming of illusory correlation as explanation of prejudicial stereotypes

  • It doesn’t say which group-behavior pairs we will associate

    • Left-handed vegetarians?

    • Snowboarding astronomers?

• Analysis captures something real and important, but it “overpredicts” 

Motivation to avoid prejudice

• Breaking the prejudice habit is not easy; unwanted (dissonant) thoughts and feelings can be persistent

  • Especially for older adults and people under alcohol’s influence

• Studies show, however, that prejudicial reactions are not inevitable - the motivation to avoid prejudice can lead people to modify their thoughts and actions

  • Awareness of the gap between how one should feel and how one does feel

  • Even automatic prejudices subside when motivation to avoid prejudice is internal rather than external

Reducing prejudice

• We can seek to create cooperative, equal-status relationships

• We can mandate nondiscrimination

• We can remove institutional supports for prejudice

• We can make efforts to personalize seemingly homogeneous members of outgroups

Outgroup homogeneity effect

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

• they are alike, we are diverse

Own race bias

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

Distinctiveness: Perceiving People Who Stand Out

• Distinctive people and vivid or extreme occurrences often capture attention and distort judgments

  • When someone in a group is conspicuous, we tend to see that person as cursing whatever happens

  • Extra attention paid to distinctive people creates an illusion that they differ more than they really do

  • Distinctiveness feeds self-confidence 

• Our minds use distinctive or vivid cases as a shortcut to judging groups

• Distinctive events foster illusory correlations

  • Stereotypes assume a correlation between group membership and individuals’ presumed characteristics

• Sometimes our attentiveness to unusual occurrences can create illusory correlations

  • Because we are sensitive to distinctive events, the co-occurrence of 2 such events is especially noticeable

Group serving bias

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

Just world phenomenon

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

Prejudice consequences

• Self-perpetuating prejudgments

• Discrimination as self-fulfilling prophecy

• Stress and other results of stereotypes threat

• Biased interpretation of events

Self-perpetuation prejudgments

Prejudices involved preconceived judgments, and these prejudgments guide our attention and memories

• Prejudgments are self-perpetuating

  • Whenever a member of a group behaves as expected, we duly note the fact; our prior belief is confirmed

  • When a member of a group behaves inconsistently without expectation, we may interpret or explain away the behavior as due to special circumstances

Subtyping

accommodating individuals who deviate from one’s subtype by thinking of them as “expectations to the rule”

Subgrouping

accommodating individuals who deviate from one’s stereotype by forming a new stereotype by forming a new stereotype about this subset of the group

Discrimination as self-fulfilling prophecy

Attitudes may coincide with the social hierarchy in part because of how discrimination affects its victims

• Reaction that involves blaming oneself - withdrawal, self hate, aggression against one’s own group

• Reactions that involve blaming external causes - fighting back, suspiciousness, increased group pride

Stress and other results of stereotype threat

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

• Unlike self-fulfilling prophecies that hammer one’s reputation into one’s self-concept, stereotype threat situations have immediate effects 

• Ex: placed in a situation where others expect you to perform poorly, your anxiety may also cause you to confirm the belief 

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

Biased interpretation of events

• Stereotypes do bias judgments of individuals, but bear the following in mind:

  • Our stereotypes mostly reflect reality

  • People often evaluate individuals more positively than the individuals’ groups

  • Strength of the stereotype matters

• Stereotypes color how we interpret events

  • Stereotypes can also operate subtly

  • We evaluate people more extremely when their behavior violates our stereotypes