Social Psychology: Group Bias, Stereotypes, and Intergroup Relations

social categorization

The automatic process of sorting people into groups ("us" vs. "them") based on characteristics like race, age, gender, or any perceived similarity.

Taylor, Fiske, Etcoff and Ruderman (1978)

Participants watched a mixed-race or mixed-gender group discussion; they confused who said what far more often within the outgroup than the ingroup, providing early evidence for the outgroup homogeneity effect.

outgroup homogeneity

Tendency to see outgroup members as more similar to each other ("all alike") than ingroup members.

stereotype

Fixed, oversimplified belief about the typical characteristics or behaviors of a social group.

Bogus Pipeline Procedure

Research technique using a fake lie-detector; participants believe it reveals true attitudes, so they report more honest (often more prejudiced) responses than on normal surveys.

implicit association test (IAT)

Reaction-time test measuring automatic stereotypes by how quickly people pair group faces (e.g., Black/White) with positive or negative words.

Steele and Aronson's (1995)

Black and White students took a hard verbal test; when described as diagnostic of ability (activating stereotype threat), Black participants underperformed Whites; when framed as non-diagnostic, the racial gap disappeared - first major evidence of stereotype threat.

stereotype threat

Anxiety from fear of confirming a negative stereotype about one's group, which impairs performance in the stereotyped domain.

ingroup favoritism

Preferring or giving better treatment/resources to members of one's own group, even without hostility toward outgroups.

Tajfel, Billig, Bundy, & Flament (1971)

Schoolboys randomly assigned to trivial groups (e.g., Klee vs. Kandinsky preference) gave more rewards to anonymous ingroup members and maximized ingroup advantage - showed mere categorization is enough to produce ingroup favoritism (Minimal Group Paradigm).

black sheep effect

Judging badly-behaving ingroup members more harshly than identical outgroup members to protect the ingroup's image.

Authoritarianism

Personality trait (Right-Wing Authoritarianism, RWA) marked by submission to authority, hostility toward outgroups, and strong adherence to conventional norms.

Social dominance orientation

Personality preference for group-based hierarchies and belief that some groups should dominate others.

Sechrist and Stangor (2001)

White students told most peers held negative stereotypes about Black people later showed stronger anti-Black implicit bias and recalled more negative information - demonstrated perceived social norms shape personal prejudice.

Czopp, Monteith and Mark (2007)

When confronted about a racist remark, people reacted more defensively to outgroup confronters than ingroup confronters; ingroup confrontations produced more guilt and behavior change - showed source of confrontation matters.

contact hypothesis

Prejudice reduces when ingroup and outgroup members interact under conditions of equal status, common goals, cooperation, and institutional support (Allport, 1954).

jigsaw classroom

Cooperative learning method where each student has a unique piece of information needed for group success; promotes interdependence and reduces prejudice (Aronson et al.).

extended contact hypothesis

Knowing an ingroup member has a close outgroup friend can reduce one's own prejudice through indirect contact.

Robbers' Cave Experiment

Boys at camp divided into two groups developed hostility through competition; superordinate goals (tasks only solvable together) dramatically reduced conflict - classic support for realistic group conflict theory and common ingroup identity solutions (Sherif et al., 1961).

common ingroup identity

Recategorizing separate groups into one larger shared identity ("we're all campers/humans") to reduce intergroup bias.

realistic group conflict

Intergroup hostility arising from actual competition over limited resources (money, jobs, status).

social conventional morality and harm-based morality

Conventional morality = rules based on social norms/traditions; harm-based morality = rules based on preventing harm. Discrimination is more acceptable when framed as convention than harm.

distributive fairness

Perceived fairness of how outcomes or rewards are actually allocated among people.

procedural fairness

Perceived fairness of the processes and rules used to make decisions.

False consciousness

Disadvantaged group members unknowingly accept ideologies that justify and maintain their own subordination.

Social creativity

Low-status groups cope by finding new comparison dimensions on which they excel ("we may be poor but we're more moral").

Collective action

Coordinated efforts by members of a disadvantaged group to improve their collective status or conditions.

Harvesting/Commons dilemma

Social dilemma where individuals over-use a shared limited resource (e.g., overfishing) because personal gain outweighs collective cost.

Contributions dilemma

Social dilemma (public goods) where individuals under-contribute to a shared resource because they can free-ride on others' efforts.

prisoner's dilemma game

Two-player game where mutual cooperation gives the best joint outcome, but self-interest tempts defection, usually leading to mutual loss.

Utz (2004)

Online social dilemma experiments showed that communication and salient group identity dramatically increased cooperation in prisoner's dilemma and commons dilemma games, even in virtual settings.

dual concern model of cooperation and competition

Cooperation depends on two concerns: (1) concern for one's own outcomes and (2) concern for the other party's outcomes; high concern for both leads to cooperation.