Prejudice

Prejudice --  Hogg and Vaughn, 2018

Prejudice --  Hogg and Vaughn, 2018

unfavourable attitude towards a social group and its members

Three components of prejudice

• Cognitive = beliefs and stereotypes about a social group

• Affective = strong, usually negative feelings about a social group and the qualities it is believed to possess

• Conative = intentions to behave in a certain way towards a social group – not behaviour itself

Stereotypes vs prejudice vs discrimination

• Stereotyping = the cognitive component of attitudes towards a social group, beliefs about what a particular group is like

• Prejudice = affective, a feeling

• Discrimination is behavioural, has an action component of an attitude

Types of prejudice - explicit attitudes

• Controllable attitudes, reflective and monitorable

• Can be measured

• Limitation: social desirability concerns can lead people to conceal their real attitudes

• Behavioural manifestations: hate crimes/speech, discriminatory policies and laws, racial profiling, etc.

Types of prejudice - implicit attitudes

• Reflexive, outside conscious awareness, uncontrollable and subtle

• Inferred based on behavioural task performance

• Behavioural manifestations: implicit hiring discrimination, implicit glass ceiling,etc

Implicit association tests (IAT)

• Example: participants rapidly categorize a series of african american vs european american faces pared with either negative or positive words

– prejudice can be held at an implicit but not explicit level – aversive racists do not hold racist beliefs at the explicit level but do at the implicit level

Authoritarian personality and right-wing-authoritarianism

ethnocentrism, negative attitudes towards ethnic minorities, negative attitudes towards democracy, cynical and pessimistic view of human nature, conservative economic and political attitudes

Issues with the measure of authoritarian personality

– methodological problems:

• Confirmation bias: interviewers know both the hypotheses and the authoritarianism scores of the participants

• Agreement bias: items are designed without taking into account some respondents’ tendency to agree with items on a questionnaire regardless of content

– situational and sociocultural factors have a powerful effect on ethnocentrism: Pettigrew 1958

• Ethnocentrism can arise quicker than child-rearing practices have time to change – e.g.: extreme anti-semitism arose quickly in Germany between the two wars

Bob Altmeyer 1988 : right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) scale measures three dimensions

1. Authoritarian submission

2. Conventionalism

3. Punitiveness against deviants: support for aggression toward deviants

Social dominance orientation

all human societies organize themselves socially along group-based hierarchies:

• Dominant groups: disproportionate power and special privileges

• Subordinate: little political power or ease in their way of life

How do dominant groups maintain their power over subordinate groups?

1. System-wide level processes: hierarchy enhancing and hierarchy attenuating social institutions , legitimizing myths

2. Personal level processes: aggregated individual acts of discrimination help maintain group-based hierarchies, social dominance orientation

Hierarchy enhancing social institutions

allocates resources to the advantage of the dominant groups

Hierarchy attenuating social institutions

allocates resources to the advantage of subordinate groups with a view to restore equality

Legitimizing myths

widely shared ideologies that organize and justify hierarchies -- stereotypes, discourses, shared social representations

Social dominance orientation

measure of a persons' orientation toward group-based hierarchies  \n high SDOs prefer group based inequalities

Intergroup-level processes

• Behavioural asymmetry: members of subordinate groups behave in ways that are less beneficial to self and ingroup compared to the behaviour of dominant groups in stable group-based hierarchies

• Institutional racism : manipulation or tolerace of insitutional practices, polcies and laws that unfairly restrict the opportunities of particular groups of people based on race

Realistic group conflict theory

• Muzafer Sherif : the origins of ethnocentrism lie in the nature of intergroup relations and not the properties of individuals

• 1954 robbers cave experiment : the boys did not have authoritarian or dogmatic personalities, the origins of intergroup conflict lie elsewhere

• Sherif 1961 = intergroup conflict results from fighting over desriable resources that are scarce and can only be obtained by one group or they are perceived as such

  – goals which are mutually exclusive lead to realistic intergroup conflict and ethnocentrism

  – goals which require coopertion for their achieveent encourage intergroup harmony and reduce conflict

  – prejudice is the result of conflicts of interest between groups

Social Identity Theory (Tajfel and Turner 1979)

 theory of intergroup conflict and considered one of the major theories of social psychology

• How do people come to see each other as enemies in the absence of rational or objective reasons?

• Can prejudice exist outside of competition over resources?

• what are the minimal conditions needed to produce ingroup bias?

Minimal group studies methodology (Tajfel et al., 1971)

• Participants assigned to two groups based on chance / arbitrary criterion – e.g.: flipping a coin

• No history of conflict ,there is no contact between participants

• participants are put in individual cubicles where they allocate points (convert into money) to:

1. Two members of the ingroup

2. Two members of the outgroup

3. A member of the ingroup and a member of the outgroup

-→ fairness is more likely to be used when allocating points to two different ingroup members or two different outgroup members

→ingroup favouritism is more likely to be used when allocating to an ingroup member (more to the ingroup than to the outgroup members)

Mere categorization effect

categorizing people into different social groups is sufficient for creating ethnocentrism

Social identification

that part of an individual’s self-concept which derives from their knowledge of membership of a social group together with the emotional significance attached to that membership” (Tajfel 1974) → the groups we belong to also affect how we value ourselves

The need for positive distinctiveness can be achieved by:

• Highlighting dimensions on which the ingroup is superior

• Actively discriminating against the outgroup to create or to reinforce an existing hierarchy

Intergroup threat theory (Stephan & Stephan 2000)

• Realistic threats = threats can arise when group members perceive to be competing with the outgroup over scarce resources or when they feel that their physical safety or power is in danger

• Symbolic threats = if group members perceive the outgroup to be a threat to their cultural values, religion, ideology, morality or world

Contact hypothesis (Allport 1954)

• interaction between individuals belonging to different social groups will reduce ethnic prejudice and intergroup tension

Four conditions for intergroup contact:

1. Participants are of equal status

2. Pursuing common goals cooperatively

3. Backed by social and institutional support

4. There is acquaintance potential

Which type of contact is most effective ?

• Importance of cross-roup friendships

• Meta-analytic findings show contact effects generalizing from individuals to overall outgroup attitudes - more likely to generalize when an outgroup member is seen as representative of the outgroup (or subtyping occurs)

• Negative intergroup contact can occur and increase prejudice – asymmetry hypothesis: negative intergroup contact affects prejudice more than positive

• Effects of positive and negative contact depend on whether the intergroup conflict is ongoing

Decategorisation

-- replace category based with interpersonal relations

• personalisation = reduce importance of group membership so that individual relationships can develop

• differentiation within outgroup category, so that outgroup members are seen as different from one another

Recatogarisation

joining “us” and “them” into we

common intergroup identity at superordinate level

Mutual intergroup differentiation

avoid depriving groups of their valued social identities

make groups salient during interaction

Dual categorization

emphasize both subirdinate identities and superordinate identity