Chapter 13: Prejudice, Stereotypes, and Discrimination

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering social identity, the ABCs of prejudice, explicit and implicit attitudes, ambivalent sexism, stereotype threat, and motivational and cognitive sources of prejudice.

Prejudice

An attitude towards people based on group membership, representing the affective component of intergroup bias.

Social Identity

The part of an individual's identity that stems from their membership in social groups.

ABCs of Prejudice

The three components of intergroup bias: Prejudice (affective), Discrimination (behavioral), and Stereotypes (cognitive).

Explicit Attitudes

Attitudes that individuals consciously endorse and can easily report.

Implicit Attitudes

Attitudes that are involuntary, uncontrollable, and at times unconscious.

Implicit Association Test (IAT)

A measure of the speed of positive and negative reactions to target groups, where response speed reflects the cognitive link between group membership and evaluative attitudes.

Discrimination

Differential, often negative, actions directed toward people based on their social group membership.

Ambivalent Sexism

A framework developed by Glick and Fiske ($1996$, $2001$) positing that prejudice toward men and women consists of both negative and seemingly positive ideologies.

Benevolent Sexism

A subjectively positive orientation toward women (e.g., viewing them as pure, needing male protection) that subtly reinforces traditional gender roles and gender inequality.

Hostile Sexism

An antagonistic attitude toward a gender, characterized by overtly negative beliefs such as the belief that women seek power by controlling men.

Gallantry

Courteous attention toward women—as opposed to politeness, which is indifferent to gender—serving as a common expression of benevolent sexism.

Stereotypes

Beliefs we hold about what members of different social groups are like, which may be accurate or inaccurate, positive or negative, and agreed with or rejected by the group.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The psychological process where perceivers' stereotypes shape expectations about individuals, which subsequently causes the targets to perform in ways that confirm those initial expectations.

Stereotype Threat

A disruptive concern, experienced when facing a negative stereotype, that one will be evaluated based on that stereotype, which impairs performance and leads to stereotype fulfillment.

Disidentification

A coping mechanism resulting from repeated stereotype threat where a student or individual psychologically detaches their self-esteem and career aspirations from a stereotyped domain.

Realistic Group Conflict Theory

The theory that prejudice and hostility arise from direct competition between groups for scarce resources.

Social Identity Theory

A theory stating that self-esteem is derived from personal identity and social identity formed via social categorization into in-groups ("we") versus out-groups ("they"), accompanied by intergroup comparison.

Ingroup Bias

The systematic tendency to favor, evaluate more positively, and allocate more resources to one's own group over out-groups.

Minimal Group Paradigm

An experimental research method (Tajfel & Billig, $1974$) showing that arbitrary and meaningless distinctions between groups (such as preference for Kandinsky versus Klee) are sufficient to produce ingroup favoritism.

Outgroup Homogeneity Effect

The cognitive perception that outgroup members are all similar to one another compared to the perceived diversity among ingroup members.

Own-Race Bias

The tendency for people to more accurately recognize and differentiate faces of their own race than faces of other races (Devine & Malpass, $1985$).

Distinctiveness

The cognitive phenomenon where salient or extreme examples capture attention, distort intergroup judgments, and produce illusory correlations between groups and rare behaviors.

Group-Serving Bias

The tendency to explain away outgroup members' positive behaviors while attributing their negative actions to disposition, while doing the opposite for one's ingroup.

Just-World Phenomenon

The tendency of individuals to believe that the world is inherently fair and that people therefore get what they deserve and deserve what they get.