Old-Fashioned Biases: Almost Gone

• People openly put down those not from their own group

• Blatant Biases

  • Old-fashioned stereotypes were overt, unapologetic, and expected to be shared by others

  • Conscious beliefs, feelings, and behavior that people are perfectly willing to admit, which mostly express hostility toward other groups (outgroups) while unduly favoring one’s own group (in-group)

  • Tend to run in packs: people who openly hate one outgroup also hate many others

• Social Dominance Orientation (SDO)

  • Describes a belief that group hierarchies are inevitable in all societies and are even a good idea to maintain order and stability

  • Scoring high on SDO

    • Believe that some groups are inherently better than others, and because of this, there is no such thing as group “equality”

    • Not just about being personally dominant and controlling of others; describes a preferred arrangement of groups with some on top (preferably one’s own group) and some on the bottom

    • More likely to be politically conservative

    • Usually lower than average on tolerance, empathy, altruism, and community orientation

    • Have a strong belief in work ethic – that hard work always pays off and leisure is a waste of time

    • Tend to choose and thrive in occupations that maintain existing group hierarchies (police, prosecutors, business), compared to those lower in SDO, who tend to pick more equalizing occupations (social work, public defense, psychology)

  • Predicts endorsing the superiority of certain groups: men, native-born residents, heterosexuals, and believers in the dominant religion

    • Seeing women, minorities, homosexuals, and non-believers as inferior

  • Rests on a fundamental belief that the world is tough and competitive with only a limited number of resources

• Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA)

  • Focuses on value conflicts, whereas SDO focuses on the economic ones

  • Endorses respect for obedience and authority in the service of group conformity

  • High in RWA

    • May equally dislike the outgroup member moving into the neighborhood

      • Outgroup member bring in values or beliefs that the person high with RWA disagrees with, thus “threatening” the collective values of his or her group

  • Respects group unity over individual preferences, wanting to maintain group values in the face of differing opinions

  • Not necessarily limited to people on the conservatives

  • Focuses on groups’ competing frameworks of values

  • Extreme scores on RWA predict biases against outgroups while demanding in-group loyalty and conformity

  • Combination of high RWA and high SDO predicts joining hate groups that openly endorse aggression against minority groups, immigrants, homosexuals, and believers in non-dominant religions

• Core Belief

  • SDO: groups compete for economic resources

  • RWA: groups compete over values

• Intergroup Belief

  • SDO: group hierarchies are inevitable, good

  • RWA: groups must follow authority

• Ingroup Belief

  • SDO: ingroup must be tough, competitive

  • RWA: ingroup must unite, protect

• Outgroup Belief

  • SDO: “They” are trying to beat “us”

  • RWA: “They” have bad values

20th Century Biases: Subtle but Significant

Automatic Biases

• Subtle Biases

  • Unexamined and sometimes unconscious but real in their consequences

  • Automatic, ambiguous, and ambivalent, but nonetheless biased, unfair, and disrespectful to the belief in equality

• Automatic: unintended, immediate, and irresistible

• Implicit Association Test (IAT)

  • Done on the computer and measures how quickly you can sort words or pictures into different categories

  • People are mostly faster at pairing their own group with good categories, compared to pairing others’ groups

  • People’s reaction time on the IAT predicts actual feelings about individuals from other groups, decisions about them, and behavior toward them, especially nonverbal behavior

  • Sometimes the automatic association – often driven by society’s stereotypes – trump our own, explicit values

    • Can result in consequential discrimination, such as allocating fewer resources to disliked outgroups

Ambiguous Biases

• Social Identity Theory

  • Describes this tendency to favor one’s own ingroup over another’s outgroup

    • Outgroup disliking stems from the ingroup liking

• Self-Categorization Theory

  • Because the attributes of group categories can be either good or bad, we tend to favor the groups with people like us and incidentally disfavors the others

  • Ingroup favoritism is an ambiguous form of bias because it disfavors the outgroup by exclusion

• Aversive Racism

  • People do not like to admit their own racial biases to themselves or others

  • Indicators correlate with discriminatory behavior, despite being the ambiguous result of good intentions gone bad

Biases can be Complicated: Ambivalent Biases

• Stereotype Content Model

  • If the other group has good, cooperative intentions, we view them as warm and trustworthy and often consider them part of “our ride”

    • If the other group is cold and competitive or full of exploiters, we often view them as a threat and treat them accordingly

  • After learning the group’s intentions, we also want to know whether they are competent enough to act on them

• Common stereotypes are classified to 2 dimensions

  • Housewives

    • Would be seen as high in warmth but lower in competence

    • Not to suggest that actual housewives are not competent but that they are not widely admired for their competence in the same way as scientific pioneers, trendsetters, or captains of industry

  • Homeless People and Drug Addicts

    • Stereotyped as not having good intentions (perhaps exploitative for not trying to play by the rules), and likewise being incompetent (unable) to do anything useful

    • Reportedly make society more disgusted than any other groups do

• Some group stereotypes are mixed, high on 1 dimension and low on the other

  • Groups stereotyped as competent but not warm include rich people and outsiders good at business

    • “Competent but cold” make people feel some envy, admitting that these others may have some talent but resenting them for not being “people like us”

    • “Model Minority”: includes with this excessive competence but deficit sociability

  • High warmth and low competence

    • Include older people and disabled people

    • Others report pitying them, but only so long as they stay in their place

    • Disability – and elderly – rights activists try to eliminate that pity, hopefully gaining respect in the process

Conclusion: 21st Century Prejudices

• Categories are becoming more and more uncertain, unclear volatile and complex

• People’s identities are multifaceted, intersecting across gender, class, race, age, region, and more

• Identities are not so simple, but maybe as the 21st century unfurls, we will recognize each other by the content of our character instead of the cover on our outside