The Nature of the Problem: Persistence and Change

Defining Our Terms

• Racism: Prejudice and discrimination based on a person’s racial background, or institutional and cultural practices that promote the domination of one racial group over another

• Sexism: Prejudice and discrimination based on a person’s gender, or institutional and cultural practices that promote the domination of one gender (typically men) over another (typically women)

• Stereotypes: Beliefs or associations that link whole groups of people with certain traits or characteristics

• Prejudice: Negative feelings about others because of their connection to a social group

• Discrimination: Negative behaviors directed against persons because of their membership in a particular group

Racism: Current Forms and Challenges

• Racial prejudice and discrimination have been decreasing in the United States and in many other countries over the last 70 years

• Elements of racial prejudice and discrimination may be on the rise, particularly in Western Europe

Modern, Aversive, and Implicit Racism

• Modern Racism: A subtle form of prejudice that tends to surface when it is safe, socially acceptable, or easy to rationalize

  • Far more subtle

  • Most likely to be present under the cloud of ambiguity

  • Can still have a profound effect

• Many people are racially ambivalent

  • See themselves as fair

  • Still harbor feelings of anxiety and discomfort about other racial groups

• Aversive Racism: Racism that concerns the ambivalence between individuals’ sincerely fair-minded attitudes and beliefs, on one hand, and their largely unconscious and unrecognized prejudicial feelings and beliefs, on the other hand

• Microaggression: Everyday, subtle, and hurtful forms of discrimination that are experienced quite frequently by members of targeted groups

• Moral Credentials: People establish that they’re not racist towards a group by demonstrating that they have good friends from the racial or ethnic group in question or they have behaved in ways that were quite fair to members of this group

• Biases can be difficult to see, but are present in abundance, across a multitude of settings

Measuring Implicit Racism

• Implicit Racism: Racism that operates unconsciously and unintentionally

• Implicit Association Test (IAT): Test that measures implicit beliefs and attitudes that a person may have

• Implicit racism correlates with a variety of attitudes and behaviors

  • Higher implicit racism predicted negative, unfriendly nonverbal behaviors in interracial interactions

  • Link between implicit racism of health care providers and their treatment of patients from racial and ethnic minority groups

Interracial Interactions

• Interracial interaction can be challenging and fraught with emotion and tension

• Metastereotypes: Thoughts about the outgroup’s stereotypes about them

  • Activated when individuals engage in intergroup interactions

  • Causes worry about being seen as consistent with these stereotypes

  • Can lead to unhealthy cardiovascular reactions associated with feelings of threat

• People sometimes try to avoid interracial interaction for fear of appearing racist or being treated in a racist way

  • Avoidant behavior can make things worse

• White adults in an interracial interaction often try to adopt a “colorblind” mentality and demeanor

  • Try to act as if race is so unimportant to them that they don’t notice or care about an individual’s race

  • Often sincere and with the best of intentions

  • Backfires and makes members of racial minority groups more uncomfortable

• Acknowledge and positively value racial and ethnic differences

  • Promotes better ingroup attitudes and behaviors

  • Polycultural thinking: Focusing on the ways that racial and ethnic groups have interacted and influenced each other’s cultures throughout history

Sexism: Ambivalence, Objectification, and Double Standards

• Gender stereotypes indicate what many people in a given culture believe men and women should be like, not what they think they actually are like

• Women who exhibit traits that are valued in society but that defy gender stereotypes are often viewed in especially harsh terms

• Contact between women and men often does little to reduce sexist beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors

Ambivalent Sexism

• Overall, stereotypes of women tend to be more positive than those of men

• The positive traits associated with women are less valued in important domains

• Hostile Sexism: Negative, resentful feelings about women’s abilities, value, and challenge to men’s power

  • Ex: Women seek special favors under the guise of equality

• Benevolent Sexism: Affectionate, chivalrous feelings founded on the potentially patronizing belief that women need and deserve protection

  • Ex: Women should be cherished and protected by men

• Being the target of either type of sexism triggered negative cardiovascular responses in women

• People from countries with the greatest degree of economic and political inequality between the sexes tended to exhibit the most hostile and benevolent sexism

Objectification

• Objectification: When a person is viewed or treated as a mere body or object and less as a fully functioning human being

• Women are often objectified in the advertising industry

• Men are also objectified, but women are objectified more frequently

• Objectification has negative effects on mental and physical health, academic performance, and social interactions

Sex Discrimination: Double Standards and Pervasive Stereotypes

• People are not generally biased by gender in the evaluation of performance

• Women are often paid less than their male counterparts and are confronted by glass ceilings

• Women are seen as more competent if they present themselves with stereotypically masculine traits

• Women who present themselves with stereotypically masculine traits are perceived as less socially skilled and attractive

• Being in a job that is traditionally seen as more typical of the other gender can be especially challenging

  • Judged more harshly for a mistake

  • Perceived as less masculine and relatively weak

Beyond Racism and Sexism: Age, Weight, Sexuality, and Other Targets

• European American participants who thought the defendant was guilty were significantly more likely to recommend the death penalty if the defendant was described as having little education or money

• Prejudice based on weight and sexuality are considered more acceptable by many people

• Americans’ attitudes toward same-sex marriage has shifted dramatically in just a few years

Being Stigmatized

• Stigmatized: Being persistently stereotyped, perceived as deviant, and devalued in society because of membership in a particular social group or because of a particular characteristic

• Targets frequently wonder whether and to what extent others’ impressions of them are distorted through the warped lens of social categorization

• Attributing negative feedback to discrimination

  • Can protect one’s overall self-esteem

  • Can make people feel as if they have less personal control over their lives, making them feel worse about themselves, especially when they believe that the discrimination will persist over time

Stereotype Threat: A Threat in the Air

• Stereotype Threat: The experience of concern about being evaluated based on negative stereotypes about one’s group

• Particularly threatening for individuals whose identity and self-esteem are invested in domains where the stereotype is relevant

• Plays a crucial role in influencing the intellectual performance and identity of stereotyped group members

• Can interfere with performance by increasing anxiety and triggering distracting thoughts

• Can cause individuals to disidentify from their domain (dismiss the domain as no longer relevant to their self-esteem and identity)

Causes of the Problem: Intergroup, Motivational, Cognitive, and Cultural Factors

Social Categories and Intergroup Conflict

• Social Categorization: The classification of persons into groups on the basis of common attributes

• Allows us to form impressions quickly and use experience to guide new interactions

• Leads us to overestimate the differences between groups and to underestimate the differences within groups

Ingroups vs Outgroups

• Ingroups: Groups with which an individual feels a sense of membership, belonging, and identity

• Outgroups: Groups with which an individual doesn’t feel a sense of membership, belonging, or identity

• We exaggerate the differences between our ingroup and other outgroups

  • Helps to form and reinforce stereotypes

• Outgroup homogeneity effect: The tendency to assume that there is greater similarity among members of outgroups than among members of ingroups

  • To people outside the group, outgroup members look and act alike

  • People are less accurate in distinguishing and recognizing the faces of members of racial outgroups than of ingroups

• Why do people tend to perceive outgroups as homogeneous?

  • People tend to have less personal contact and familiarity with individual members of outgroups

    • The more familiar people are with an outgroup, the less likely they are to perceive it as homogenous

  • People don’t often encounter a representative sample of outgroup members

• As soon as we categorize an unfamiliar person as a member of our ingroup or an outgroup, we immediately process information about them differently

Dehumanizing Outgroups

• Perceivers sometimes process outgroup faces more like objects and lower-order animals than like fellow humans

• People often implicitly dehumanize members of particular outgroups

• Police officers who more associated black men with apes were more likely to use force against black children

• Men who automatically associated women with animals or objects showed stronger inclination to sexually harass or rape women

Fundamental Motives Between Groups

• Protect one’s ingroup and be suspicious of outgroups

• The feeling of connection and solidarity we have with our own groups enhances our sense of control and meaning

• Identity Fusion: The sense of “oneness” that people may feel with a group

• Favoring ingroups over outgroups is an important way that people preserve their cultural worldviews and attain a kind of immortality

Motives Concerning Intergroup Dominance and Status

• Social Dominance Orientation: A desire to see one’s ingroup as dominant over other groups and a willingness to adopt cultural values that facilitate oppression over other groups

  • Ingroup identification and outgroup derogation and dehumanization can be especially strong among people with a social dominance orientation

• System Justification Theory: A theory that proposes that people are motivated to defend and justify the existing social, political, and economic conditions

  • Groups with power may promote the status quo to preserve their own advantaged position

  • Members of disadvantaged groups with a system justification orientation think the system is fair and just

    • May admire and show outgroup favoritism to outgroups that thrive in this system

Stereotype Content Model

• Stereotype Content Model: A model proposing that the relative status and competition between groups influence group stereotypes along the dimensions of competence and warmth

• Stereotypes about the competence of a group are influenced by the relative status of that group in society

• Stereotypes about the warmth of a group are influenced by perceived competition with the group

Robbers Cave

• Superordinate Goal: A shared goal that can be achieved only through cooperation among individuals or groups

• Working towards a common goal can bring two groups together

Realistic Conflict Theory

• Realistic Conflict Theory: The theory that hostility between groups is caused by direct competition for limited resources

• Relative Deprivation: Feelings of discontent aroused by the belief that one fares poorly compared with others

Social Identity Theory

• People believe that their own in-groups are better and more deserving than others

• In-Group Favoritism: The tendency to discriminate in favor of in-groups over out-groups

• Social Identity Theory: The theory that people favor in-groups over out-groups in order to enhance their self-esteem

• Our self-esteem has two components

  • Personal identity

  • Social identity (based on the groups we belong to)

• People can boost their self-esteem through their own personal achievements or through affiliation with successful groups

• We derive pride from our connections with others even if we don’t receive any direct benefits from them

• We often feel the need to belittle out-groups in order to feel secure about our in-groups

  • Religious fervor

  • Racial and ethnic conceit

  • Aggressive nationalism

  • Gossiping (when people shared negative attitudes about a third party, they felt closer to each other)

• Schadenfreude: The experience of pleasure at other people’s misfortunes, particularly for celebrities or others we don’t feel empathy for

• Threats to one’s self-esteem heighten the need for ingroup favoritism

• Expressions of in-group favoritism enhance one’s self-esteem

Culture and Social Identity

• Collectivists are more likely than individualists to value their connectedness and interdependence with the people and groups around them, and their personal identities are tied closely with their social identities

• Collectivists show some biases favoring their in-groups and may draw sharper distinctions between in-group and out-group members than individualists do

• People from collectivist cultures are less likely to enhance their in-groups in order to boost their own self-esteem

Culture and Socialization

• Socialization: The processes by which people learn the norms, rules, and information of a culture or group

• The stereotypes and prejudices of a parent can shape the stereotypes and prejudices of a child, often in implicit ways

• Stereotypes and prejudices exhibited by peers, popular media, and culture can have a profound influence

Gender Stereotypes

• Typical male is said to be more adventurous, assertive, aggressive, independent, and task-oriented

• Typical female is said to be more sensitive, gentle, dependent, agreeable, emotional, and people-oriented

• Children learn gender stereotypes and roles from their parents and other role models

• Boys and girls receive many divergent messages in many different settings

Social Role Theory

• Social Role Theory: The theory that small gender differences are magnified in perception by the contrasting social roles occupied by men and women

• A division of labor has emerged over time, both at home and at work

  • Men are more likely to work in construction or business

  • Women are more likely to care for children and to take lower-paying jobs

• People behave in ways that fit the roles they play

• Men are more likely than women to wield physical, social, and economic power

• Behavioral differences lead us to perceive men as dominant and women by domestic by nature, when the differences may reflect the roles they play

Media Effects

• Stereotyping of women and POCs in the media has lessened over time, but does persist

• Media depictions can influence viewers, often without the viewers realizing it

• Body image

  • Women are portrayed in the media as being impossibly thin

  • Men are portrayed in the media as belong muscular and lean

• Media’s impact is especially negative among individuals who are already concerned about their appearance or are particularly concerned with others opinions

How Stereotypes Distort Perceptions and Resist Change

Confirmation Biases and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

• Stereotypes of groups influence people’s perceptions and interpretations of the behaviors of group members, especially when a target of a stereotype behaves in an ambiguous way

• The effect of stereotypes on individuals’ perceptions is a type of confirmation bias

• Illusory Correlation: A tendency for people to overestimate the link between variables that are only slightly or not at all correlated

  • Can create or perpetuate negative stereotypes

• Stereotypes are often perpetuated through repeated communications with many people in a culture

• Stereotypes can create self-fulfilling prophecies

Attributions and Subtyping

• People maintain their stereotypes through how they explain the behaviors of others

• Attributions can sometimes be flawed

• People don’t take into account context when trying to explain someone’s behavior

• When people see others acting in ways that contradict a stereotype, they are more likely to think about situational factors

• If we encounter someone’s behavior that clearly contradicts our stereotypes and we can’t easily explain it away as due to some situational factor, we consider the action or the person as an exception to the rule

Automatic Stereotype Activation

• Stereotypes can bias our perceptions and responses even if we don’t personally agree with them

• We don’t have to believe a stereotype for it to trigger illusory correlations and self-fulfilling prophecies

• Stereotypes can be activated without our awareness

• When we think of a stereotyped group, we are also primed to think of concepts relevant to the stereotype

• Subliminal Presentation: A method of presenting stimuli so faintly or rapidly that people don’t have any conscious awareness of having been exposed to them

• Stereotypes can be activated implicitly and automatically, influencing subsequent thoughts, feelings, and behaviors even among perceivers who are relatively low in prejudice

• Some stereotypes are much more prevalent than others in a particular culture, and with more exposure to a stereotype comes a greater likelihood of automatic activation

• The threshold for what triggers stereotype activation may be lower for those relatively high in prejudice

• Motivation can play an important role

The Shooter Bias

• A quick glimpse of a black male face primed participants to see a threatening object more than seeing a white male face did

• Racial bias in decisions to shoot was significantly stronger if the targets looked more stereotypic of their respective races

• Members of some groups are more likely to be mistakenly perceived as holding a gun than members of other groups

• The police may be trained to avoid activating racial stereotypes

• Officers’ were quicker to decide to shoot armed black than white targets and slower to decide to not shoot unarmed black than white targets

• Racial bias in the decision to shoot was not related to participants’ levels of racial prejudice

• By manipulating the accessibility of stereotypes that associated blacks with danger in perceivers’ minds, they could strengthen or weaken the bias

Reducing the Problem: Social Psychological Solutions

Intergroup Contact

• Contact Hypothesis: The theory that direct contact between hostile groups will reduce intergroup prejudice under certain conditions

  • Equal Status: The contact should occur in circumstances that give the groups equal status

  • Personal Interaction: The contact should involve one-on-one interactions among individual members of the two groups

  • Cooperative activities: Members of the two groups should join together in an effort to achieve superordinate goals

  • Social norms: The social norms, defined in part by relevant authorities, should favor intergroup contact

• Contact reduces prejudice by…

  • Enhancing knowledge about the outgroup

  • Reducing anxiety about intergroup contact

  • Increasing empathy and perspective taking

• Both whites and blacks would like to have more contact with each other but believe that the other group doesn’t want to have contact with them

Intergroup Friendships and Extended Contact

• Cross-group friendships are associated with more positive attitudes and behaviors toward outgroup members

• Cross-group dating is associated with more positive intergroup attitudes

• Extended Contact Effect / Indirect Contact Effect: Knowing that an ingroup friend has a good and close relationship with a member of an out-group can produce positive intergroup benefits in ways similar to direct contact

  • Reduces ignorance and anxiety about outgroup members

  • Provides individuals with positive examples of outgroup members

The Jigsaw Classroom

• Cooperation and shared goals are ideal for intergroup contact to be successful

• Jigsaw Classroom: A cooperative learning method used to reduce racial prejudice through interaction in group efforts

• Everyone needs everyone else if the group as a whole is to succeed

• Children in these types of classrooms grew to like each other more, liked school more, were less prejudiced, and had higher self-esteem

• Academic test scores improved for minority students and remained the same for white students

• Individuals became more likely to classify outgroup members as part of their own ingroup

Shared Identities

• Common Ingroup Identity Model: If members of different groups recategorize themselves as members of a more inclusive superordinate group, intergroup attitudes and relations can improve

• By recognizing their shared categorization, a common ingroup identity can be forged

• Individuals from minority groups or groups that have less power in a society tend to not feel as positively as majority group members do about recategorizing their groups into one common ingroup

  • May feel overwhelmed and a sense of lost identity if they merge completely with a larger or more powerful group

  • Sometimes prefer or benefit more from dual-identity categorizations

• Dual-Identity Categorizations: When individuals from minority groups preserve their distinctiveness as a member of their specific group, but recognize their connection and potential for cooperation with the majority or more powerful group

• Seeing connections between the groups and ways in which their identities are shared is essential

Trust, Belonging, and Reducing Stereotype Threat

• To reduce stereotype threat effects, individuals must feel a sense of trust and safety in the situation

  • Don’t feel like they’re the target of others’ low expectations

  • Don’t have to be concerned with fairness or other obstacles that would otherwise distract, worry, or discourage them

• Stereotype threats undermine students by reducing their sense of belonging

Exerting Self-Control

• People often stereotype and show prejudice toward others even when they would rather not, sometimes by merely being aware of the stereotype

• Trying to suppress stereotyping or to control prejudiced actions can take mental effort

  • People often don’t have the time, energy, or awareness to dedicate to this effort

  • People rely on their stereotypes more when they have to make their judgments quickly

• Some factors make people less likely to have sufficient cognitive resources for successful control

  • Older people have a harder time suppressing stereotypes than younger people

  • Being low in blood sugar can weaken people’s ability to control stereotyping and prejudice

  • Being intoxicated makes people have a difficult time suppressing thoughts or inhibiting impulses

  • Being physically tired or being affected by strong emotion or arousal can make perceivers less likely to avoid stereotyping

• Two kinds of motivation to control prejudiced responses and behaviors

  • Externally driven: Not wanting to appear to be prejudiced

  • Internally driven: Not wanting to be prejudiced, regardless of whether or not others would find out

    • Likely to be more successful at controlling stereotyping and prejudice, even on implicit measures

    • Still vulnerable to automatic stereotyping and implicit biases

• Self-Regulation of Prejudiced Responses Model: Internally motivated individuals may learn to control their prejudices more effectively over time

  • People who are truly motivated to be unprejudiced are often confronted with the sad reality that they have failed to live up to that goal

  • This realization leads to unpleasant emotions (ex: guilt)

  • Due to repeated experiences of guilt, the individuals begin to develop expertise at recognizing the situations and stimuli that tend to trigger those failures, and they are then able to exert more control over them

  • Begin to interrupt what had been automatic stereotype activation

• Anti-prejudice messages that are designed to appeal more to people’s internal motivations may be more effective than messages that seem more externally focused

  • Comes across as very controlling and makes people rebel against it somewhat

Changing Cognitions, Cultures, and Motivations

• Exposure to images and individuals that reflect the diversity within social groups can help weaken stereotypes and combat their automatic activation

• Motivations, norms, and values can change over time

  • Popular culture plays an important role (ex: celebrities, tv shows, anti-prejudice campaigns)

  • Peers play an important role

  • Laws and policies that require behavior change can cause hearts and minds to follow