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Defining Models of Prejudice: People vs. Places

• Traditional View of Prejudice: Historically, prejudice has been viewed as a "problem of people" (Allport, 1954). This "prejudice-in-people" model locates bias within individual attitudes and beliefs—identifying "bigots," "homophobes," "sexists," and "racists."

• The Case of Harvey Weinstein: The situation involving Harvey Weinstein, a powerful Hollywood producer accused of decades of sexual harassment and assault, illustrates two perspectives:

  • The Individual Model: Views the problem as a deeply disturbed man who should be stripped of power, prosecuted, and punished. Once the individual is removed, the system presumably returns to normal.

  • The Contextual Reality: While individual prosecution addresses specific victims, it does not account for the over $500,000$ women who shared experiences of sexism via the "Me, too" movement in a single week (Gilbert, 2017). These women navigated psychological, behavioral, and economic contingencies in workplaces that disadvantaged them relative to men.

• Prejudiced Places: Defined as environments with predictable, systematic inequalities in experience and outcomes based on social group membership. These contexts advantage people from some social groups while disadvantaging others.

• The Social-Contextual Theory: This model examines the values, norms, models, hierarchies, and behaviors cultivated by organizations. It asks questions such as: What context afforded Weinstein the opportunity to behave this way? What norms of concealment allowed it to persist for decades?

The Prejudice-in-People Model: Characteristics and Limitations

• Appeal of the Individual Model: This model suggests that by rooting out "bad actors," an otherwise fair system will produce equitable outcomes. It allows individuals to feel "off the hook" if they personally lack biased hearts or minds, preventing them from acknowledging how they might be complicit in perpetuating biased norms.

• Focus on Attitudes: Social psychology has traditionally focused on attitudes, distinguishing between:

  • Explicit Attitudes: Conscious beliefs about the inferiority of certain groups.

  • Implicit/Unconscious Attitudes: Automatic associations, such as linking certain social groups (e.g., Black men) with characteristics like "dangerous" or "criminal" (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2010).

• Measurement Methods: Researchers use covert methods because people avoid the stigma of being labeled prejudiced. These include:

  • Reaction time measures (difficult to "game").

  • Physiological responses.

  • Brain imaging and hormonal assays.

• Individual-Focused Interventions: Common strategies include increasing intergroup contact, introducing counterstereotypical role models, and retraining implicit attitudes (Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001; Devine et al., 2012).

• Limitations of Attitudinal Theories:

  • Poor Predictivity: Generalized attitudes (measured by feeling thermometers or association speeds) are poor predictors of specific discriminatory behaviors, such as hiring decisions or avoiding contact (Ajzen & Fishbein, 2005).

  • Dissonance and Defensiveness: Being confronted with personal bias often leads to denial, dispute, or avoidance toward outgroup members (Czopp & Monteith, 2003; Perry et al., 2015).

  • Perceived Inevitability: Construing bias as an automatic feature of human cognition can make it seem unchangeable, leading diversity training to sometimes backfire (Dobbin & Kalev, 2016).

  • Absence of "Bad People": Individuals can experience prejudiced outcomes even in the absence of prejudiced people if the context is poorly structured.

The Social-Contextual Model of Prejudice

• The Target's Perspective: This approach takes the perspective of the marginalized individual to explore how environment features shape outcomes. It is rooted in social identity threat theory (Steele et al., 2002).

• Experience of Treatment: Targets do not experience another person's implicit bias score; they experience whether they are valued, respected, and included, or devalued, excluded, and passed over.

• Prejudice as an Action: The model moves from viewing prejudice as a trait some people possess to viewing it as something both people and places "do" (Markus & Moya, 2010).

Factors That Create Prejudiced Environments

• Unequal Taxes on Resources: Environments become prejudiced when they unequally tax the emotions, physiology, and cognitive function of specific groups.

• Demographic Salience in High-Stakes Testing:

  • Asking for demographic information (race, gender) before a standardized test (e.g., $SAT$, $LSAT$, $MCAT$) creates a prejudiced context (Steele & Aronson, 1995).

  • For negatively stereotyped groups, checking these boxes triggers "stereotype threat," leading to evaluation apprehension, anxiety, and physiological stress that sap cognitive resources.

  • Majority group members do not face this pressure, allowing them full use of cognitive resources.

• Identity Suppression and Suppression of Authenticity:

  • Promotion practices favoring a single "fit" (e.g., independent, agentic, masculine leadership) force those who favor communal or collaborative approaches to suppress parts of their identity (Pronin et al., 2004).

  • Physical representations, like all-male conference panels, signal that only one group is expected to succeed.

• Stereotypical Cues and Representations:

  • Images (e.g., "bro-grammar" posters in tech companies) or naming meeting rooms only for famous White male executives signal that stereotypes are an acceptable lens for interaction.

  • Task assignments based on stereotypes (e.g., asking women to fetch coffee) require targets to constantly contend with stereotypes (Czopp et al., 2015).

• Prejudiced Norms:

  • Acceptability of prejudice toward certain groups (e.g., immigrants) prevents people from suppressing biased behavior (Crandall & Eshleman, 2003).

  • Environments with prejudiced norms can create bias in individuals who were initially egalitarian through self-persuasion and dissonance reduction.

• Biased Recruitment and Promotion Policies:

  • Criteria such as "on-call during holidays/school breaks" disadvantage those with family commitments.

  • Pay-secrecy policies mask group-based inequities, making it difficult to challenge discrimination legally (e.g., under the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act).

• Organizational Ideologies:

  • Colorblindness: Avoiding the topic of race communicates that cultural differences are not valued. It leads majority members to avoid intergroup interaction for fear of appearing biased and prevents minorities from receiving constructive feedback (Cohen et al., 1999).

  • Fixed Mindset/Lay Theories of Intelligence: Environments that believe intelligence is a fixed, innate trait undermine trust and engagement among members of groups whose abilities are stereotyped (Murphy & Dweck, 2010).

• Neutral Procedures with Disparate Impact:

  • Legal Selection: Law school admissions often weight $LSAT$ scores at $60\%$ and undergraduate $GPA$ at $40\%$. Because women often have higher $GPA$s and lower $LSAT$s, this weighting systematically disadvantages them.

  • Testing Scores: Treating a $1200$ $SAT$ score from a White student and a Black student as identical ignores the "latent ability" suppressed by stereotype threat in the Black student (Walton & Spencer, 2009).

Strategies to Debian Places and Organizations

• Perspective Taking and Reporting: Organizations should survey members to understand differential experiences between majority and minority groups. Implementing bias incident reporting systems should involve minority groups in the creation of procedures.

• Challenging Societal Stereotypes:

  • Assess physical environments for symbolic cues of inclusion.

  • Hire and promote individuals in counterstereotypic roles.

  • Increase numerical representation to reduce the feeling that an individual must represent their entire group (Steele, 2010).

• Attending to Local Norms: Leaders should embody egalitarian behavior. All-inclusive multiculturalism (AIM) acknowledges that both minority and majority groups enhance the collective (Stevens et al., 2008).

• Debiasing Hiring and Promotion:

  • Use clear criteria to avoid shifting standards (Biernat & Manis, 1994).

  • Implement identity-blind reviews of work products.

  • Broaden job announcements beyond internal, informal networks.

  • Consider "distance traveled" (overcoming challenges/showing growth) as a criterion for resilience.

• Valuing Multiple Mastery Styles: Assessments should allow for demonstrations of both independence (agency) and interdependence (communality) (Diekman et al., 2017).

• Structural Training: Educate employees about how policies and practices—rather than just individual attitudes—create prejudice.

• Data-Driven Evaluation: Regularly analyze institutional data for recruitment, retention, and performance to ask "what are we as an organization doing?" rather than "what is wrong with these people?"

Risks to Monitor in Policy Implementation

• Moral Credentialing: Gaining a "moral license" by performing one egalitarian act can make individuals less vigilant about bias in subsequent decisions (Monin & Miller, 2001).

• Illusion of Fairness: The mere presence of diversity policies can make people believe bias is unlikely, causing them to overlook actual instances of discrimination (Kaiser et al., 2013).

• Shifting Definitions of Diversity: Avoid broadening the definition of diversity to mean "expertise" (e.g., different academic departments), which can unintentionally maintain gender and racial hierarchies.

• Symbolic Diversity (Tokenism): Discrepancies between diverse imagery (brochures) and the actual lack of representation in the organization leave new employees feeling "hoodwinked."

• Majority Group Backlash: Efforts must include majority groups to prevent them from feeling sidelined. Highlighting how diversity improves the "bottom line" and enhances performance for everyone can help enlist their support.