Chapter 3 - Stereotypes and Prejudice

Prejudice and Its Components

• Prejudice is an attitude with three components:

  • Cognitive: Stereotypes (beliefs/generalizations about a group, assigning traits regardless of individual variation).

  • Affective: Emotions (hostile or negative feelings based on group membership).

  • Behavioral: Discrimination (unjustified negative actions toward a group member).

Old-Fashioned vs. Modern Biases

• Old-fashioned (overt and blatant) biases: Conscious beliefs, feelings, and behavior that people openly admit and favor their own group.

  • Example: Right-wing authoritarianism.

• Modern (implicit) biases: Unexamined, sometimes unconscious biases with real consequences.

  • Ambiguous and ambivalent.

  • Automatic and implicit.

  • Suppressed (due to social unacceptability).

Cognitive Component: Stereotypes

• Categories: Stereotypes are beliefs or generalizations about a group, assigning traits regardless of individual variation.

• Adaptive Mechanism: Creating categories is an adaptive mechanism to make sense of the social world. Social categorization is quick, effortless, and spontaneous.

  • Evidence from social neuroscience; newborns initially have no preference for faces of specific races but develop a preference by about 3 months of age.

• Stereotyping as Natural: A cognitive process where humans are cognitive misers, saving effort by taking shortcuts.

  • The law of the least effort (Allport, 1954).

• Variety of Qualities: Mental, physical, jobs, skills, etc.

• Negative and “Positive” Stereotypes

• Influence on Attention and Recall: Direct our attention and what we recall, allowing us to ignore inconsistent information (schemas).

• Acquisition of Stereotypes: May be acquired from others or based on personal experience, to some extent accurately identifying group attributes, making them adaptive.

• Drawbacks: Often blind us to individual differences within a category, which is negative.

Gender Stereotypes

• Women: Warm, empathic, emotional, talkative (studies show no actual gender differences in the number of words spoken, Mehl et al., 2007).

• Men: Competent, agentic, emotionally-constrained, and sometimes aggressive.

• Exaggerating Differences: Exaggerating differences between sexes, ignoring differences within the category.

• Transformation to Prejudice: Stereotypes often morph into prejudice.

• Ambivalent Sexism (Glick & Fiske, 2001; Glick & Fiske, 2011): Hostile and benevolent sexism both legitimize discrimination against women.

Affective Component: Emotions

• Prejudice Defined: Negative attitudes toward members of specific social groups, based solely on their group membership; not personal.

• Commonality: Common in most societies (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999).

• Impact of Logic: Make us immune to logical, rational arguments, as logic is not effective in countering emotions.

• Explicit vs. Implicit Feelings and Biases: We may be consciously aware that the prejudice is wrong, but it still persists in us.

Behavioral Component: Discrimination

• Discrimination Defined: Unjustified negative or harmful action toward a member of a group solely because of their membership in that group.

• Prejudice in Action: Sometimes institutionalized, e.g., hiring discrimination (Moss-Racusin et al., 2012).

• Forms of Discrimination:

  • Blatant (explicit).

  • Subtle (disguised): Microaggressions (put-downs, indignities, ignoring someone’s input, dedicating less time to someone, etc.), social distance, modern racism (thinking that minorities seek and receive more benefits than they deserve, denying that discrimination affects their outcomes (McConahay, 1986).

Easy Activation of Prejudice

• Implicit Associations: Many biases are beneath the surface, automatic and implicit, due to existing associations between certain categories of people and some negative events.

  • Example: Feeling of being in danger, quick decisions to act under stress; also, when angered or insulted (Rogers & Prentice-Dunn, 1981).

• Shooter Bias Studies: Higher level of pulling the trigger by White participants when a man in a video game was Black (vs. White), regardless of whether he was holding a gun vs. an innocent object, like a bottle (Correll, Park, Judd, & Whittenbrink, 20027; Cox & Devine, 2016).

Vicious Circle of Prejudice

• Cognition (Stereotyping) → Affect (Prejudice) → Behavior (Discrimination).

Modern Biases: Ambivalent Stereotypes

• Stereotype Content Model (SCM) (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002; Fiske, 2018):

  • Warmth (friendliness, trustworthiness, likability).

  • Competence (capability, assertiveness, respect).

• Four Categories Based on Warmth and Competence:

  • High Warmth, High Competence: Ingroup, middle class = pride, admiration.

  • High Warmth, Low Competence: Elderly, disabled, children = pity, sympathy, ambivalence.

  • Low Warmth, High Competence: Rich, professional, tech experts = envy, jealousy, ambivalence.

  • Low Warmth, Low Competence: Poor, homeless, immigrants = disgust, contempt.

Detecting Implicit Biases

• Fake Resume/CV Studies: Sending identical CVs to be evaluated, modifying just one element, indicative of group membership, e.g., a female vs. male name (Moss-Racusin et al., 2012).

• Assessing Nonverbal Behaviors: Speech errors, physical closeness—how far we sit from others (Sechrist & Stangor, 2001).

• Using “Technology”: Various “lie detectors” make us more as we believe we cannot trick a machine or someone who knows our attitudes = more prejudice expressed, e.g., the bogus pipeline procedure (Jones & Sigall, 1971).

  • Problem: at times people’s insight is limited.

• IAT (Implicit Association Test) (Banaji & Greenwald, 2013):

  • Measuring mistakes in categorization and speed of reaction to pairs of words as a test of associations between those.

• Stages 1 & 2: Sorting tasks– identify stimuli (Black or White face - decide if it is Black or White; sort positive and negative words as such).

• Stage 3 – pairs of words - faces and words combined - quicker reaction to White faces + positive words, and Black faces + negative words.

  • Not a perfect measure of prejudice, in some cases translates into discrimination, while in others possibly just indicative of a cultural association

Consequences for Targets of Prejudice

• Risk of Internalization: Risk of internalization of society’s views on the inferiority of one’s group.

• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (Merton, 1948, 1968; Rosehthal & Jacobsen, 1968; Rosenthal & Babad, 1985):

  • Acting upon our stereotypes and prejudice → discrimination → resulting in their behavior confirming the stereotype.

• Stereotype Threat (Steele & Aronson, 1995; Casad & Bryant, 2016) or Social Identity Threat:

  • Apprehension experienced by members of a group that their behavior might confirm a cultural stereotype; race, gender, etc., may cause lower performance.

  • Counter-measures: self-affirmation as a way of directing focus on important domains, other than the stereotyped one (perspective shift) + wise feedback (Yeager et al., 2014).

• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Study (Word, Zanna, & Cooper, 1974):

  • Study 1: White students interview white or African American job applicants.

  • Study 2: White students interview white job applicants, in one group treated in the way African-American applicants were treated in Study 1. Independent judges evaluated them as less competent, more nervous = reflecting interviewer’s expectations.

Stereotype Threat and Gender

• The common belief that women are worse at math – research does not confirm this (Else-Quest, Hyde, & Linn, 2010); but still fewer women in STEM sciences.

• Role of current category identification and awareness of the stereotype existence + (possibly) the importance of the domain (identification).

• Study by Shih, Pittinsky, & Ambady, 1999: Asian women do worse on a math test when primed with (reminded of) a stereotype of “women are poor at math” (stereotype threat) than when they are reminded of a stereotype “Asians are good at math” (stereotype boost). White males also perform worse on math tests when thinking the comparison group is Asian males (Aronson et al., 1999).

Origins of Prejudice

Three main sources:

• Social

• Motivational

• Cognitive

Social Origins

• Socialization: Authoritarian beliefs, culture and religion, pressures and normative rules to conform: going along with the group to fulfill its expectations + gain acceptance.

• Unequal Status: Its maintenance via stereotypes (remember SDO?).

  • “Lazy slaves who cannot take care of themselves.”

  • “Weak and incompetent women who need protection and support”: patronizing, benevolent sexism that appreciates only “good women” (caring, sweet, passive, weak) and employs backlash against the agentic ones (gender role dissidents/ deviants/ non-stereotypical females).

Motivational Origins

• Frustration + Aggression: Displaced aggression and scapegoat theory.

• Competition: Competition for scarce resources and realistic conflict theory.

• Social Identity Theory: Us vs. them division, ingroup favoritism + outgroup derogation, feeling of entitlement and superiority + need to justify it, need for status, self-regard, outgroup > ingroup homogeneity; minimal group paradigm (Tajfel et al., 1971).

• Threats to Self-Esteem: My group’s interests are undermined, my self-esteem is in danger, outgroup derogation as a way to regain positive SE.

• Just World Beliefs: Blaming the victim for their victimization – ”They deserve it, world is fair and predictable, I am good = safe.