Prejudice Reduction Techniques

Attitudes and Social Change

• Researchers analyzed attitudes towards sexual orientation, race, and skin tone using time series models on Internet data from the US.

• Explicit responses (direct questions) showed a shift from negativity to neutrality over 13 years (2007-2016).

• Implicit responses on the IAT (which are harder to control) also showed a shift from negativity to neutrality.

• Caveat: Data is from 2007-2016, before Trump's first term; there may be limitations due to the Trump effect (increased prejudice).

• Homicide rates have declined drastically in the last few years, reaching an all-time low last year.

• Violent crime, including gun violence, has decreased to levels of the 1970s, despite news coverage of mass shootings (bad news bias).

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Pyramid of Hate and Reducing Prejudice

• The pyramid of hate starts with biased attitudes (prejudice) and stereotyping at the base.

• Addressing prejudice and stereotyping is crucial for reducing hate in society.

• Factors contributing to prejudice include cognitive processes (categorization), motivational factors (in-group favoritism), value orientations (authoritarianism), and socialization processes (media stereotypes).

• People often feel uncomfortable with their prejudices, as prejudice is incompatible with humanitarian and egalitarian values.

• To cope with this dissonance, people may justify their prejudices on seemingly non-prejudiced grounds, rationalize, deny, or ignore outgroups (modern, symbolic, and aversive racism).

• These processes maintain prejudice in society.

• For those who want to reduce their prejudices, recognizing and confronting biases is essential.

Individual Level Interventions

• Effective for individuals genuinely wanting to reduce biases.

• For systemic discrimination, group or societal level interventions are necessary.

Stereotype Suppression

• A form of thought suppression where one consciously tries to stop thinking about a particular thought.

• Used to manage food cravings, control depressing thoughts, and intrusive thoughts.

• Involves replacing unwanted thoughts with distracting thoughts.

• Crane and colleagues found that participants asked not to think about stereotypes used fewer stereotypical thoughts in written descriptions. However, there can be a rebound effect.

• Rebound effect: Trying not to think about something can prime a person to think about it even more.

• Especially likely if one has strong prejudices or if social norms do not discourage stereotypes.

• Self-regulation exercise (even unrelated to stereotypes) can aid in successful stereotype suppression, as self-regulation strengthens with practice.

Self Regulation of Prejudice Model

• Stereotypes and biases are often activated automatically without conscious awareness (as shown by the IAT).

• If people become aware of a prejudiced response discrepant from their egalitarian standards, they experience negative self-directed affect (guilt, disappointment).

• This moment allows for a pause and reflection on the causes of the behavior (retrospective reflection).

• Retrospective reflection involves focusing on environmental features and one's own behavior to identify cues for control.

• Cues for control are factors that cause prejudiced behavior; identifying them in advance can stop the behavior.

• Example: A white woman clutches her purse when a Black man approaches, realizes her bias, and reflects on why, establishing cues for control.

• In the future, when similar cues appear, behavioral inhibition is triggered to prevent the prejudiced response.

• Prospective reflection then enables a non-biased response.

• The biases may still exist, but people can learn to control how they affect behavior.

Mindfulness Meditation

• Focusing on the present, viewing thoughts and feelings non-judgmentally.

• Effective for depression and anxiety, and also has a positive impact on bias.

• Inhibits the tendency to automatically react and evaluate stimuli.

• Studies show mindfulness decreases implicit race and age biases (IAT).

Self Confrontation

• Raises awareness of inconsistencies among a person's self-held values.

• Inconsistencies cause cognitive dissonance, which people are motivated to reduce.

• Example: Realizing that freedom is ranked higher than equality leads to cognitive dissonance.

• Researchers found that when low-prejudiced people are aware of behaving inconsistently with egalitarian values, they feel guilty and want to change.

Compassionate Love

• Feelings, thoughts, and behaviors focused on caring, concern, and tenderness toward others.

• People high in compassionate love have more positive attitudes toward outgroups, including immigrants.

• More likely to include outgroup members in their sense of self and find commonalities.

• Opposite of moral exclusion, compassionate love broadens the scope of justice.

• Reminders of everyday experiences of compassionate love hold promise for prejudice reduction, as does creating compassionate love through cross-group friendships.

• These interventions are most effective for individuals low in prejudice seeking to eliminate biases.

Group Level Interventions

• Because prejudice and stereotyping are systemic, group-level interventions are generally more effective.

• Education alone is insufficient because prejudice has underlying emotional aspects and cognitive biases.

• Repeated contact with outgroup members can modify stereotypes and reduce prejudice. However, mere contact isn't enough.

• Desegregation in schools did not guarantee a reduction in prejudice.

• Robber's cave study: simply removing the competition did not restore harmony

Necessary Conditions for Contact to Reduce Prejudice

• Gordon Allport's initial contact hypothesis:

  • Groups must be of equal status.

  • Groups must share a common goal.

• Pettigrew's expanded hypothesis:

  • Mutual interdependence: Each group's success depends on the other group's success (opposite of zero-sum situation).

  • Common goal (superordinate goal): Working together takes priority, uniting people despite conflicts.

  • Equal status: Interaction should not reinforce stereotypes based on power differences.

  • Friendly, informal setting: On-on-one interactions are crucial to avoid segregation promoting knowledge of each other.

  • Knowing multiple outgroup members: Prevents viewing someone as an exception to the rule; the more people you interact with who don't fit the stereotypes, the harder it is to say they're all exceptions.

  • Social norms promoting equality: Norms reinforced by authorities or media motivate reaching out to outgroups; meeting all conditions encourages members of advantaged groups to become psychologically invested in the perspectives, experiences, and welfare of disadvantaged groups.

  • The goal is empathetic inclusion, humanization, investment in outgroups.

Superordinate Goals and Mutual Interdependence

• Robber's Cave Study showed superordinate goals diminishing hostility; researchers created situations requiring the boys to cooperate and rely on each other effectively diminished the hostility and stereotyping among the campers

Jigsaw Classroom

• A cooperative learning technique for students in grades 3-12 designed to limit student competition and racial segregation.

  • Students are divided into groups known as expert groups. Each expert group was given one portion of the data.

  • The jigsaw group, you have the coming together of the students from the different expert groups that present their own material to the group as a whole.

  • No one individual in the jigsaw group can learn the entire lesson without depending on the other members of the group.

  • Students had higher academic achievement and lower levels of discrimination.

Jane Elliott's Classroom Experiment

• Divided students based on eye color to teach them what it felt like to be discriminated against.

• Students were, 17 years later, affected by the experience and were using that with their kids and so on

• Studies relying on empathy and perspective taking have mixed evidence.

• It can backfire in real world interactions because of negative meta stereotypes.

Decategorization, Recategorization Theory

• Intergroup relations go through a series of stages:

  • During initial contact between two different groups, you would expect that the members of these groups are going to view each other in terms of stereotypes.

    • As contact is maintained, the members of the groups will start seeing each other in terms of individual personalities and characteristics rather than simply as members of an outgroup (decategorization).

    • Decategorization allows realizing that outgroup members are unique and variable

    • The category that the out group member had been lumped into is no longer very useful once you get to know that person as an individual, and you start to see all the ways in which they don't fit into the stereotypes about their group. And, eventually, the stereotypes just stop being useful.

    • Awareness that people have complex social identities beyond just their race or their gender or their religion or their age, etcetera, lessens boundaries between groups.

    • Salient categorization is what happens when you begin to view the outgroup members that you're interacting with.