Decategorization and Recategorization Model & Prejudice Reduction

Decategorization and Recategorization Model

• Explains the steps during prolonged intergroup contact that reduce stereotypes and prejudice.
• Example: Gender-inclusive bathrooms and their impact on perceived workplace fairness.

Gender-Inclusive Bathrooms

• Becoming more common in universities, museums, and some cities.
• Some states and cities prohibit them.
• Signal a transgender-friendly workplace.
• Critical for transgender people, 90% of whom report workplace harassment, including denial of appropriate bathrooms or job loss due to transphobia.

Identity Safety

• Gender-inclusive restrooms signal identity safety, indicating that a stigmatized identity (e.g., being transgender) will not lead to negative outcomes.
• Transfers to other stigmatized groups (people of color, women).
• White women report greater perceived fairness and belonging in organizations with racial diversity awards.
• Black and Latino men report greater identity safety in workplaces with gender diversity awards.

Reasons for Transfer of Identity Safety Cues

• Workplaces with racial diversity commitments are perceived as:
  • More egalitarian.
  • Lower in social dominance orientation (SDO).
  • Signaling more positive attitudes toward women.
• Treatment of one stigmatized group indicates how other stigmatized groups will be treated.

Research by Cheney and Sanchez

• Demonstrated that women and racial minorities report greater perceived fairness and a more positive climate in workplaces with gender-inclusive restrooms.
• Companies with gender-inclusive bathrooms are perceived as:
  • Lower in gender essentialism (the idea that men and women are specific categories with fixed traits).
  • More egalitarian.
  • Promoting identity safety across different stigmatized identities.

Societal Level Interventions: Assimilation vs. Multiculturalism

Assimilation

• When a group gives up its cultural identity to adopt the customs of another group; traditionally encouraged for immigrants to the United States.
• Problems:
  • Causes resentment when people are forced to assimilate.
  • Individuals may hide their cultural heritage.

Multiculturalism

• Different cultural groups cohabit without losing their cultural identities.
• Encourages people to practice their cultures openly.
• Leads to greater understanding between cultures in the long run.

Color Blindness

• The ideology of not seeing race, idealized since the late 1960s as a way to combat racism.
• Aims to end discrimination by treating individuals equally without regard to race, culture, or ethnicity.
• Focuses on commonalities and shared humanities.

Problems with Color Blindness

• Not sufficient to heal racial wounds personally or nationally.
• White individuals can ignore racism and justify the current social order, feeling comfortable with their privileged standing.
• Minorities experience it as denying negative racial experiences, rejecting cultural heritages, and invalidating unique perspectives.
• Makes race a taboo topic, hindering understanding and addressing racism.
• Ignores that race affects opportunities, perceptions, and income levels.
• Tends to attribute shortcomings to individual failings rather than systemic issues.
• Ignores cultural differences, stereotypes, and values.
• Comes from a lack of awareness of racial privilege.

Research Findings on Color Blindness in the Workplace

• Decreases individual sensitivity to racism and discrimination.
• Has negative implications for interracial interactions, minorities' perceptions, and outcomes in the workplace, and the pursuit of diversity.
• Minority employees feel less engaged in workplaces that downplay racial and ethnic differences.
• Colorblindness is based on assimilation, favoring those who act or fit into the white norm.
• Denies the racialized experiences of workers who are Black, Asian, Latino, or Native American.

Color Blindness Example

• City infrastructure planning that doesn't account for the needs of communities of color.

Colorblind vs Multicultural Ideologies

Study Comparing Colorblind and Multicultural Approaches

• White college students read essays espousing either a colorblind or multicultural approach to improving ethnic relations.
  • Colorblind Essay: Intergroup harmony can be achieved if we recognize that at our core, we are all the same and created equal.
  • Multicultural Essay: Intergroup harmony can be achieved if we better appreciate our diversity and recognize and accept each group's positive and negative qualities.
• Results:
  • Multicultural essay readers increased both positive and negative stereotyping but also increased positive regard for minorities and showed greater appreciation of the different social realities experienced by minorities and white Americans.
  • Those exposed to the colorblind argument showed more pro-white bias.

Additional Research

• Hearing colorblind messages predicts negative outcomes among whites, such as greater racial bias and negative affect toward minorities.
• Colorblind messages cause more stress in ethnic minorities, resulting in decreased cognitive performance (stereotype threat).

Multiculturalism Benefits

• Acknowledges, highlights, and celebrates differences, recognizing the valuable contributions of each tradition.
• Addresses historical suffering due to racial conflict or differences.

How to Become More Multicultural

• Recognizing and valuing differences rather than ignoring them.
• Teaching and learning about different cultures.
• Fostering personal friendships and organizational alliances.

Usefulness of Color Blindness

• In specific situations with specific people, the colorblind approach can be used to facilitate tolerance between groups.
• Distracts attention away from race and ethnicity and toward commonalities across people or people's uniqueness as individuals.
• Works particularly well with children, helping them form a more nuanced understanding of people.
• Seems to work well with African American adults, who are more likely to attach a truly egalitarian meaning to color blindness.

Ethnic and Racial Identities

• Study by Demonia Taylor focused on the effect of ethnic and racial discrimination and marginalization on minority children and adolescents.
• Ethnic racial identity can protect adolescents from the negative effects of discrimination and stigmatization.
• Ethnic racial identity: A multidimensional construct including feelings about one's ethnic group, its meaning for their identity, and the extent to which they have explored their cultural background.
• Engaging in identity exploration provides youths with a sense of clarity and self-assuredness regarding their ethnic background, protecting their psyche and psychosocial adjustment.
• Helps adolescents better understand and cope with negative experiences based on their culture.

Social Identity Theory

• Feeling good about your social group membership is essential for maintaining a positive self-concept and positive self-esteem, especially when dealing with threats against your group.
• Latino adolescents who felt the most positive about their ethnicity did not experience depression when they were discriminated against.
• Multiculturalism has positive implications for minority group members' feelings of power in society.
• Because multiculturalism highlights the essential contributions that different races and cultural groups make to society and this is empowering rather than from the colorblind approach.

Violence and Aggression

Punishment

• The most common treatment societies have employed to control aggression.
• Three necessary conditions for effectiveness:
  • Prompt: Administered quickly after the aggressive action.
  • Relatively Strong: Aversive to the aggressor.
  • Consistently applied: The aggressor knows it will likely follow future aggressive actions.
• The criminal justice system often fails on promptness.
• May still not reduce aggression; recidivism in the prison system is high.
• Punishing angry individuals might not deter them because anger interferes with rational cost-benefit analysis.
• May provoke counter-aggression.
• Using aggression as punishment can teach and encourage observers to copy.
• Does not teach new prosocial forms of behavior, so changes in behavior are unlikely to really result in long term changes in behavior.

Modeling Nonaggressive Behavior

• Children will be more aggressive if they've seen other people behaving aggressively in similar situations.
• Exposing children to nonaggressive models who express themselves in a restrained and rational manner when provoked can reduce aggression.
• Children copy what they see; it's up to adults to model appropriate behavior.

Condemning Aggressive Behavior

• If a child watches violence on TV in the presence of an adult who condemns the violence, the child is much less likely to copy it.

Prosocial Video Games

• Exposure to violent video games increases aggression in children, whereas exposure to prosocial video games can reduce a child's aggressive behavior.
• Prosocial video games decrease aggressive thoughts, emotions, hostile attributions, and aggressive behaviors themselves.

Internalizing Anti-Aggression Beliefs

• Coming up with anti violent beliefs apparently caused the children to actually incorporate them into their self concepts.
• Cognitive strategy to help people internalize anti-violent beliefs by having them think of reasons why aggression is bad.
• Effective in reducing the impact of TV violence on children's attitudes and behavior.
• Two years later, children showed fewer aggressive behaviors than those who had not gone through the intervention.

Apologies

• Very effective at reducing other people's anger and aggression.
• Offering a genuine apology can effectively diffuse hostile aggression.
• Gender difference in willingness to apologize: women are more willing than men to take responsibility for a perceived social transgression; can be caused by men's fear of losing face or social status.

Reducing Exposure to Violence

• Particularly important for children.
• Significantly reduced when children spend less time watching violent shows and playing violent video games.
• Reducing exposure by a third can make a huge difference in children's behavior.

Dealing with Aggressive Urges

• Debunking the catharsis hypothesis: blowing off steam by performing an aggressive act does not relieve aggressive tendencies.
• Engaging in aggressive behavior to reduce aggression is counterproductive.
• Doing something impressive, even if it's not aimed at a person still makes us aggressive.

Active Enabling

• Using simple devices to allow anger to dissipate.
• Examples:
  • Counting to 10.
  • Taking deep breaths.
  • Listening to soothing music.
  • Taking a walk.
  • Exercising.
  • Doing chores.
  • Riding your bike.