Factors affecting prejudice

Factors affecting prejudice (and discrimination), including individual differences (personality), situation and culture.

Competition

Sherif and Tajfel both propose that people easily fall into an in-group/out-group mentality, but there are situational factors that make this more likely.

This big difference between Realistic Conflict Theory and Social Identity Theory is the importance of competition

For RCT, there needs to be a competition over resources (real or just perceived) to turn in-group/out-group mentality into prejudice and discrimination.

According to SIT, there's no need for competition. Just recognising that someone is from an out-group is enough - all by itself! - to trigger prejudice and discrimination will follow.

Charismatic leaders

"Charisma" is an influence over other people's emotions. A "charismatic leader" is someone other people look up to and want to follow. Charismatic leaders can promote prejudice and discrimination or they can oppose it.

Cultural Varibles

• Deference: how important is it to show respect to people in authority and follow leaders?
• Individualism: how important is it to be an individual or to be a part of the group?
• Justice: how important is it for people to do as they promised and get what they deserve?
• Shame: how important is it to "save face" in the presence of other people and not look bad?

In cultures which strongly value justice, a person might feel an obligation to obey if they've previously signed a contract or received a payment; they might feel less worry about discriminating if the other group seems to deserve punishment.

Culture usually applies to countries or even whole continents. However, smaller groups can have a subculture that might affect obedience and prejudice. Bikers might be less deferential but the army has a strong culture of obedience.

Developmental differences

A stereotypical view would be that young children are particularly submissive, with disobedience rising during the rebellious teenage years, then people becoming more obedient as they get older

no great change in obedience with age - or perhaps different factors associated with age cancel each other out (e.g. teenagers are less respectful of authority but lack the confidence to disobey a direct order).

It's often said that children are born without prejudices. However, in-group favouritism and out-group discrimination seems to develop around age 5 (Aboud & Amata, 2001) but that prejudice then declines after that.

Gender differences

You might expect gender differences in obedience and prejudice. Maybe females are raised to be more compliant and follow instructions better than males. Alternatively, maybe females are less likely to follow aggressive instructions - this ties in with some biological views about aggression.

We might expect obedience levels to be higher in many other cultures, but perhaps lower in cultures even less deferential and even more individualistic than the USA.

However, in this study the women were being ordered to shock another woman by a male authority figure, so they may have sided with the victim instead (this would be an example of in-group favouritism overruling obedience to authority).

Personality differences

Milgram's Variation #5 was the "empathy" variation, where Mr Wallace mentioned having a heart condition and, at 150V, started complaining about chest pains. More participants dropped out at 150V, long before Mr Wallace went silent at 300V. However, participants who continued after 150V seemed to feel they had “passed a point of no return”

Empathy scores didn't make any difference to obedience but autonomy scores did. Burger concludes that people who have a psychological need to be in control of their own lives may be slightly more disobedient.