Module 37: Antisocial Relations - Prejudice and Aggression

Prejudice: Racial and Ethnic

• Americans' racial attitudes have changed significantly in the last half-century.
  • Support for interracial marriage between blacks and whites increased from 4% in 1959 to 87% in 2013.
• Data indicates a decline in extreme poverty, illiteracy, war, violent crime, racism, sexism, homophobia, domestic violence, disease, and lethal accidents.
• Colorism exists among Black and Hispanic people, as well as in India and East Asian cultures, where those with darker skin tones face greater prejudice and discrimination.
• Criminal stereotypes can influence perceptions, with individuals being more likely to misperceive a tool as a gun when preceded by a Black face compared to a White face.

Gender Prejudice and Attitudes

• Attitudes often follow legislated behavior. For example, support for same-sex marriage increased in US states where it became legal.

Roots of Prejudice: Social, Emotional, and Cognitive

• Evolutionarily, humans are predisposed to make instant judgments about strangers, distinguishing between friend and foe, which can lead to prejudice.
• The urge to distinguish enemies from friends and to dehumanize those not like us predisposes prejudice against strangers.
• Examples include instances where individuals of Asian descent were blamed for the spread of a virus and told to go back to China.
• Misfortunes of others can be perceived as funny, as indicated by a Japanese saying.

Cognitive Shortcuts and Social Identity

• People tend to prejudge others based on group membership, which can result in positive or negative evaluations.
• Positive prejudice involves a positive evaluation in favor of someone within one's own group, while negative prejudice involves a negative evaluation of someone in a different group, often leading to discrimination.
• Social psychologists discuss groups in terms of in-groups (us) and out-groups (them).
• In-group members are viewed as diverse, whereas out-group members are perceived as all alike.
• Groups serve positive functions such as providing protection and solving problems, but they can also lead to prejudice.
• Prejudice is an unjustified, often negative attitude, while stereotyping involves generalizations (often overgeneralizations) about members of a particular group.
• Stereotypes can be positive, such as viewing the elderly as wise or certain ethnic groups as pro-family.
• The Robbers Cave experiment (Muzaffar Sharif, 1954) demonstrated how easily prejudice can arise between groups.
  • 22 Oklahoma boys were divided into two groups at a boy scout camp, and competitions fostered hostility between the groups.
  • Intergroup hostility was alleviated by presenting challenges that required both groups to work together, such as getting a stalled truck out of the mud.

Explicit vs. Implicit Prejudice

• Prejudice exists at both conscious (explicit) and unconscious (implicit) levels.
• It is a challenge to address implicit forms of prejudice, which individuals may not be aware of.
• Researchers use instruments to measure conscious and unconscious attitudes, revealing that people often operate on autopilot.
• Consciousness can sometimes override automatic attitudes and prejudices.
• Automatic associations between race and violence can influence perceptions, such as whether someone is seen as holding a gun or a wrench in the dark.
• Reducing prejudice is essential, and individuals can monitor their feelings and actions, replace old habits with new ones, and seek out new friendships.
• People are inclined to see the way things are as the way they ought to be.
• System justification tends to preserve existing policies, even after major social changes are legislated.

Aggression: Correlation with Gun Ownership

• Individuals who keep a gun in the home are twice as likely to be murdered and three times as likely to die by suicide (Anglomir et al, 2014).
• States and countries with high gun ownership rates tend to have high gun death rates (BPC, 2016).
• More guns correlate with more violence and aggression.

Biological Influences on Aggression

• Animals can be bred for aggressiveness.
• Genes play a role in aggression, as indicated by human twin studies (Miles and Carrie, 1997; Rome et al, 1999).
• Damage to the impulse-controlling frontal lobes can increase the likelihood of aggression (Amin et al, 1996; Davidson et al, 2000; Rain, 2013).

Alcohol and Aggression

• Thinking one has consumed alcohol can increase aggression (Bedou et al, 2009).
• Unknowingly ingesting alcohol can also increase aggression.
• Alcohol affects aggression both biologically and psychologically (Bushman, 1993; Edou et al, 1996).

Psychological and Social-Cultural Factors in Aggression

• Aversive events can trigger aggressive behavior (Berkowitz, 1983, 2012).
• Exposure to violent video game content and violent media can increase aggression.
• Researchers have different opinions on the impact of violent video games on aggression.
• Violent video games may be one contributing factor to social violence (APA, 2019; Mother and Vanderwheel, 2019).