Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Prejudice: Causes and Cures Chapter 13

Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Prejudice: Causes and CuresChapter 13


Overview

• Definition of prejudice, stereotype and discrimination?

• What causes prejudice?• How can prejudice be reduced?

– Contact hypothesis


Prejudice: The Ubiquitous Social Phenomenon• Prejudice is ubiquitous: In one form

or another, it affects us all. • For one thing, prejudice is a two-way

street; it often flows from the minority group to the majority group as well as in the other direction.

• And any group can be a target of prejudice.


Prejudice: The Ubiquitous Social PhenomenonMany aspects of your identity can

cause you to be labeled and discriminated against:– nationality– racial and ethnic identity– gender– sexual orientation– religion– appearance– physical state

– weight– disabilities– diseases– hair color– professions– hobbies


Prejudice: The Ubiquitous Social PhenomenonMany aspects of your identity can

cause you to be labeled and discriminated against.

• Consider the stereotypes of the “ditzy blonde,” “dumb jock,” or “computer nerd.”

• Some people have negative attitudes about blue-collar workers; others, about Fortune 500 CEOs.

• The point is that none of us emerges completely unscathed by prejudice; it is a problem common to all humankind.


Prejudice: The Ubiquitous Social PhenomenonIn addition to being widespread, prejudice is

dangerous.Simple dislike of a group can be relentless and

can escalate to extreme hatred, to thinking of its members as less than human, and to torture, murder, and even genocide.

Even when murder or genocide is not the culmination of prejudiced beliefs, the targets of prejudice will suffer in less dramatic ways.

One frequent consequence of being the target of relentless prejudice is a diminution of one’s self-esteem.


Prejudice and Self-Esteem

• Seeds of low self-esteem are sown early.• Clark and Clark (1947) demonstrated that African

American children as young as three already thought it was not particularly desirable to be black.

• Children were offered a choice between playing with a white doll and playing with a black doll. The great majority of them rejected the black doll, feeling that the white doll was prettier and generally superior.

• Taking this evidence into consideration, the Supreme Court ruled that separating black children from white children on the basis of race alone “generates a feeling of inferiority."


Experiments with the African American children

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6eHxMoyuig&feature=related


Prejudice and Self-Esteem

• Goldberg (1968) women in this culture had learned to consider themselves intellectually inferior to men.

• In his experiment, Goldberg asked female college students to read scholarly articles and to evaluate them in terms of their competence and writing style.

• For some students, specific articles were signed by male authors (e.g., “John T. McKay”), while for others, the same articles were signed by female authors (e.g., “Joan T. McKay”).

• The female students rated the articles much higher if they were attributed to a male author than if the same articles were attributed to a female author.


A Progress Report

Significant changes have happened since those studies:•The number of blatant acts of overt prejudice and discrimination has decreased sharply.•Affirmative action opened the door to greater opportunities for women and minorities.•The media have increased our exposure to women and minorities doing important work in positions of power and influence.


A Progress Report

These changes are reflected in the gradual increase in self-esteem of people in these groups.

Most recent research has failed to replicate the results of those earlier experiments.

1. African American children have gradually become more content with black dolls than they were in the late 1930s.

2. People no longer discriminate against a piece of writing simply because it is attributed to a woman.


A Progress Report

While this progress is real, it would be a mistake to conclude that prejudice has ceased to be a serious problem in the United States.

Prejudice exists in countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

For the most part, in America, prejudice has gone underground and become less overt.


Prejudice DefinedPrejudice is an attitude.

Attitudes are made up of three components: • affective or emotional component, representing both

the type of emotion linked with the attitude (e.g., anger, warmth) and the extremity of the attitude (e.g., mild uneasiness, outright hostility),

• cognitive component, involving the beliefs or thoughts (cognitions) that make up the attitude,

• behavioral component, relating to one’s actions—people don’t simply hold attitudes; they usually act on them as well.


Prejudice Defined

Prejudice refers to the general attitude structure and its affective (emotional) component.

While prejudice can involve either positive or negative affect, social psychologists (and people in general) use the word prejudice primarily when referring to negative attitudes about others.

PrejudiceA hostile or negative attitude toward

people in a distinguishable group, based solely on their membership in that group.


Stereotypes: The Cognitive Component

The distinguished journalist Walter Lippmann (1922), who was the first to introduce the term stereotype, described the distinction between the world out there and stereotypes—“the little pictures we carry around inside our heads.”

Within a given culture, these pictures tend to be remarkably similar.



Once formed, stereotypes are resistant to change on the basis of new information.

Stereotype A generalization about a group of

people in which identical characteristics are assigned to virtually all members of the group, regardless of actual variation among the members.



Stereotyping is a cognitive process, not an emotional one.

Stereotyping does not necessarily lead to intentional acts of abuse.

Often stereotyping is merely a technique we use to simplify how we look at the world—and we all do it to some extent.


Stereotypes, Attribution, and Gender

1. Compared to men, women do tend to manifest behaviors that can best be described as more socially sensitive, friendlier, and more concerned with the welfare of others, while men tend to behave in ways that are more dominant, controlling, and independent.

2. Some data indicate that the stereotype tends to underestimate the actual gender differences.

3. While overlap exists between men and women on these characteristics, the differences are too consistent to be dismissed as unimportant.



Needless to say, the phenomenon of gender stereotyping often does not reflect reality and can cut deeply.

When a man is successful on a given task, observers of both sexes attribute his success to ability.

If a woman is successful at that same task, observers attribute her success to hard work.



Even as children, girls have a tendency to downplay their own ability.

While fourth-grade boys attribute their own successful outcomes on a difficult intellectual task to their ability, girls tend to derogate their own successful performance.

While boys learn to protect their egos by attributing their own failures to bad luck, girls take more blame for failures.



These beliefs can be influenced by the attitudes of our society in general and parents.

• Mothers who hold the strongest gender-stereotypical beliefs also believe their own daughters have relatively low math ability and that their sons have relatively high math ability.

• Mothers who don't hold stereotypical beliefs do not see their daughters as less able in math than their sons.


Discrimination:The Behavioral Component

DiscriminationAn unjustified negative or harmful

action toward the members of a group simply because of their membership in that group.


Adapted from Bond, diCandia & McKennon, 1988.


Discrimination against Homosexuals

Several studies have shown homosexuals face much discrimination and antipathy in day-to-day lives.

Unlike women, ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities, homosexuals are not protected by national laws banning discrimination in the workplace.


Discrimination against Homosexuals

Researchers have found that compared to the way they interacted with “non-homosexuals,” employers interacting with job applicants they have been led to think are homosexual:– were less verbally positive– spent less time interviewing them– used fewer words while chatting with

them– made less eye contact with them


Group exercise

• Think about an example to a:– prejudice– stereotype– discrimination


What Causes Prejudice?


The Way We Think: Social Cognition

Our first explanation for what causes prejudice is that it is the inevitable byproduct of the way we process and organize information.

Our tendency to categorize and group information, to form schemas and use them to interpret new or unusual information, to rely on potentially inaccurate heuristics (shortcuts in mental reasoning), and to depend on what are often faulty memory processes—all of these aspects of social cognition can lead us to form negative stereotypes and to apply them in a discriminatory way.


Social Categorization: Us versus Them

• The first step in prejudice is the creation of groups—putting some people into one group based on certain characteristics and others into another group based on their different characteristics.

• This kind of categorization is the underlying theme of human social cognition.

• Thus social categorization is both useful and necessary; however, this simple cognitive process has profound implications.


Social Categorization: Us versus Them

For example, in Jane Elliot’s third-grade classroom, children grouped according to eye color began to act differently based on that social categorization.

• Blue-eyed children, the superior group, stuck together and actively promoted and used their higher status and power in the classroom.

• They formed an in-group, defined as the group with which an individual identifies.

• The blue-eyed kids saw the brown-eyed ones as outsiders—different and inferior.

• To the blue-eyed children, the brown-eyed kids were the out-group, the group with which the individual does not identify.


In-Group Bias

In-Group BiasPositive feelings and special treatment

for people we have defined as being part of our in-group and negative feelings and unfair treatment for others simply because we have defined them as being in the out-group.


In-Group Bias

The major underlying motive is self-esteem:

• Individuals seek to enhance their self-esteem by identifying with specific social groups.

• Self-esteem will be enhanced only if the individual sees these groups as superior to other groups.


In-Group Bias

To get at the pure, unvarnished mechanisms behind this phenomenon, researchers have created entities that they refer to as minimal groups.

• In these experiments, complete strangers are formed into groups using the most trivial criteria imaginable.

• For example, in one experiment, participants watched a coin toss that randomly assigned them to either group X or group W.


In-Group Bias

The striking thing about this research is that despite the fact that the participants were strangers before the experiment and didn’t interact during it, they behaved as if those who shared the same meaningless label were their dear friends or close kin.

• They liked the members of their own group better.

• They rated the members of their in-group as more likely to have pleasant personalities and to have done better work than out-group members.

• Most striking, participants allocated more rewards to those who shared their label.


Out-Group Homogeneity

OUT-GROUP HOMOGENEITYThe belief that “they” are all

alike.

In-group members tend to perceive out-group members as being more similar (homogeneous) than they really are—and more homogenous than the in-group members.

If you know something about one out-group member, you are more likely to feel you know something about all of them.


Adapted from Quattrone & Jones, 1980.


The Failure of Logic

Even people who are usually sensible become relatively immune to rational, logical arguments when it comes to their prejudice.

Why is this so? 1. It is primarily the emotional aspect of

attitudes that makes a prejudiced person so hard to agree with. Logical arguments are not effective in countering emotions.



Even people who are usually sensible become relatively immune to rational, logical arguments when it comes to their prejudice.

Why is this so? 2. As discussed in earlier chapters, an

attitude tends to organize the way we process relevant information about the targets of that attitude.



Specifically, information consistent with their notions about these target groups will be:•Given more attention•Rehearsed (or recalled) more often, and•Therefore remembered better than information that contradicts these notions.


The Persistence of Stereotypes

Stereotypes reflect cultural beliefs.Even if we don’t believe these

stereotypes, we can easily recognize them as common beliefs held by others.

The Activation of Stereotypes


Adapted from Greenberg & Pysczynski, 1985.


Automatic and ControlledProcessing of Stereotypes

• An automatic process is one over which we have no control.

• Stereotypes are automatically triggered under certain conditions—they just pop into one’s mind.

• Since the process is automatic, you can’t control it or stop it from occurring.

• However, for people who are not deeply prejudiced, their control processes can suppress or override these stereotypes.


The Justification-Suppression Model of Prejudice

• According to Crandall and Eschleman’s (2003) model, most people struggle between their urge to express prejudice and need to maintain positive self-concept (as a non-bigot).

• However, it requires energy to suppress prejudiced impulses.

• Because people are programmed to avoid the constant expenditure of energy, we seek information that can convince us there is a valid justification for holding a negative attitude toward a particular out-group.

• Once we find a valid justification for disliking this group, we can act against them and still feel as though we are not bigots—thus avoiding cognitive dissonance.


The Illusory Correlation

Illusory Correlation

When we expect two things to be related, we fool ourselves into believing that they are actually unrelated.


Can We Change Stereotypical Beliefs?

• Researchers have found that when people are presented with an example or two that seems to refute their existing stereotype, most do not change their general belief.

• Indeed, in one experiment, some people presented with disconfirming evidence actually strengthened stereotypical belief because the disconfirming evidence challenged them to come up with additional reasons for holding on to that belief.


How We Assign Meaning: Attributional Biases


Dispositional versusSituational Explanations

• One reason stereotypes are so insidious and persistent is the human tendency to make dispositional attributions.

• Relying too heavily on dispositional attributions often leads us to make attributional mistakes.



Ultimate Attribution ErrorOur tendency to make dispositional

attributions about an individual’s negative behavior to an entire group of people.



Researchers had college students read fictionalized files on prisoners to make a parole decision.

Sometimes the crime matched the common stereotype of the offender—for example, when a Hispanic male, committed assault and battery, or when an upper-class Anglo-American committed embezzlement.

When prisoners’ crimes were consistent with participants’ stereotypes, the students’ recommendations for parole were harsher.

Most students ignored additional information that was relevant to a parole decision but inconsistent with the stereotype, such as evidence of good behavior in prison.


Stereotype Threat

When African American students find themselves in highly evaluative educational situations, most tend to experience apprehension about confirming the existing negative cultural stereotype of “intellectual inferiority.”


Stereotype Threat

Stone and his colleagues (1999) found that when a game of miniature golf was framed as a measure of “sport strategic intelligence” black athletes performed worse at it than whites.

But when the game was framed as a measure of “natural athletic ability” the pattern reversed, and the black athletes outperformed the whites.


Stereotype Threat

• The common stereotype has it that men are better at math than women are.

• When women in one experiment were led to believe that a particular test was designed to show differences in math abilities between men and women, they did not perform as well as men.

• In another condition, when women were told that the same test had nothing to do with male-female differences, they performed as well as men. The phenomenon even shows itself among white males if you put them in a similarly threatening situation.


Stereotype Threat

• How can the effects of stereotype threat be reversed?

• An understanding of stereotype threat can be very useful for improving performance on tests and other.

• Merely reminding participants they were “selective northeastern liberal arts college” students eliminated the gender gap on a spatial ability test.


Expectations and Distortions

• When a member of an out-group behaves as we expect, it confirms and even strengthens our stereotype. And when an out-group member behaves in an unexpected, nonstereotypical fashion?

• Attribution theory provides the answer: we can simply engage in some attributional fancy footwork and emerge with our dispositional stereotype intact.

• Principally, we can make situational attributions about the exception—for example, that the person really is as we believe, but it just isn’t apparent in this situation.


Blaming the Victim

Ironically, this tendency to blame victims for their victimization is typically motivated by a desire to see the world as a fair and just place, one where people get what they deserve and deserve what they get.

Ironically, this tendency to blame victims for their victimization is typically motivated by a desire to see the world as a fair and just place, one where people get what they deserve and deserve what they get.

When empathy is absent, it can be hard to avoid blaming the victim for his or her plight.


Self-fulfilling Prophecies

On a societal level, the insidiousness of the self-fulfilling prophecy goes far.

• Suppose that there is a general belief that a particular group is irredeemably stupid, uneducable, and fit only for menial jobs.

• Why waste educational resources on them? Hence they are given inadequate schooling.

• Thirty years later, what do you find? An entire group that with few exceptions is fit only for menial jobs.



Prejudice and Economic Competition: Realistic Conflict Theory

• Realistic conflict theory holds that limited resources lead to conflict among groups and result in prejudice and discrimination.

• Thus prejudiced attitudes tend to increase when times are tense and conflict exists over mutually exclusive goals. – Sherif’s Rober Cave experiment with the

children


Economic and Political Competition

When times are tough and resources are scarce:1.In-group members will feel more threatened by the out-group.2.Incidents of prejudice, discrimination, and violence toward out-group members will increase.


The Role of the Scapegoat

Research on scapegoating shows that individuals, when frustrated or unhappy, tend to displace aggression onto groups that are disliked, are visible, and are relatively powerless.

The form the aggression takes depends

on what is allowed or approved by the in-group in question.


The Way We Conform: Normative Rules


When Prejudice Is Institutionalized

• Simply by living in a society where stereotypical information abounds and where discriminatory behavior is the norm, the vast majority of us will unwittingly develop prejudiced attitudes and discriminatory behavior to some extent.

• We call this institutional discrimination or, more specifically, as institutionalized racism and institutionalized sexism.


When Prejudice Is Institutionalized

Normative ConformityThe strong tendency to go along

with the group in order to fulfill the group’s expectations and gain acceptance.

Normative ConformityThe strong tendency to go along

with the group in order to fulfill the group’s expectations and gain acceptance.


“Modern” Prejudice

• As the norm swings toward tolerance, many people simply become more careful—outwardly acting unprejudiced yet inwardly maintaining stereotyped views.

• People have learned to hide prejudice in order to avoid being labeled as racist, but when the situation becomes “safe,” their prejudice will be revealed.


Subtle and Blatant Prejudice Elsewhere

Examples of blatant prejudice abound in newspaper headlines: •Ethic cleansing in Bosnia.•Violent conflict between Arabs and Jews in Middle East.•Mass murder between warring tribes in Rwanda.•Bother blatant and “modern” subtle racism in France, Great Britain, etc.


Subtle Sexism

• Hostile sexists hold stereotypical views of women that suggest that women are inferior to men (e.g., that they are less intelligent, less competent, and so on).

• Benevolent sexists hold stereotypically positive views of women.


How Can Prejudice Be Reduced?


The Contact Hypothesis

Mere contact between groups is not sufficient to reduce prejudice.

In fact, it can create opportunities for conflict that may increase it.

Prejudice will decrease when two conditions are met: 1. Both groups are of equal status.2. Both share a common goal.


When Contact Reduces Prejudice:Six Conditions

Sherif and colleagues (1961) found:• Once hostility and distrust were established,

simply removing a conflict and the competition did not restore harmony.

• In fact, bringing two competing groups together in neutral situations actually increased their hostility and distrust.

Mutual InterdependenceThe need to depend on each other to

accomplish a goal that is important to each group.

Mutual InterdependenceThe need to depend on each other to

accomplish a goal that is important to each group.


Adapted from Sherif, Harvey, White, Hood & Sherif, 1961.


When Contact Reduces Prejudice:Six Conditions

1. Mutual interdependence2. Common goal3. Equal status4. Friendly, informal setting5. Knowing multiple out-group

members6. Social norms of equality


Group exercise

• Imagine that you are among a group of psychologists who wants to find a solution for reducing stereotyped views of workers, who are from different ethnic groups, towards each other in a work place. What kind of an intervention would you design? Why?– The Jigsaw Classrom Example

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Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Prejudice: Causes and Cures Chapter 13