Prejudice

The dislike of diversity

Prejudice

Stereotyping

Discrimination

Terms that often overlap

A negative prejudgment of a group and its individual members

Prejudice

An Attitude – is a distinct combination of feelings, inclinations to act, and beliefs

A•Affect (feelings)B•Behavior tendencies (inclinations to act)C•Cognition (beliefs)

Negative evaluations that mark prejudice can stem from emotional associations, from the need to justify behavior, or from negative beliefs called stereotypes

Stereotype

To stereotype is to generalize To stereotype is to categorize They reflect ideas that groups of people

hold about others who are different from them.

A stereotype can be embedded in single word or phrase (such as, "jock" or "nerd")

Stereotype

Stereotypes can be either positive ("black men are good at basketball") or negative ("women are bad drivers").

A problem with stereotypes arises when they are overgeneralized or just plain wrong.

most stereotypes tend to make us feel superior in some way to the person or group being stereotyped

Prejudice – negative

attitude

Discrimination – negative behavior

Discrimination

Social Sources Emotional Sources Cognitive Sources

Roots of Prejudice

Unequal

Status

The Self-

Fulfilling

Prophecy

Stereotype Threat

Social Identit

y

Ingrou

p Bias

Conformity

Social Sources of Prejudice

Masters view slaves as lazy, irresponsible, lacking ambition—as having those traits that justify slavery

Once these inequalities exist, prejudice helps justify the economic and social superiority of those who have wealth and power

People view enemies as subhuman and depersonalize them with labels

Unequal Status

negative beliefs predict negative behavior (or problems in life)

If a person thinks we are clever or stupid or whatever, they will treat us that way.

If we are treated as if we are clever, stupid or whatever, we will act, and even become, this way.

The person has thus had their prophecy about us fulfilled!

This is also known as the Pygmalion Effect.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

a self-conforming apprehension that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype

refers to being at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one's group (Steele & Aronson, 1995)

Black college freshmen and sophomores performed more poorly on standardized tests than White students when their race was emphasized.

When race was not emphasized, however, Black students performed better and equivalently with White students.

The results showed that performance in academic contexts can be harmed by the awareness that one's behavior might be viewed through the lens of racial stereotypes.

Stereotype Threat

Self-concept—our sense of who we are—contains not just personal identity (our sense of personal attributes and attitudes) but also a social identity

Example: ◦ A person may identify his self a man, a Filipino, a

psychology student of USJ-R, a member of the school’s student council, a chess player, and so on..

Social Identity

We categorize: we find it useful to put people, ourselves into categories (label)

We identify: we associate our selves with certain groups (ingroups); gain self-

esteem in doing so

We compare: we contrast our groups with other groups (outgroups), with a favorable bias toward our own group

Social Identity Theory (Turner & Tajfel,)

The group definition of who you are—your race, religion, gender, academic major—implies a definition of who you are not.

The circle that includes “us” (the ingroup) excludes “them” (the outgroup)

Thus, a mere experience of being formed into groups may promote ingroup bias.

Due to human quest for a positive self-concept

Ingroup Bias

If prejudice is socially accepted, many people will follow the path of least resistance and conform to fashion

They will act not so much out of a need to hate as out of a need to be liked and accepted.

Conformity

Frustration and

Aggression

Personality

Dynamics

Emotional Sources of Prejudice

Pain and frustration (a blocking of a goal) often evoke hostility.

When the cause of our frustration is intimidating or unknown, we often redirect our hostility (displaced aggression)

Frustration and Aggression(The Scapegoat Theory)

Scapegoating is a hostile social - psychological discrediting routine by which people move blame and responsibility away from themselves and towards a target person or group.

It is also a practice by which angry feelings and feelings of hostility may be projected, via inappropriate accusation, towards others.

The target feels wrongly persecuted and receives misplaced vilification, blame and criticism; he is likely to suffer rejection from those who the perpetrator seeks to influence.

Scapegoating

"On the Day of Atonement a live goat was chosen by lot. The high priest, robed in linen garments, laid both his hands on the goat's head, and confessed over it the iniquities of the children of Israel. The sins of the people thus symbolically transferred to the beast, it was taken out into the wilderness and let go. The people felt purged, and for the time being, guiltless.

Scapegoating

Need for status, self-regard and belonging

• To perceive ourselves as having status, we need people below us.• Psychological benefit of status is superiority

The authoritarian personality

• Obedience and conformity are the most important virtues children should learn.

Personality Dynamics

Adorno identified the authoritarian personality type as having these characteristics:

The authoritarian personality does not want to give orders, their personality type wants to take orders.

People with this type of personality seek conformity, security, stability.

They become anxious and insecure when events or circumstances upset their previously existing world view.

They are very intolerant of any divergence from what they consider to be the normal (which is usually conceptualized in terms of their religion, race, history, nationality, culture, language, etc.) 

Authoritarian Personality

Categorization

Distinctiveness

Attribution

Cognitive Sources of Prejudice

One way we simplify our environment is to categorize—to organize the world by clustering objects into groups (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000)

Perceived similarities and differences

Categorization

Distinctive people and vivid or extreme occurrences often draw attention and distort judgment.

We define people by their most distinctive traits and behaviors

Distinctiveness

In explaining others’ actions, we frequently commit the fundamental attribution error.

We attribute people’s behavior so much to their inner dispositions that we discount important situational forces.

The error occurs partly because our attention focuses on the persons, and not the situation.

Essentially, the fundamental attribution error involves placing a heavy emphasis on internal personality characteristics to explain someone's behavior in a given situation, rather than thinking about external situational factors.

Fundamental Attribution Error (Lee Ross)

Imagine yourself walking down a crowded sidewalk, carrying loaded bags from shops. If someone bumps into you, you are probably inclined to think “what an idiot! That person has no respect for others, he clearly saw me!” In this assessment of the person's behavior, you fail to consider situational factors like someone else bumping into that person, or your failure to realize that your bags are taking up more room than you think they are, thus forcing people to bump into you as they try to get around you.

Fundamental Attribution Error Examples

On a specific day a waitress is talking rude to her customers. The customers now think that she is a really bad person. What the customers don't realize is that usually most people find the waitress friendly but today the waitress is experiencing one of the hardest days in her life. Her husband just left her for another woman, and she just lost her son in a car wreck. If the customers were aware of the problems the waitress just had, they actually wouldn't mind her negative attitude as much considering her current state.

Fundamental Attribution Error Examples

the belief that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get (Melvin Lerner,1977)

Attributing failures to dispositional causes rather than situational causes, which are unchangeable and uncontrollable, satisfies our need to believe that the world is fair and we have control over our life.

We are motivated to see a just world because this reduces our perceived threats, gives us a sense of security, helps us find meaning in difficult and unsettling circumstances, and benefits us psychologically.

Unfortunately, the just world hypothesis also results in a tendency for people to blame and disparage victims of a tragedy or an accident, such as victims of rape and domestic abuse to reassure themselves of their insusceptibility to such events.

People may even go to such extremes as the victim's faults in "past life" to pursue justification for their bad outcome.

Just-World Phenomenon(Linda Carli et.al,1999)

The end.Prepared by:

Jeel Christine C. de Egurrola