Prejudice, Stereotypes, and Discrimination

1. Prejudice, Stereotypes, and Discrimination

2. Definitions • Ingroup • a group we belong to • e.g., UNC student population • Outgroup • a group we do not belong to • e.g., Duke student population

3. Components of Group Antagonism • Three Components of Group Antagonism • Cognitive • stereotypes • Affective • prejudice • Behavioral • discrimination

4. Components of Group Antagonism Prejudice (affect) Stereotypes(cognitive) Discrimination(behavior)

5. Components of Group Antagonism • Stereotypes • beliefs about the characteristics of members of a group • Examples: • Asians are good at math • Lawyers are slimy • African-Americans are musical • can be positive, negative or neutral • Stereotype Threat (Steele & Aronson, 1995) • the fear that one might confirm the negative stereotypes held by others about one’s group

6. Components of Group Antagonism • Prejudice • disliking a group or members of a group • examples: • Canadians disgust me. • I hate George because he’s an English major. • Foreigners creep me out. • Ethnocentrism • belief that one’s ingroup is superior to any other outgroup

7. Components of Group Antagonism • Discrimination • inappropriate treatment of individuals due to their group membership • examples: • denying someone a job because of their race, sex, sexual orientation, etc. • simply treating someone in a negative manner because of their group membership

8. Learning Prejudice • Social Learning Theory • Socialization • stereotypes and prejudices are learned • e.g., racial prejudice in the North vs. the South • Media • does the media give us a representative sample of the American public? • when minorities are portrayed, do we get an accurate portrayal?

9. Motives for Prejudice • Psychodynamic Approaches • assumes that attitudes and behavior are the result of internal drives and motives • prejudice seen as a personality disorder • Displaced Aggression • aggressing against something or someone other than the actual source of frustration • e.g., lynchings and the economy of the American south; WWII Germany

10. Motives for Prejudice • Authoritarian Personality • personality type characterized by: • exaggerated submission to authority • extreme conformity to conventional standards • self-righteous hostility, especially towards deviants and minority groups • ethnocentrism • Strongly correlated with prejudice • Right-Wing Authoritarianism • assumed to originate from social learning, not a personality disorder • Left-Wing Authoritarianism?

11. Motives for Prejudice • Intergroup Competition • Realistic Group Conflict Theory • views prejudice as a natural consequence of competition between groups over limited resources • Relative Deprivation • doing poorly in comparison to other groups • Sense of Group Position • Proposes that members of a dominant group: • view themselves as superior, • sense that their advantages are deserved, and • believe that members of subordinate groups pose a threat to these advantages

12. Motives for Prejudice • Social Dominance Theory • assumes that all societies are organized in group hierarchies • Hierarchical structure sustained through: 1. Discrimination 2. Legitimizing Myths • ideology that justifies the status quo 3. Efforts of individuals with a high social dominance orientation

13. Cognitive Bases of Prejudice • Categorization • we naturally and automatically categorize people into groups • by salient features • e.g., race, gender, dress, language • Subtyping • Categorizing within a category • e.g., College students can be further categorized by school, class, age, major, etc. • Salient cues vary by culture • e.g., In Cuba, race isn’t as salient as it is in the US

14. Cognitive Bases of Prejudice • Category-Based Processing • perceiving a person based on group membership rather than individuating characteristics • Automatic process • Devine (1989) found evidence that subliminal priming caused activation of racial stereotypes **even with members of racial minorities and non-prejudiced participants**

15. Cognitive Bases of Prejudice • Accessibility of a Category • when many categories are relevant, we’ll use the one that’s most accessible • e.g., a racist will use more race-based categorizations than others • the actual label given to a category has an effect on our evaluations • e.g., “Full-figured” vs. “Fat” • ambiguous or inadequate information about an outgroup member makes the use of stereotypes more likely • even when we have a single example of stereotype inconsistent information about that person

16. Cognitive Bases of Prejudice • Advantages/disadvantages of category-based processing • Advantages • efficient • fills in missing gaps of information • Disadvantages • oversimplified stereotypes often lead to prejudices • stereotypes almost always overgeneralize • generation of false memories

17. Klee/Kandinsky Task

18. Social Identity • Ingroups vs. Outgroups • Ingroup Favoritism Effect • Ingroup members: • are rated more positively • are given more favorable attributions for their behavior • are rewarded more often • expect favorable treatment from other ingroup members • are more persuaded by other ingroup members • these hold even when groups are formed completely arbitrarily and members don’t have the opportunity to meet their fellow group members

19. Social Identity • Group-Serving Biases • similar to the self-serving bias • applied towards one’s ingroup rather than the self • internal attributions for the ingroup’s successes, external attributions for its failures, vice versa for an outgroup • Assumed Similarity Effect • ingroup members perceived as more similar than outgroup members • members of naturally formed groups probably are more similar to one another • also occurs in studies where group members are arbitrarily assigned to groups though (Allen & Wilder, 1979) • Klee/Kandinsky preference task

20. Social Identity • Outgroup Homogeneity Effect • “They are all alike, whereas we are diverse individuals.” • More likely to see subcategories of the ingroup because of increased exposure

21. Social Identity • Social Identity Theory • Minimal Intergroup Situation (Tajfel, 1969) • randomly assigned to one of two groups under the pretense of the Klee/Kandinsky task • no interaction between or within the groups • participants were then asked to evaluate members of both groups and distribute rewards • who received more positive evaluations and rewards?

22. Social Identity • Social Identity Theory • Assumptions (Tajfel, 1982) • we categorize the social world into ingroups and outgroups • part, if not most of our self-esteem is a product of our identity as group members • part, if not most of our self-concept is a product of how we evaluate our ingroups relative to other groups • When asked “Who are you?,” most people refer to the social groups they belong to

23. Contemporary and Historical Prejudice • Old-Fashioned Racism • Three Components • a belief in innate white superiority • support of racial segregation • discrimination against minorities in areas such as employment and higher education • Old-Fashioned Racism is on the decline • most who hold these beliefs are dying off • the vast majority of whites in the US now explicitly endorse principles of racial equality • Trends indicate that anti-Semitism and anti-gay prejudices are also on the decline in the US

24. Contemporary and Historical Prejudice • Illusory Change??? • is racism really on the decline or just the overt display of it? • on the whole, researchers believe there has been a genuine decline in old-fashioned types of racism. • What do you think?

25. Contemporary and Historical Prejudice • Symbolic Racism • holding the belief that minorities no longer have the barriers once holding them back and the reason they have yet to gain equal status is entirely their own fault • probably worse than old-fashioned racism • much more common than old-fashioned racism

26. Contemporary and Historical Prejudice • Aversive Racism • explicitly supporting racial equality but harboring a negative feeling toward a minority group, often resulting in avoidance of members of the group • those with a high level of aversive racism truly see themselves as non-racist • yet when put in situations where discrimination is possible, they’re more likely to discriminate against members of a minority and attribute this behavior to something else. • e.g., job hiring studies, waiting room studies

27. Contemporary and Historical Prejudice • Implicit Stereotypes • Devine’s (1989) Dissociation Model of Stereotypes • there is an automatic activation of stereotypes with a controlled application of stereotypes • implicit stereotypes are those that involve automatic activation • people aren’t necessarily aware that they hold these views

28. Contemporary and Historical Prejudice • Devine (1989) found that almost everyone is aware of racial stereotypes • However, not everyone shows a quicker response time to stereotype congruent stimuli and stereotypes… • So, we can’t really say that quicker responses by some are due to differences in cultural knowledge.

29. Contemporary and Historical Prejudice • Thankfully, we do have control over how we deal with automatic activation of stereotypes • with enough activation, new schemas can develop and eventually become automatic • Other methods for measuring implicit stereotypes include the Evaluative Priming Technique and the Implicit Association Test (IAT). • you can take many IATs on the IAT website • Keep in mind that these are relatively new and the validity of the measures is still being analyzed and increasingly called into question

30. Reducing Prejudice • Socialization • Old-fashioned racists are dying off • Level of education is negatively correlated with prejudice • as education increases, prejudice tends to decrease • the college experience itself can lead people to examine their stereotypes and make changes

31. Reducing Prejudice • Intergroup Contact • ignorance about other groups is thought to cause the formation of stereotypes and prejudice • Contact Theory (Allport, 1954) • specific conditions necessary • cooperative interdependence with common goals • contact between individuals with equal status • contact must have sufficient frequency, duration and closeness to allow development of friendships • contact needs institutional support • Aronson’s Jigsaw technique utilizes these ideas.

32. Reducing Prejudice • Recategorization • thinking of outgroup members as part of a larger group (a superordinate category) that includes both ingroup members and outgroup members • e.g., If we have stereotypes and prejudices about people majoring in engineering, thinking about them as fellow college students will reduce this negative view