Prejudice

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Prejudice
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Lecture Overview

• Origins of Prejudice
• Techniques for Countering

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What do they have in common?
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Prejudice

• Many aspects of your identity can cause you to
  become labeled and discriminated against.
• nationality
• racial and ethnic identity
• gender
• sexual orientation
• religion
• appearance
• weight
• disabilities
• hair color
• profession

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Prejudice

• Hostile or negative attitude toward people in a
  distinguishable group, based solely on their
  membership in that group.
• Prejudice can be so pervasive that people can
  become prejudiced against members of their own
  group.
• Clark and Clark, 1947
• Goldberg, 1968

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Stereotyping

• To stereotype is to assign identical
  characteristics to a member of a group, without
  taking into account how that individual may
  differ from other members of the group.
• Often stereotyping is merely a way to simplify
  how we look at the world - and we all do it to
  some extent.

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Discrimination

• An unjustified negative or harmful action toward
  the members of a group simply because of their
  membership in that group.
• Bond, Di Candia, and McKinnon, 1988

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What Causes Prejudice?

• Social Categorization Us versus Them
• Putting some people into one group based on
  certain characteristics and others into another
  group based on their different characteristics is
  both useful and necessary, as it helps us
  simplify how we look at the world.
• However, it can have profound implications.

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In-Group versus Out-Group

• In-Group Favoritism
• The tendency to see ones own group as better
  on any number of dimensions and to allocate
  rewards to ones own group.
• Tajfel and Turner, 1979 studied this phenomenon
  with the minimal groups paradigm.
• Out-Group Homogeneity
• In-group members tend to perceive those in the
  out-group as more similar to each other
  (homogeneous) than they really are, as well as
  more homogeneous than the in-group members are.

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Realistic Conflict Theory

• Racial Violence and Economic Conditions (Hovland
  Sears, 1940)
• Lynchings increased when times were bad

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Realistic Conflict Theory

• Competition for materialistic resources leads to
• Hierarchical organization
• Increased loyalty to the ingroup
• Derogation of the outgroup
• Biased evaluation of ingroup and outgroup
  products.

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Realistic Conflict Theory

• More recent analysis of hate crimes and
  economic conditions (Green, Glaser, Rich, 1998)
• Hate crimes did not rise and fall with economic
  conditions

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Social Categorization

• Tendency to divide the social world into two
  separate categories our in-group (us) and
  various outgroups (them
• Minimal Group Research (Tajfel)

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The Illusory Correlation

• When we expect two things to be related, we fool
  ourselves into believing that they are even
  when they are not.

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The Ultimate Attribution Error

• Our tendency to make dispositional attributions
  about an individuals negative behavior to an
  entire group of people.
• Bodenhausen and Wyer, 1985
• When a person behaves in a way that conforms to
  our stereotypes, we tend to believe it was
  something about the person, not their life
  circumstances, which caused the behavior.

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Stereotype Threat

• The fear that one's behavior will confirm an
  existing stereotype of a group with which one
  identifies.
• This fear may lead to an impairment of
  performance.
• Steele Aronson, 1995

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Just-World Hypothesis

• Most people, when confronted with evidence of an
  unfair outcome that is otherwise difficult to
  explain find a way to blame the victim.

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

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How Can Prejudice be Reduced?

• Mere contact between groups is not sufficient to
  reduce prejudice. In fact, it can create
  opportunities for conflict that may increase it.
• Contact can reduce prejudice only if several
  conditions are met (Sherif et al., 1961)
• Mutual interdependence
• Common goal
• Equal status
• Friendly, informal setting
• Knowing multiple out-group members
• Social norms of equality

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How Can Prejudice be Reduced?
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Cognitive Interventions(Kawakami et al., 2000)

• Prior to training, activation of stereotypes
  resulted in faster racial categorization of faces

• After negation training, categorization rates are
  not significant.