Social Psychology Prejudice: Causes and Curesdemarcusjackson.com/files/37456875.pdf · unscathed by prejudice; it is a problem common to all humankind. Prejudice: The Ubiquitous Social
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Social PsychologyElliot Aronson
7th edition
Elliot AronsonUniversity of California, Santa Cruz
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 AfricanClark 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."
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
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 hasmistake 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.
While prejudice can involve either positive or negative affect, social psychologists (and people in general) use the word prejudiceprimarily when referring to negative attitudes about others.
Stereotypes: The Cognitive Component
The distinguished journalist Walter Li (1922) h th fi t tLippmann (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.
Stereotypes: The Cognitive Component
StereotypeA 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
use to simplify how we look at the world—and we all do it to some extent.
Sports, Race, and Attribution
• Potential abuse of stereotyping’s mental shortcuts can be blatant and obvious—as whenshortcuts can be blatant and obvious—as when one ethnic group is considered lazy or another ethnic group is considered greedy.
• Potential abuse can be more subtle—and might involve a stereotype about a positive attribute.
overlap in the distributions like when we ignore the fact that plenty of African American kids are not adept at basketball and a plenty of white kids are.
ineptitude on the basketball court, we are, in a very real sense, denying him his individuality.
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Stereotypes, Attribution, and Gender
1. Compared to men, women do tend to manifest behaviors that can best be described as morebehaviors 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
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.
Stereotypes, Attribution, and Gender
Needless to say, the phenomenon of gender stereotyping often does not reflect reality andstereotyping 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.
Stereotypes, Attribution, and GenderEven 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.
y p g yattributing their own failures to bad luck, girls take more blame for failures.
Stereotypes, Attribution, and Gender
These beliefs can be influenced by the attitudes of our society in general and parentsof 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.
Researchers have found that compared to the way they interacted with “non-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
Our first explanation for what causes prejudice is that it is the inevitable byproduct of the way we process and yp y porganize 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
y y paspects 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 groupgroups—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.
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 actchildren 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.
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In-Group Bias
In-Group BiasIn 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
The major underlying motive is self-esteem: I di id l k h h i lf• 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
• For example, in one experiment, participants watched a coin toss that randomly assigned them to either group X or group W.
In-Group BiasThe striking thing about this research is that despite
the fact that the participants were strangers before the experiment and didn’t interact during it theythe 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
Even people who are usually sensible become relatively immune to rational logicalrelatively 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
Even people who are usually sensible become relatively immune to rational logicalrelatively 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
control it or stop it from occurring.• However, for people who are not deeply
prejudiced, their control processes can suppress or override these stereotypes.
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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 CorrelationWhen we expect two things to be related, we fool ourselves into believing that they are actually unrelated.
• Researchers have found that when people are presented with an example or two that seemspresented with an example or two that seems to refute their existing stereotype, most do notchange their general belief.
• Indeed, in one experiment, some people presented with disconfirming evidence actually strengthened stereotypical belief because the
• One reason stereotypes are so insidious and persistent is the human tendency toand persistent is the human tendency to make dispositional attributions.
• Relying too heavily on dispositional attributions often leads us to make attributional mistakes.
Researchers had college students read fictionalized files on prisoners to make a parole decision. p p
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
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 h l i hi hl l ithemselves in highly evaluative educational situations, most tend to experience apprehension about confirming the existing negative cultural stereotype of “intellectual inferiority.”
Stone and his colleagues (1999) found that when a game of miniature golf was framed aswhen 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
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
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?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
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 p , gstereotype. 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
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.
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Blaming the Victim
When empathy is absent, it can be hard to avoid blaming the victim for his or
Ironically, this tendency to blame victims for their victimization is typically motivated by a desire to see the world as a fair and
to avoid blaming the victim for his or her plight.
Prejudice and Economic Competition: Realistic Conflict Theory
• Realistic conflict theory holds that limitedRealistic 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
and violence toward out group members will increase.
The Role of the Scapegoat
Research on scapegoating shows that individuals when frustrated or unhappyindividuals, when frustrated or unhappy, tend to displace aggression onto groups that are disliked, are visible, and are relatively powerless.
• Simply by living in a society where stereotypical information abounds and where discriminatoryinformation 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
• As the norm swings toward tolerance, many people simply become more careful—p p p youtwardly 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
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
•Bother blatant and modern subtle racism in France, Great Britain, etc.
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Subtle Sexism
• Hostile sexists hold stereotypical views of women that suggest that women areof 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.