Transcript Chapter 1

Learning goals:
Identify the affective, cognitive, and
behavioral components of prejudice.
Distinguish between the various theories
that explain prejudice.
Understand modern prejudice.
Identify means of reducing prejudice.
Prejudice: The Ubiquitous Social
Phenomenon
Ubiquitous- present, appearing, or found
everywhere.
Prejudice is ubiquitous; it affects all of us -majority group members as well as minority.
Prejudice is dangerous, fostering negative
consequences from lowered self-esteem to
genocide.
Over the past 30 years, blatant discrimination
has been reduced; however, prejudice still
exists in subtle -- and sometimes blatant -forms.
ACTIVITY: Entertainment Personality
Prejudice, Stereotyping and
Discrimination Defined
Prejudice: The Affective Component
Prejudice is a hostile or negative attitude toward a
distinguishable group of people, based solely on their
membership in that group.
Prejudiced people direct their prejudice towards members
of the group as a whole, ignoring distinguishing
characteristics.
ACTIVITY: Subtle prejudice
Prejudice, Stereotyping and Discrimination
Stereotyping: The Cognitive
Component
A stereotype is 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.
Stereotypes are not necessarily emotionally laden and do
not necessarily lead to discrimination.
Prejudice, Stereotyping and
Discrimination Defined
Discrimination: The Behavioral
Component
Discrimination is an unjustified, negative or harmful action
towards a member of a group, simply because of his or
her membership in that group.
What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Think: Social Cognition
One explanation for prejudice is that it is the inevitable
byproduct of categorization, schemas, heuristics, and
faulty memory processes in processing information.
ACTIVITY: Physical Appearance
What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Think: Social Cognition
The first step in prejudice is the creation of group
categorizations. Once we have mental categories, we
group stimuli by similarities, downplaying differences
between members of a group and exaggerating
differences between members of different groups.
What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Think: Social Cognition
These mental categorizations are often referred to as
schemas. Similar to computer files containing knowledge
about people, events or concepts. Schemas affect what
we attend to and how we interpret things, schemas can
influence, bias, and distort our thoughts, perceptions, and
social behaviours.
What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Think: Social Cognition
Schemas provide three functions:
1. Information about social stimuli
2. Influence what social stimuli to pay attention to
3. Influence how to respond to social stimuli
What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Think: Social Cognition
There are four different types of schemas related to social
cognition, and they are divided into the following groups:
1.Person schemas include judgments about traits we
and others possess, e.g., meet new person, rely on
person schemas to provide general information about that
person. Person schemas that contain general information
about people who have membership in groups are
stereotypes.
What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Think: Social Cognition
2. Role schemas based on the jobs people perform or
the social positions they hold.
Often why asked ‘What do you do?’ so people can use
role schemas to provide any missing information about
the person and provide mental shortcuts about what they
might say or how may act in social situations.c
What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Think: Social Cognition
3. Event schemas also called scripts, contain behaviours
that we associate with familiar activities, events or
productions.
The event schema for graduations is to celebrate getting
your Year 12 certificate, which is different to event
schema for being in class.
What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Think: Social Cognition
4. Self schemas contain personal information about
ourselves, and this information influences, modifies, and
distorts what we perceive and remember and how we
behave.
Self schemas tend to overemphasize our good points,
which is why being criticised in public easily hurts our
feelings. We look for information that supports our
schemas and tend to disregard information that doesn’t.
What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Think: Social Cognition
Can you think of any disadvantages of schemas?
Can you think of any advantages of schemas?
What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Think: Social Cognition
Disadvantages:
1. Restrict, bias or distort what we attend to and
remember, thus causing us to overlook important
information.
2. Highly resistant to change because select and
attend to information that supports our schemas and
deny any information that is inconsistent with them.
What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Think: Social Cognition
Advantages:
1. Contains information to help you analyse and
respond appropriately in a particular social situation.
2. Provide guidelines for how to behave in various
social events (events schemas) and help us explain
the social behaviour of others (role schemas).
What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Think: Social Cognition
Schemas/social categorisation
An in-group is a group with which a person identifies
and feels he/she is a member of; an out-group is a
group with which a person does not identify.
In-group bias is the especially positive feelings and
special treatment we reserve for people we have
defined as part of our in-group.
What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Think: Social Cognition
Tajfel postulates that the underlying motive behind ingroup bias is self-esteem maintenance and
enhancement.
Another consequence of social categorization is the
outgroup homogeneity bias, the perception that those
in the out-group are more similar to each other than
they really are.
What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Think: Social Cognition
There are two reasons why it is almost impossible to
get a person holding a deep-seated prejudice to
change his or her mind.
First, it is primarily the emotional aspect of attitudes
that makes a prejudiced person hard to argue with;
Second, people with strong prejudices have a firmly
established schema for the target group(s).
What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Think: Social Cognition
Devine developed a theory about how stereotypical and
prejudiced beliefs affect information processing.
Her theory is based on the distinction between
automatic and controlled information processing.
According to her theory, when we process information
about another, first the stereotypes that we know about
are automatically triggered, then in the controlled
process we decide whether or not to accept the
stereotype.
What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Think: Social Cognition
An illusory correlation is the tendency to see
relationships, or correlations, between events that
are actually unrelated.
Illusory correlations are most likely to occur when the
events or people are distinctive or conspicuous;
minority group members are so by definition.
What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Think: Social Cognition
Webber and Crocker proposed three possible models
of how stereotypes might change when exposed to
disconfirming information;
The bookkeeping model is that each piece of information
inconsistent with a stereotype will lead to its modification;
The conversion model is that a strongly inconsistent piece of
information will lead to radical change in the stereotype;
The subtyping model is that information inconsistent with a
stereotype will lead to the creation of a new substereotype
What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Assign Meaning: Attributional Biases
The Bell Curve ignited the latest chapter in a 200-year old
debate on whether or not there are racial differences in
intelligence.
The question is whether the reason for differences is
dispositional or situational.
Steele and Aronson have shown that at least one major
contributing factor is situational.
They define stereotype threat as the apprehension
experienced by members of a minority group that they
might behave in a manner that confirms an existing
cultural stereotype.
What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Assign Meaning:
Attributional Biases
When an out-group member behaves in a way that
disconfirms our stereotypes, we are likely to make a
situational attribution for his or her performance, leaving
the stereotype intact.
Blaming the victim is the tendency to blame individuals
for their victimization; ironically, it is motivated by a
desire to see the world as a fair and just place where
people get what they deserve.
What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Assign Meaning:
Attributional Biases
The self-fulfilling prophecy is the case whereby
people (a) have an expectation about what another
person is like, which (b) influences how they act
toward that person, which (c) causes that person to
behave in a way consistent with people’s original
expectations.
What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Allocate Resources:
Realistic Conflict Theory
Realistic Conflict Theory is the theory that limited
resources lead to conflict between groups, and result
in increased prejudice and discrimination.
Scapegoating, the tendency for individuals, when
frustrated or unhappy, to displace aggression onto
groups that are disliked, visible, and relatively
powerless, may occur when people are frustrated but
there is no clear target to blame the frustration on.
What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Conform: Normative Rules
Through both explicit and implicit socialization, we are
trained in the norms of our culture.
Stereotypes and prejudiced attitudes are part of this
normative package.
Institutionalized racism refers to the idea that racist
attitudes are help by the vast majority of us because we
live in a society where stereotypes and discrimination are
the norm.
Institutionalized sexism is the idea that sexist attitudes are
held by the vast majority of us for the same reason.
What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Conform: Normative
Rules
In societies in which racism and sexism are
institutionalized, normative conformity leads to the
tendency to go along with the group in order to fulfill
their expectations and gain acceptance.
Modern racism or symbolic racism is prejudice
revealed in subtle, indirect ways because people
have learned to hide prejudiced attitudes in order to
avoid being labeled as racist.
Theories of Prejudice
Social Learning

Through socialization, children learn social norms
Motivational

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Psychodynamic approaches focus on displaced
aggression
Intergroup competition theories emphasize relative
deprivation, group position, and social dominance
hierarchies
Cognitive

Prejudice develops through reliance on automatic,
category-based processing

Takes into account accessibility, category labels, the typicality
effect, and the assumed similarity effect
Social Identity Theory

Relies on the ingroup favoritism effect
How Can Prejudice Be Reduced?
The Contact Hypothesis
The contact hypothesis is the idea that merely
bringing members of different groups into contact
with each other will erode prejudice.
How Can Prejudice Be Reduced?
When Contact Reduces Prejudice: Six
Conditions
Allport suggested that six conditions are necessary
for intergroup contact to reduce prejudice:
1. Mutual interdependence
2. A common goal
3. Equal status of group members
4. Having informal interpersonal contact
5. Having multiple contacts with several members of the
outgroup
6. When social norms are in place that promote equality
How Can Prejudice Be Reduced?
Cooperation and Interdependence: The
Jigsaw Classroom
A jigsaw classroom is a classroom setting designed
to reduce prejudice and raise the self-esteem of
children by placing them in small desegregated
groups and making each child dependent on the
other children in his or her group to learn the course
material and do well in the class.
ACTIVITY: Social Media Perpetuate/Combat