PSYC 331 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Realistic Conflict Theory, Heritage Language, In-Group Favoritism
2 Oct 2014
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The fact that our default is to categorize, once we"ve done that, we minimize ingroup differences, maximize outgroup differences. We categorize our social environment to the point that it is useful to us. You don"t want to undercategorize because you"ll look at distinctions like they don"t matter. You don"t want to overcategorize because you"ll get overload. We must appreciate that we are information processors and we have too much information coming in. Colour if you do an experiment, humans can distinguish 7,500,000 actual colours: we don"t do this because if we make distinctions like this we would be rendered helpless. We categorize people: sometimes according to things that are not true. It happens and pretty much nothing can stop us from doing it. Attempts have been made to stop people from categorizing, but to be honest it can"t be stopped: social identity, psychological distinctiveness. The first three propositions are nice theoretical derivations of the work that the bristol psychologists do.
