PSYC12H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Cognitive Flexibility, Communication Problems, False Consciousness
Chapter 1 – Prejudice, Stereotyping and Discrimination: Theoretical and Empirical Overview
Intergroup bias generally refers to the systematic tendency to evaluate one’s own membership group (the
ingroup) or its members more favorably than a non-membership group (the outgroup) or its members.
Approaches to understanding prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination have broadened.
- Early theorists focused on individual differences, and associated prejudice with psychopathology
- 1970s and 1980s; the cognitive revolution in psychology generated interest in how cognitive processes
lead to stereotyping and prejudice; simultaneously European researchers focused on how group
processes and social identities affect bias.
- Both perspectives emphasized how normal psychological and social processes foster and maintain
prejudice and stereotyping.
Three forms of social bias toward a group and its members:
(a) prejudice, an attitude reflecting an overall evaluation of a group;
(b) stereotypes, associations, and attributions of specific characteristics to a group; and
(c) discrimination, biased behavior toward, and treatment of, a group or its members.
Prejudice
- Prejudice is typically conceptualized as an attitude that has a cognitive component (e.g., beliefs about a
target group), an affective component (e.g., dislike), and a conative component (e.g., a behavioral
predisposition to behave negatively toward the target group).
- Most researchers have continued to define prejudice as a negative attitude (i.e., an antipathy).
- Prejudice subjectively organizes people’s environment and orients them to objects and people within it.
- Psychological functions, such as enhancing self-esteem and providing material advantages
- Psychologists have focused on prejudice as an intrapsychic process (an attitude held by an individual),
sociologists have emphasized its group-based functions.
- Sociological theories consider the dynamics of group relations in economic- and class-based terms – often
to the exclusion of individual influences
- Both psychological and sociological approaches have converged to recognize the importance of how
groups and collective identities affect intergroup relations
o E.g. group competition is central to the development and maintenance of social biases.
▪ Sociologist Blumer (1958a) wrote, ‘Race prejudice is a defensive reaction to such
challenging of the sense of group position … It functions, however short-sightedly, to
preserve the integrity and position of the dominant group’
▪ From a psychological orientation, they argued that competition between groups
produces prejudice and discrimination, whereas intergroup interdependence and
cooperative interaction that leads to successful outcomes reduces intergroup bias
- Recent definitions of prejudice bridge the individual-level emphasis of psychology and the group-level
focus of sociology by concentrating on the dynamic nature of prejudice.
- People who deviate from their group’s traditional role arouse negative reactions; others who exhibit
behaviors that reinforce the status quo elicit positive responses.
- Hostile sexism punishes women who deviate from a traditional subordinate role, whereas benevolent
sexism celebrates women’s supportive, but still subordinate, position
- This perspective reveals that current prejudices do not always include only an easily identifiable negative
view about the target group, but may also include more subtle, but patronizing and also pernicious
‘positive’ views.
- Because prejudice represents an individual-level psychological bias, members of traditionally
disadvantaged groups can also hold prejudices toward advantaged groups and their members.
- However, much of this prejudice is reactive, reflecting an anticipation of being discriminated against by
majority group members
- FINALLY: Prejudice is an individual-level attitude (whether subjectively positive or negative) toward
groups and their members that creates or maintains hierarchical status relations between groups.
Stereotypes → typical picture that comes to mind when thinking about a particular social group.
- Stereotypes are cognitive schemas used by social perceivers to process info about others
- Stereotypes not only reflect beliefs about the traits characterizing typical group members but also contain
information about other qualities such as social roles, the degree to which members of the group share
specific qualities (i.e., within-group homogeneity or variability), and influence emotional reactions to
group members.
- Stereotypes imply a lot of information about people beyond their apparent surface qualities and generate
expectations about members’ anticipated behavior in new situations (‘enriching’).
- At the earliest stages of perceptual processing, stereotype consistent characteristics are attended to most
quickly.
- Stereotypes can not only promote discrimination by systematically influencing perceptions,
interpretations, and judgments, but they also arise from and are reinforced by discrimination, justifying
disparities between groups; people infer the characteristics of groups based on the social roles they
occupy
- Minority group members are also socialized to adopt ‘system-justifying ideologies,’ including stereotypic
beliefs about their own group, that rationalize the group’s social position
The Stereotype Content Model
- 2 dimensions of stereotypes: warmth (associated with ‘cooperative’ and denied to ‘competitive’ groups)
and competence (associated with high-status and denied to low-status groups).
o Stereotypically warm + competent groups (e.g., the ingroup) elicit pride and admiration
o Stereotypically warm but incompetent groups (e.g., the elderly) = pity and sympathy
o Stereotypically cold but competent groups (e.g., Asians, Jews) elicit envy and jealousy
o Stereotypically cold and incompetent groups (e.g., welfare recipients, poor people) generate
disgust, anger, and resentment.
- Cultural stereotypes tend to persevere for both cognitive and social reasons.
o Cognitively, people often discount stereotype discrepant behaviors, attributing them to
situational factors, while making dispositional (and stereotype-reinforcing) attributions for
stereotype-consistent behaviors
o Socially, people behave in ways that elicit stereotype confirming reactions, creating self-fulfilling
prophecies.
- Biased expectancies influence how perceivers behave, causing targets, often without full awareness, to
conform to perceivers’ expectations
- Language plays an important role in the transmission of stereotypes
o Stereotypical traits are generally high on communicability (viewed as interesting and
informative), contributing to persistent use
o The traits that tend to form their core are characterized not only by high central tendency (e.g.,
the British are very cold), but also by low variability (e.g., most British occupy the ‘cold’ end of a
warm–cold continuum)
- As psychology has increasingly turned to understanding the effects on targets, two influential directions
have emerged: tokenism and stereotype threat.
o Kanter provided a pioneering sociological analysis of the consequences of group proportions
▪ When people are tokens, one of relatively few members of their group in a social
context, they feel particularly vulnerable to being stereotyped by others.
▪ This occurs especially when the individual is the only member of their group (solo
status) in the situation.
▪ Tokens or solos experience high levels of self-consciousness and threat, which reduces
their ability to think and act effectively
o Stereotype threat that occurs when members of a stereotyped group become aware of negative
stereotypes about them, even when (a) a person holding the stereotype is not present and (b)
they personally do not endorse the stereotype.
▪ Making group membership salient can impair performance by producing anxiety and
cognitive preoccupation with a negative stereotype
- In sum, stereotypes represent a set of qualities perceived to reflect the essence of a group.
o Stereotypes systematically affect how people perceive, process information about, and respond
to, group members.
o They are transmitted through socialization, the media, and language and discourse.
o Stereotypes = associations and beliefs about the characteristics and attributes of a group and its
members that shape how people think about and respond to the group.
Discrimination
- Refers also to inappropriate and unfair treatment of individuals due to group membership.
- Discrimination may involve actively negative behavior toward a member of a group or, more subtly, less
positive responses than those toward an ingroup member in comparable circumstances.
- Discrimination is generally understood as biased behavior, which includes not only actions that directly
harm or disadvantage another group, but those that unfairly favor one’s own group
- Intergroup bias in evaluations (attitudes) and resource allocations (discrimination) often involves ingroup
favoritism in the absence of overtly negative responses to outgroups
- To separate the 2 components of ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation we need to include an
independent assessment of ingroup and outgroup, and a control condition.
o Practically, the bias uncovered in much social-psychological research predominantly takes the
mild form of ingroup favoritism, rather than outgroup derogation
o When does ingroup favoritism gives way to derogation against outgroups?
- An outgroup that violates ingroup norms may elicit disgust and avoidance; an outgroup seen as benefiting
unjustly (e.g., government programs) elicit resentment and actions aimed at reducing benefits; and an
outgroup seen as threatening may elicit fear and hostile actions.
- Thus, weaker emotions imply only mild forms of discrimination, such as avoidance, but stronger emotions
imply stronger forms, such as movement against the outgroup, and these latter emotions could be used
to justify outgroup harm that extends beyond ingroup benefit
- Discrimination = an individual as behavior that creates, maintains, or reinforces advantage for some
groups and their members over other groups and their members.
Explicit and implicit bias
- Stereotypes and prejudice occur within an individual and may vary not only in their transparency to
others but also in the level of awareness of the person who harbors stereotypes and prejudice.
- Traditionally, stereotypes and prejudice have been conceived as explicit responses – beliefs and attitudes
people know they hold, subject to deliberate (often strategic) control in their expression
- Deliberative processes, implicit prejudices and stereotypes involve a lack of awareness and unintentional
activation
Document Summary
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