bradford mvsu fall 2012 so 213 prejudice ch 13

Prejudice(Chapter 13)

Dr. Bradford

Focus Questions

• What is prejudice?• How can we measure prejudice? Implicit

prejudice?• What conditions lead to prejudice?• What conditions tend to reduce prejudice?

Prejudice

• Prejudice: a hostile or negative attitude toward people in a distinguishable group, based solely on their membership in that group.

• Three components: 1. Cognitive2. Emotional (‘affective’); 3. Behavioral (discrimination).

Prejudice (Cognitive)

• Close your eyes and imagine the looks and characteristics of the following people:

• A compassionate nurse• A computer scientist• A Black Musician


• Did you imagine a male nurse?


• A female computer scientist?


• A black classical composer?


• Stereotype: a generalization about a group of people, in which certain traits are assigned to virtually all members of the group, regardless of actual variation among the members.– Stereotypes can be positive or negative– Why do we stereotype? “The law of least

effort”- because the world is complicated … for most things we rely on simple, sketchy beliefs.


• Positive Stereotypes– Example: African American athletic ability– In one study, students were asked to listento a 20-

minute audio tape of a college basketball game and to rate the performance of ‘Mark Flick.’ Students who were told that ‘Mark Flick’ was African American consistently rated his performance higher than those who were told he was caucasion.

• Illusory correlation: the tendency to see relationships, or correlations, between events that are actually unrelated.


• Imagine an aggressive construction worker. How is this person dressed, where is this person located, and what, specifically, is this person doing to express aggression?


• Now imagine an aggressive lawyer. How is this person dressed, where is this person located, and what, specifically, is this person doing to express aggression?


• Findings: most people imagine the construction worker using physical aggression and the lawyer using verbal aggression.

Prejudice (Emotional)

• Logical arguments are not affective in countering emotions!

• The emotional or ‘affective’ component of prejudice can be explicit or implicit.

Prejudice (Behavioral)

• Discrimination: an unjustified negative or harmful action toward the members of a group solely because of their membership in that group.

• ‘micro-aggressions’: the slights, indignities, and put-downs that many minorities and people with disabilities face.

• Formal vs. Interpersonal discrimination: e.g. in one study, employers were less verbalyl positive, spent less time interviewing, and used fewer words when talking to, applicants who they believed were homosexual compared to applicants they believed were not homosexual.

Modern Racism and Other Implicit Prejudices

• Modern racism: outwardly acting unprejudiced while inwardly maintaining prejudiced attitudes.

• Implicit Association Test (IAT):– Claim: if it takes whites longer to associate positive words

with black faces than negative words with black faces, then whites must harbor some implicit prejudice towards blacks.

– However, other researchers showed they got a significant effect when using nonsense words or neutral words, so whatever it is measuring, it might not be a stable prejudice, but how much the word associated with the target stands out, i.e. its salience.


• ‘Shooter-bias’ in a video game

• Findings: Participants were especially likely to pull the trigger when the people in the picture were black, whether or not they were holding a gun.


• However, the book does not mention that this bias also holds for black video game players!

• What does this mean?

Automatic vs. Controlled Stereotypes

• Automatic processing: occurs whenever an appropriate stimulus is encountered … causing the stereotype for that group to be accessed from memory, without your awareness.

• Controlled processing: occurs with your awareness- as when you choose to disregard or ignore the stereotyped information that has been brought to mind.

• Study showed that people showed stereotyped words (e.g. black, hostile, lazy, welfare) so fast that they could not consciously remember them, were more likely to evaluate negatively African American characters who acted ambiguously (i.e. their behavior could be interpreted positively or negatively) in short stories.

Effects of Prejudice on the Victim

• Self-fulfilling prophecy– In one study, White college undergraduates were asked to

interview candidates for a job. They acted disinterested in African American candidates, sat farther away, tended to stammer, and ended the interview sooner than compared to white candidates.

– The ‘employers’ (actually confederates in the study), then interviewed only white applicants, acting towards half of them the way they had acted towards African Americans.

– Independent judges watching these interviews evaluated those applicants who had been treated as the African Americans had!

Effects of Prejudice on the Victim

• Self-fulfilling prophecy– This study shows that how applicants were

evaluated, how competent they appeared to be, was largely influenced by something over which they had little control: the expectations of the interviewer.

Effects of Prejudice on the Victim• Stereotype threat: the stress and apprehension experienced by

members of a group that their behavior might confirm a cultural stereotype.

• Study: African and American and white students were given a difficult test: the GRE. Half of them were told it measured intellectual ability, and the other half were told the test was still being developed, wasn’t reliable, and didn’t measure anything.

• Findings: white students performed equally well (or poorly) regardless of whether they thought they were being evaluated. African American students who thought they were being evaluated performed much worse than those who were led to believe the test was meaningless, who also performed as well as whites.

What Causes Prejudice?

• In 1942, 98% of the white population supported segregation of schools. By 1988, only 3% of whites said they wouldn’t want their child to attend school with black children.

• Institutionalized Discrimination• Institutionalized Racism• Institutionalized Sexism (see pg. 377)


• Out-Group Homogeneity: the believe that ‘they’ [members of the out-group] are all alike.

• Dispositional attributions – the conclusion that a person’s behavior is due to some aspect of his or her personality

• Situational attributions- the conclusion that a person’s behavior is due to aspect of the person’s situation or environment.

• Fundamental attribution error (Ch 4.)• Ultimate attribution error- the tendency to make

dispositional attributions about an entire group of people


• Blaming the victim– We tend to rationalize or justify what happens

after the fact. In one study, two people worked equally hard on some task. By a flip of the coin, one person receives a very large reward and the other nothing.

– Findings: after the fact, observers tended to reconstruct what happened and convince themselves that the unlucky person must not have worked as hard.


• Blaming the victim– Study on Rape: In one study, college students

were given a description of a woman’s friendly behavior toward a man, which they judged to be appropriate. However, students who were told that the woman was also raped by this man, judged her behavior as inappropriate! She was judged as having brought the rape on herself.


• Why do we blame the victim?– The more we believe in a just world (the idea that people

get what they deserve in life), the more we tend to blame the victim.

– When something bad happens to someone else, we feel bad for them, but at the same time, feel relieved that it wasn’t us. Blaming the victim makes us feel safe. We think we can protect ourselves from that fear by convincing ourselves that the victim must have done something to bring on the tragedy. We feel safer because we believe we would have behaved differently, more cautiously, etc.

How can prejudice be reduced?

• Contact hypothesis: contact with people from other groups tends to reduce your prejudice against them. – Study: black students at majority white

universities felt a greater sense of belonging and satisfaction the more white friends they made.


• NOT ALL CONTACT REDUCES PREJUDICE! • After all, slavery is also a kind of ‘contact.’


Six Conditions in which Contact Reduces Prejudice:1. Mutual interdependence2. Having a common goal3. Equal status and power4. Must occur in friendly, informal setting5. Individual must learn that these out-group members

who they come to know are typical of their group6. Social norms that promote and support equality

among groups are operating in the situation

Sex and Gender

• Sex = biological, physical characteristics; “Nature”

• Gender = cultural roles or social expectations about the attributes and behavior of males and females; “Nurture”– ‘Gender is not something you

have, it is something you do’

Gender Gap RankingsCountry(top 10)

Overall Rank

Iceland 1

Norway 2

Finland 3

Sweden 4

New Zealand 5

Ireland 6

Denmark 7

Lesotho 8

Philippines 9

Switzerland 10

*USA *19

• Ranking based on the extent to which women have achieved equality in 4 areas:1. Economic participation

and opportunity2. Education3. Health4. Political empowerment

Gender Gap RankingsCountry

(bottom 10)Overall Rank

Egypt 125

Turkey 126

Morocco 127

Benin 128

Saudi Arabia 129

Cote d’Ivoire 130

Mali 131

Pakistan 132

Chad 133

Yemen 134

Sex and Gender

• What are some ‘cultural scripts’ (stereotypes) we have about men and women?– Dress, emotional states, ways

of talking…Would you ever see a male human proposing to a female dog in a cartoon?

Sex and Gender

WOMEN DRESSING UP LIKE LITTLE GIRLS DRESSING UP LIKE WOMEN

• “The fact that many women dress up as sexy little girls points to both the sexualization of female children and the infantilization of adult women.”

Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz Goldilocks from Goldilocks

and the Three BearsAlice from Alice in Wonderland

HALLOWEEN GENDER BINARY

bradford mvsu fall 2012 so 213 prejudice ch 13

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