2. Prejudice Flashcards
(12 cards)
What is prejudice
- affective/emotional response to another person based on perceived social group membership
- affect is never implicit or unconscious; pre-conscious at best
- aware of emotional response
- oxymoron = idea of implicit bias
- people may misattribute affect
Differentiated Prejudice
More than just negative affect, encompasses a plethora of emotions
What are the two core dimensions of the Stereotype Content Model, and how do their combinations predict different emotional prejudices?
When we encounter strangers, we engage two dimensions of person perception:
1) Evaluation of person’s intentions / warmth dimension / morality or sociability dimension – are they a friend or foe?
2) Whether the individual is able to act on their intentions / competency dimension
- Not all social actors are perceived equally- Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu (2002)
- Friend or foe?
- Warm, friendly, trustworthy, sincere-
- Able or unable?
- Competent, able, skillful, capable
-
Stereotype Content Model (SCM)
- Warmth x competence in 4 clusters:
These clusters lead to different types of prejudice e.g.: - Perceiving high warmth, low competence: ageism to pity - Perceiving high competence and high warmth: ingroup -> pride - Perceiving high competence, low warmth: businessmen -> envy - Perceiving low competence + low warmth: disgust -> likely subject to dehumanisation e.g. homeless people
Bias map (Cuddy et al., 2007)
Active vs Passive facilitation and harm; behaviour resulting from nuanced emotions identified
- Ingroups who receive pride and admiration > actively facilitate and passively help them
- Groups who receive disgust and contempt > actively and passively harm
- Groups soliciting pity > active help but passive harm (e.g. people do not visit elderly in care homes)
- Groups eliciting envy > active harm, passive facilitation (because you want to associate with them
– depends on state of society i.e. whether it is doing well or not). Genocide more likely to happen to groups with high competency, low warmth perception
Why is prejudice an emotional response? Evolution.
- prejudice informed by a friend or foe evaluation
- Relies on a threat detection mechanism
- Strangers present a dilemma: potential ally or threat
- Prejudice is a nuanced emotional response
IAT (Greenwald et al., 1998)
- created to tap into biases participants were unwilling to report due to changes in societal views on prejudice. Important to note: they were aware.
- even members of stigmatised categories will show IAT effect
- measure of cultural knowledge
- predicting bias → people will be able to predict their own IAT scores
- even members of stigmatised categories will show IAT effect
Predicting bias (Huhn et al., 2014)
People can predict their IAT scores
– asked how easy it would be to sort congruent or incongruent pictures
- Measure of how biased they would be predicted IAT scores
- Tapping into people’s inability to report
- People who don’t believed they are biased > experience their responses as an emotional reaction, but may misattribute this affect (and not to their bias)
Affect Misattribution Paradigm (Payne et al., 2005)
Show a stimulus (e.g. picture of baby) > show an ideograph (e.g. a Chinese character, flashed very quickly)> followed by a masking procedure
- Shown ideography again – judge whether it means something positive or negative
- People do not report seeing the baby, but their ideograph meaning is consistent with the image shown before
- The affect the baby generates gets attributed / misattributed to the ideograph.
- Being unware of your bias makes you more likely to misattribute your biased feelings > dangerous as activates same threat detection mechanism (e.g. police shootings)
- Shows people who argue they are ‘not biased’ do feel some sort of affect towards particular social groups whether negative or positive but pass it on to something else.
Counteracting prejudice: Emotion Regulation Strategies (Sheppes et al., 2011)
- Reappraisal (re-interpreting stimulus): most effective strategy
-reliant on late selective attention mech. - suppression - experience the emotion but try to control it; almost impossible
- Distraction; dont process stimuli = no reaction
- reliant on early selective attention mech.
show participants high intensity / low intensity emotions
- High intensity emotions > opt for distraction strategy; shut down processing of stimuli
- Low intensity emotions > opt for reappraisal strategy; stimuli processed and reinterpreted - Spontaneous employment of strategies
How do you regulate emotions to avoid biasing?
- Avoid time pressure → adds to cognitive load + less time to employ emotional regulation strategies
- Reframe the Question - spontaneous recategorisation
Other bias reduction strategies (Paluck et al., 2021)
Most effective technique is contact – based on contact hypothesis; if we interact with the person with which we hold a negative stereotype against, we can reduce strength of association:
- New learning opportunity to reduce association over time
- Hard to achieve because always an imbalanced power dynamic (with the one being stereotyped against at a disadvantage)
- Cognitive / emotional training> follows suppression approach
- Social categorisation> attempt to recategorize
- Problem with measuring implicit bias via explicit reporting
Average effect of bias interventions
Only cognitive and emotional training, entertainment + peer influence interventions that have a real-world effect (+ extended and imaginary contact)-
- Small effect sizes
Why are the trainings ineffective?
- they complete it once and then re-enter the biased world where their biases are reinforced