CH 11-12: Causes and Consequences of Prejudice

Question 1

Defining Prejudice, Stereotypes, and Discrimination

Answer 1

• ABCs of an attitude: Affect = prejudice, Behaviour = discrimination, Cognition = stereotypes
• Prejudice is a preconceived negative judgment (an attitude) of a group and its individual members (some definitions include positive judgments, but almost all are negative)
• Discrimination is negative behaviour that often has its source in prejudicial attitudes –> but behaviours and attitudes are loosely linked and prejudiced attitudes do not breed hostile acts, nor does all oppression spring from prejudice
• Stereotypes- beliefs about the personal attributes of a group of people; they can be overgeneralized, inaccurate, and resistant to new information
• The schemas we have for certain groups and their members
• Even when stereotypes are positive (in terms of the information itself) they can have negative effects on the group down the road
• Stereotypes may be more or less true, and are not always negative –> the social perception glass is about 90% full
• The 10% problem with stereotypes arises when they are overgeneralized or just plain wrong –> it is especially when we have strong views about group difference that our beliefs exaggerate reality
• Making essentialist claims (oversimplifications) is the issue –> macro-level trends are problematic when you draw individualistic or essentialist conclusions from them
• Stereotypes can come from culture, what we learn at home, media (pairing a group w a stereotypical topic, which reinforces the stereotype), social groups

Question 2

Explicit and Implicit Prejudice

Answer 2

• Prejudice illustrates our dual attitude system as demonstrated by the IAT which show we can have different explicit and implicit attitudes towards the same target
• Although explicit attitudes may change dramatically with education, implicit attitudes may linger, changing only as we form new habits through practice
• IAT may be more revealing of common cultural associations rather than predicting behaviour well enough to assess or label individuals –> more appropriate for research to predict certain behaviours like voting behaviour
• A small effect of implicit prejudice, may, over time and across people, accumulate to large societal effect, so IAT better predicts average outcomes
• Prejudiced and stereotypic evaluations can occur outside people’s awareness –> we have been primed to make certain associations

Question 3

Automatic Racial Prejudice

Answer 3

• Some argue that unconscious associations may only indicate cultural assumptions, perhaps without prejudice, whereas some studies find that implicit bias can leak into behaviour
• People who take IAT test and associated negative things w black are more likely to judge white job applicants more favourably, recommend better treatment for white ppl
• In some situations, automatic, implicit prejudice can have life or death consequences –> simulation where white ppl are “shot” less than black people (shooter bias)
• When people are fatigued or feeling threatened by a dangerous world to become more likely to mistakenly shoot a minority person –> brain activity in the amygdala, a region that underlies fear and aggression, facilitates such automatic responding
• Implicit-bias training is now a part of modern police education, and that, when trained to overcome the influence of stereotypes, police are less racially influenced than most people in the decision to shoot

Question 4

Modern v “Old-Fashioned” Racism

Answer 4

• “Old-fashioned racism” – outright, explicit prejudice & discrimination
• “Modern Racism” describes a belief system that has three main tenets:
• Denial that there is continuing discrimination
• Resentment about the demands that disadvantaged groups make for equal treatment –> thinking that racism is abolished, so they don’t understand why people are still making demands and feel subsequent resentment
• Resentment about concessions made to disadvantaged groups –> getting mad over scholarships for minority groups bc they think that racism is gone and thus minority groups should not be receiving advantages
• overt conscious prejudice is not really the problem as much, but modern prejudice appears subtly in our preferences for what is familiar, and comfortable

“Shoving” study (Duncan, 1976)

• White person shoves black person: 13% of raters said it was aggressive
• Black person shoves white person: 73% of raters said it was aggressive

Question 5

Aversive Racism

Answer 5

• Aversive racism: Individuals will state that they have egalitarian views, and accordingly, will not be overtly discriminatory
• Behavioural consequences: Avoidance of outgroup members, anxiety & overcorrection, subtle discrimination
• Say they endorse egalitarian views but feel anxious/ uncomfortable around outgroup members
• Form of racism as a result of a lack of experience w outgroup members
• Aversive Racism and Hiring Decisions:
• Participants (all Caucasian) rated resumes –> how good the person would be for various jobs
• Resumes were either strong or moderate (manipulated by researchers)
• Resumes included a photo of applicant, a Black Person or White Person
• When applications were strong, race didn’t really matter –> there is a lot of information provided that the person is a good fit
• When applications were moderate, Blacks were at a disadvantage –> when the resume is ambiguous, race gets factored in
• Sometimes awareness that it is awkward can make it less awkward –> trying to appear not racist/comfortable can make you seem awkward and racist

Question 6

Institutional/Systemic Racism

Answer 6

• The differential access to the goods, services, and opportunities of society by group status
• Hides as other factors (neighborhood, income, education) but propagates and thus becomes extremely difficult to rectify
• *Systemic Racism in Detroit:**
• White flight and aversive racism caused segregation
• White ppl uncomfortably and moved to the suburbs & blacks stay in intercity
• Suburbs become increased in property tax →segregation by race & SES
• Public schools funded by property tax of the area (wealth) → good schools in blue areas and bad schools in pink
• The result is institutional racism → education good for white & bad for black
• This gets perpetuated: white = good education = good job = good income
• Pink area = teacher shortage = teachers don’t need to be certified = education even worse

Question 7

Gender Stereotypes

Answer 7

• Gender norms are prescriptive, while gender stereotypes are descriptive
• Strong gender stereotypes exist, and often, members of that stereotypes group accept them
• The average man and woman do differ somewhat in social connectedness, empathy, social power, aggressiveness, and sexual initiative (not in intelligence), but sometimes stereotypes exaggerate these differences
• Gender stereotypes have persisted across time and culture, with most people everywhere perceiving women as more agreeable, and men as more outgoing
• The persistence and omnipresence of gender stereotypes leads some evolutionary psychologists to believe that they reflect innate, stable reality
• Stereotypes are not prejudice, but may reflect them

Question 8

Ambivalent Sexism: Benevolent and Hostile

Answer 8

• Hostile Sexism Items: old fashioned, explicit sexism
• “Most women fail to appreciate all that men do for them.”
• “Women seek to gain power by getting control over men.”
• “Most women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist.”
• Benevolent Sexism Items: positive information
• “Women should be cherished and protected by men.”
• “Many women have a quality of purity that few men possess.”
• “A good woman ought to be set on a pedestal by her man.”
• Hostile and benevolent sexism tend to be positively correlated –> conflicting views: think that women want to gain power over men, but also think that women should be held on a pedestal
• Individuals (both men and women) who score high on benevolent sexism do not necessarily recognize that they hold stereotypes toward women –> think that it’s only a stereotype if it holds negative information

Both predict discrimination, just different kinds:

• Hostile sexism – sexual harassment, intimate partner violence (IPV)
• Benevolent sexism – decreases women’s confidence & performance in the workplace, encourages subordination –> a man’s expectation of these things (positive stereotypes) can cause negative effects as men think that women need protection which gives the power to men

Hostile and benevolent stereotypes can also be seen in racism and ableism

• Hostile sexist beliefs predict increased future gender equality; it is overtly negative
• Benevolent sexism, though sounding positive, may still impede gender equality by discouraging the hiring of women in traditionally male-dominating occupations

Question 9

Gender Discrimination

Answer 9

• Men are 3x more likely to die by suicide and be murdered, they comprise nearly all battlefield and death row casualties
• Males represent the majority of those with intellectual disability or autism, and majority of students in special ed
• Women even discriminate against women: study where an article had a male author’s name v female, and in general the articles received lower ratings when attributed to a female
• In academic sciences, studies reveal that faculty prefer female job candidates over identically qualified male ones
• In the non-western world, gender discrimination is less subtle –> many women are illiterate and have experienced intimate partner violence (IPV)
• IPV tendencies are especially likely among men who objectify women by implicitly associating them with animals or objects (honey, chick, sweetie)
• Biggest violence against women may happen prenatally –> across the world, ppl tend to prefer to have baby boys and the use of ultrasound and abortion are affecting the ratio of girls to boys being born
• This female shortage also contributes to increased violence, crime, prostitution, and trafficking of women

Question 10

LGBTQ Prejudice

Answer 10

• Most of the world’s gay and lesbian people cannot comfortably disclose who they are and whom they love, and in many countries, same-sex relationships are a criminal offence
• Anti-gay attitudes are strongest among those who are older, less educated, and male
• Heterosexual men who value masculinity express the most prejudice against transgender individuals
• Anti-gay prejudice can be in the form of job discrimination, mixed gay marriage support, harassment, rejection (unable to live openly gay)
• Community attitudes predict LBGT health; communities where anti-gay prejudice is commonplace are communities with high rates of gay-lesbian suicide and cardiovascular death, as well as increased depression and anxiety

Question 11

Sources of Prejudice (LEC) (4)

Answer 11

• Economic perspective: Realistic conflict theory
• Motivational Perspectives: Social Identity theory
• Cognitive perpectives: cognitive misers, illusory correlations

Question 12

Social Sources of Prejudice: Social Inequalities

Answer 12

• The principle to remember is that unequal status breeds prejudice
• Once inequalities exist, prejudice helps justify the economic and social superiority of those who have wealth and power
• Stereotypes helped rationalize inferior status of blacks and women: people thought both groups were mentally slow, emotional, primitive, and contended with their subordinate role
• Studies found that powerful men who stereotype their female subordinates give them plenty of praise but fewer resources which undermines their performance and allows men to maintain their power
• Hostile and benevolent sexism can extend to other prejudices; we see other groups as competent or likeable but not usually both –> Quickly respect the competence of those high in status and like those who agreeably accept lower status
• Those high in social dominance orientation- a motivation to have your own group be dominant over other social groups- tend to view people in terms of the hierarchies and like their social group to be high status –> status breeds prejudice
• Being a dominant, high status position tends to promote this orientation so it has been suggested that this desire to be on top leads people high in social dominance to embrace prejudice and to support political positions that justify prejudice
• These people tend to frequently express more negative attitudes towards minority persons who exhibit strong racial identities

Question 13

Social Sources of Prejudice: Socialization- Authoritarian Personality

Answer 13

• In those who are strongly prejudiced, prejudice appears to be less of an attitude to one specific group than a way of thinking about those who are different or marginalized
• These ethnocentric people share certain tendencies: an intolerance for weakness, a punitive attitude, and a submissive respect for their groups authorities
• These tendencies define a prejudiced-prone authoritarian personality- a personality that is disposed to favor obedience to authority and intolerance of outgroups and those of lower status
• Research has demonstrated that the insecurity of authoritarian individuals predisposes them towards an excessive concern with power and status and an inflexible right-wrong way of thinking that makes ambiguity difficult to tolerate
• Authoritarian people therefore tend to be submissive to those with power over them and aggressive or punitive towards those whom they consider lower in status than themselves
• Authoritarian’s feelings of moral superiority may go hand in hand with brutality toward perceived inferiors
• People high in social dominance orientation and authoritarian personality are among the most prejudice persons in our society, and they seem to display the worst qualities of each type of personality, striving for status often and manipulative ways while being dogmatic and ethnocentric
• Authoritarianism is more related to concern with security and control, whereas social dominance orientation is more related to a person’s group status

Question 14

Social Sources of Prejudice: Socialization- Religion and prejudice

Answer 14

• The use of religion to support injustice helps explain a consistent pairing of findings concerning North American Christianity:
• White church members express more racial prejudice than non-members
• Those professing traditional or fundamentalist Christian beliefs expressed more prejudice than those professing more progressive beliefs
• There might be no causal connection and maybe perhaps people with less education or both more fundamentalist and more prejudice, perhaps prejudice causes religion, or perhaps religion causes prejudice
• If religion causes prejudice then more religious church members should also be more prejudice, but there are three consistent findings that indicate otherwise:
• Faithful attendees are less prejudiced
• Intrinsically religious people are less prejudiced
• Clergy are less prejudiced
• If we define religiousness as church membership or willingness to agree at least superficially with traditional beliefs, then the more religious people have been the more racially prejudiced
• If we assess depth of religious commitment in any of several ways than the very devout are last prejudiced
• The role of religion is paradoxical; it makes prejudice and unmakes prejudice

Question 15

Social Sources of Prejudice: Socialization- Conformity

Answer 15

• If prejudice is socially accepted many people will follow the path of least resistance and conform to the fashion; they will act not so much out of a need to hate, but out of a need to be liked or accepted
• People become more likely to favor or oppose discrimination after hearing someone else do so, and are less supportive of woman after hearing sexist humor
• Those who conformed most to other social norms were also most prejudice; those who were less conforming mirrored less of the surrounding prejudice
• Hate speech can be socially toxic; frequent and repetitive exposure to hate speech leads to desensitization to such speech and to increasing outgroup prejudice –> A jump in hate crime can often follow political movement such as the election of trump
• Conformity also maintains gender prejudice

Question 16

Social Sources of Prejudice: Institutional Supports

Answer 16

• Social institutions may bolster prejudice through over policies such as segregation, or by possibly reinforcing the status quo
• media may also strengthen harmful stereotypes
• Institutional supports for prejudice are often unintended and unnoticed
• Studies have discovered that 2/3 of the average male photo but less of then half of average female photo was devoted to the face –> this face-ism phenomenon suggests that the visual prominence given men’s faces and women’s bodies both reflects and perpetuates gender bias

Question 17

Motivational Sources of Prejudice

Answer 17

• Frustration and Aggression
• Social Identity Theory (in-group bias, the need for status, regard and belonging)
• Motivation to avoid prejudice

Question 18

Motivational Sources of Prejudice: Frustration and Aggression- The Scapegoat Theory

Answer 18

• Frustration feeds hostility, and when the cause of our frustration is intimidating or unknown, we often redirect our hostility –> displaced aggression, or scapegoating
• Ethnic peace is easier to maintain during prosperous times
• By contrast, individuals who experience no negative emotional response to social threats (children with William’s syndrome) display a notable lack of racial stereotypes and no prejudice –> no passion = no prejudice
• Competition is an important source of frustration that can fuel prejudice; when two groups compete, one group’s goal fulfillment can become the other group’s frustration
• The realistic group conflict theory suggests that prejudices arise when groups compete for scarce resources
• In evolutionary biology, Gause’s law states that maximum competition will exist between species with identical needs

Question 19

Motivational Sources of Prejudice: Social Identity Theory- Feeling Superior to Others (In-group Bias)

Answer 19

• The mere experience of being formed into groups may promote in-group bias (the tendency to favour your own group)
• People favour ingroups over outgroups to enhance their own self- esteem –> motivates us to like the group be otherwise we wouldn’t be a part of it
• Self-esteem bolstered by belonging to favorable groups
• Identity w groups we like, so we show favouritism to boost self-esteem, and downgrading members of other groups the serve the same purpose (like cognitive dissonance)
• You can have prejudice & discrimination without competition of resources
• We aren’t in conflict w other groups, but we need to feel better about the groups we are a part of & our decisions
• All we need is motivation for self-esteem
• We are more prone to in-group bias when our group is small and differs in status relative to the out-group
• *In-group Liking Fosters out-group Disliking:**
• Experiments reveal both in-group liking and out-group disliking; sometimes love and hate are on opposite sides of the same coin
• To the extent that we feel virtue in us, we likely see evil in them
• Out-group stereotypes prosper when people feel their in-group identity most keenly, such as when they are with other in-group members
• We also ascribe uniquely human emotions (love, hope, contempt, resentment) to in-group members and are much more reluctant to see such human emotions in out-group members –> infrahumanization (denying human attributes to out-groups)
• In-group bias and discrimination result less from hostility than from in-group favouritism
• Bias is less a matter of dislike toward those who are different than of networking and mutual support among those in one’s group
• *Minimal groups paradigm** –> pick which painting you prefer and then choose
• Option 1: $3 to in-group, $4 to out-group
• Option 2: $2 to in-group, $1 to out-group –> most ppl chose this option
• *Ingroup/Outgroup distinctions can affect our self-esteem:**
• Participants given positive or negative feedback about their own intelligence (self-esteem assessed) –> IQ test was given where some were told they did really well and others told they did really poorly and then questionnaire filled out where participants rate how they feel about themselves
• Watched a videotape of a job applicant who was subtly described as an outgroup member (or not)
• Participants rated candidate
• Participants’ self-esteem was assessed again
• Hypothesis: if need for self-esteem drives out-group discrimination, then threatening self-esteem (through poor IQ) should result in discrimination towards outgroup, and there should be a boost in self-esteem after derogating outgroup
• Ratings of Candidate:
• If participants were given positive feedback about their intelligence, they rated the ingroup and outgroup members equally
• If participants were given negative feedback about their intelligence, they rated the outgroup member more negatively than the ingroup member
• Change in Self-esteem:
• If participants were given positive feedback about their intelligence, there was no change in self-esteem from Time 1 to Time 2
• If participants were given negative feedback about their intelligence, the participants who derogated the outgroup member showed an increase in self-esteem relative to those who rated the ingroup member

Question 20

Motivational Sources of Prejudice: Social Identity Theory- Need for Status, Self-Regard, and Belonging

Answer 20

• Status is relative: to perceive ourselves as having status, we need people below us –> one psychological benefit of prejudice is a feeling of superiority
• If our status is secure, we have less need to feel superior, and we express less prejudice
• Thinking about death can provoke enough insecurity to intensify in-group favouritism and out-group prejudice
• With death on our mind, people exhibit terror management and shield themselves from the threat of their own death by derogating those whose challenges to their worldviews further arouse their anxiety
• When people are already feeling vulnerable about their mortality, prejudice helps bolster a threatened belief system
• This suggests that a man who doubts his own strength and independence might, by proclaiming women to be weak and dependent, boost his masculine image
• Affirm people and they will evaluate an out-group more positively; threaten their self-esteem and they will restore it by denigrating an out-group
• Despising out-groups strengthens the in-group

Question 21

Motivational Sources of Prejudice: Motivation to Avoid Prejudice

Answer 21

• Motivations lead people to be prejudiced, but also to avoid prejudice
• It can be hard to suppress unwanted thoughts, and this is especially so for older adults, who lose some of their ability to inhibit unwanted thoughts, and therefore to suppress old stereotypes
• People with low and high prejudices sometimes have similar automatic (unintentional) prejudicial responses, and as a result, unwanted (dissonant) thoughts and feelings often persist
• In real life, majority person’s encountering a minority person may trigger a knee-jerk stereotype, but prejudicial reactions are not inevitable
• The motivation to avoid prejudice can lead people to modify their thoughts and actions
• Aware of the gap between how they should feel and how they do feel, self-conscious people will feel guilt and try to inhibit their prejudicial response
• Even automatic prejudices (internal) subside when peoples motivation to avoid prejudice is internal (bc they believe it’s wrong) rather than external (don’t want to be disliked)

Question 22

Cognitive Sources of Prejudice

Answer 22

• Categorization (spontaneous categorization, perceived similarities and differences)
• Distinctiveness (distinctive people, distinctiveness feeds self-consciousness, vivid cases, distinctive events foster illusory correlations)
• cognitive misers

Question 23

Cognitive Sources of Prejudice: Categorization

Answer 23

• We classify people so that we can think about them more easily –> If persons in a group share some similarities, knowing their group members can provide useful information with minimal effort
• Stereotypes represent cognitive efficiency: they are energy saving schemas for making speedy judgments and predicting how others will think and act
• We judge people in out-groups more quickly and take longer to form impressions of in-group members –> stereotypes and out-group bias may have served evolutionary functions by enabling our ancestors to cope and survive
• We find it especially easy to rely on stereotypes when we are: pressed for time, preoccupied, tired, and emotionally aroused
• We spontaneously categorize by sex and ethnicity –> creates a foundation for prejudice
• When we assign people to groups, we are likely to exaggerate the similarities within the groups and the differences between them
• We assume that other groups are more homogenous than our own
• Mere division in groups can create an out-group homogeneity effect- a sense that they are all alike and different from us and our group
• In general, the greater our familiarity with a social group, the more we see its diversity, and the less our familiarity, the more we stereotype
• People of other races do in fact seem to look more alike than people of your own race
• When white and black students are shown faces and then asked to pick these individuals out of a line up, they show own-race bias: they more accurately recognize white faces than the black, and they often falsely recognize black faces they have never seen before
• It’s not that we cannot perceive differences among faces of another group, but when looking at a face from another racial group, we often pay attention first to race, rather than to individual features
• When viewing someone of our own race, we are less attentive to the race category and more attention to individual details
• Our attending to someone being different social category may also be contributing to a parallel own-age bias- the tendency for both children and older adults to more accurately identify faces from their own age groups

Question 24

Cognitive Sources of Prejudice: Distinctiveness (Illusory Correlations)

Answer 24

• Mind makes sense of rare distinctive events which can lead to discrimination and prejudice
• Distinctive events capture attention bc they:
• Are more likely to be remembered
• May become over-represented in memory
• What makes an event distinctive?
• When it is infrequent –> e.g. don’t remember height unless someone is really tall or really short
• When it is something that is counter-normative –> stands out if someone is doing something you don’t normally see
• By definition, members of minority groups are distinctive because they are infrequent in North America
• Negative events are also distinctive bc they are counter-normative
• So people are very likely to note negative behaviours by minority members –> minority doing something negative is more memorable than the same thing done by a majority group member (appear to have exaggerated positive and negative qualities)
• Reinforces the stereotype that minorities are more likely to do negative things
• if one has limited experience with a particular social group, they recall examples of it and generalize from those –> can prime stereotypes
• distinctiveness can also feed self-consciousness bc we misperceive others reacting to our distinctness –> feels tense even when nobody means for it to be
• Because we are sensitive to distinctive events, the co-occurrence of two such events is especially noticeable- more noticeable than each of the times the unusual events do not occur together
• We often have pre-existing biases, and these stereotypes can lead us to see correlations that aren’t there, which helps to perpetuate stereotypes
• *Hamilton and Gifford (1976):**
• Participants were presented with a description of 39 behaviours, told that they were either performed by members of “Group A” or “Group B”
• Group A: 26 behaviours: (18 positive, 8 negative)
• Group B: 13 behaviours: (9 positive, 4 negative)
• Participants then viewed the behaviours and asked to guess whether it was enacted by a member of Group A or B
• Negative events are more memorable than positive traits
• Only difference is how many people are in each group, but mind only remembers distinctive information

Question 25

Cognitive Sources of Prejudice: Cognitive Misers

Answer 25

• Participants were asked to do two tasks simultaneously
• Form an impression of a hypothetical person based on traits (e.g., rebellious, aggressive)
• Listen to a lecture about Indonesia (facts)
• Independent variable: trait terms accompanied by stereotype (e.g., skinhead) or no stereotype provided
• Dependent variables: trait information and facts about Indonesia recalled by P
• Recall task –> recite all of the traits you remember and the facts you remember
• The stereotype served as a memory bias to help to remember trait-specific information
• Participants were then better able to remember the facts bc the stereotype makes them more efficient at remembering traits and this frees up processing resources which makes them better able to listen to the and remember the facts of Indonesia
• Stereotypes are a product of natural thinking and how we organize info

Question 26

Economic Perspective of Prejudice: Realistic Conflict Theory

Answer 26

• Hostility between groups is caused by direct competition for limited resources (can be economic, political, social, or even just the perception of there being competition)
• According to this theory, wherever there is competition, there will be stereotype and prejudice towards the other group
• There are third variable problems and correlational problems –> what comes first: Prejudice or competition
• To determine the causation, you need to create conflict and see if it manifests as prejudice
• *The Robbers Cave Experiment:**
• Twenty-two middle-class 5th grade boys
• Formation of Group Identity: Eagles and Rattlers –> allow the members of each group to bond, form culture, and norms
• Competition for Resources created stereotypes, prejudice, & discrimination
• Reduction of inter-group conflict by introducing a superordinate goal –> children given the opportunity to come together as allies and work for a common goal
• Coexistence alone does not eliminate the prejudice and discrimination, but working together does

Question 27

Attributions: Group-Serving Bias

Answer 27

• We frequently omit FAE, which occurs partly because our attention focuses on the person and not the situation
• The more people assume that human traits are fixed dispositions, the stronger are their stereotypes and the greater their acceptance of racial inequalities
• Attribution errors can bias people’s explanations of group members’ behaviours
• We grant members of our group the benefit of the doubt, but when explaining acts by members of other groups, we often assume the worst (actor-observer bias)
• Positive behaviour by out-group members is more often dismissed and may be seen as a “special case”, as owing to luck or some special advantage, as demanded by the situation, or as attributable to extra effort
• Disadvantaged groups and groups that stress modesty (Asian) exhibit less of this group-serving bias, and immodest groups that are invested in their own greatness react to threats with group-serving bias and hostility
• This bias can colour our language –> positive behaviours by in-group are general dispositions, and by outgroups are unique (opposite true for negative behaviour)
• Blaming the victim can justify the blamer’s own superior status, and blaming occurs as people attribute to out-group’s failures to its members’ flawed dispositions

Question 28

Motivation to See the World as Just

Answer 28

• We are taught that good is rewarded and evil punished; hard work and virtue pays dividends and laziness and immorality do not
• We then assume that those who flourish must be good and those who suffer must deserve their fate
• Just-world phenomenon- people’s tendency to believe that the world is just and good, and people get what they deserve, and deserve what they get
• This phenomenon colours our impressions of rape victims
• Blameless victims threaten people’s sense of justice –> people are indifferent to social injustice, not because they have no concern for justice but because they see no injustice (believing rape victims must have behaved seductively, teens bullied deserved it, sick pople are responsible for their illness, etc.)
• Such beliefs enable successful people to reassure themselves that they too deserve what they have
• Linking good fortune with virtue and misfortune with moral failure enables the fortunate to feel pride and to avoid responsibility for the unfortunate
• Believing in a just world also motivates us to invest our energies in long-term goals
• Just-world thinking also tends to lead people to justify their culture’s familiar social systems –> we are inclined to think that the way things are is the way things essentially are and ought to be

Question 29

All Sources of Prejudice:

Answer 29

Social Sources of Prejudice:

• social inequalities
• socialization (authoritarian personality, religion and prejudice, conformity)
• institutional supports

Motivational Sources of Prejudice:

• Frustration and aggression theory
• Social identity theory (LEC) (in-group bias, the need for status, regard and belonging)
• Motivation to avoid prejudice

Cognitive Sources of Prejudice:

• Categorization (spontaneous categorization, perceived similarities and differences)
• Distinctiveness (distinctive people, distinctiveness feeds self-consciousness, vivid cases, distinctive events foster illusory correlations (LEC))
• cognitive misers (LEC)
• Economic perspective: Realistic conflict theory (LEC)

Question 30

Consequences of Prejudice (LEC) (5)

Answer 30

• *Ways that being a member of a stigmatized group affects group members:**
• Internalization of stereotypes
• Attributional ambiguity
• Stereotype threat
• *Ways it affects nongroup members:**
• Self-fulfilling prophecy
• Shooter bias

Question 31

Consequences of Prejudice: Self-Perpetuating Prejudgments

Answer 31

• Prejudgments are self-perpetuating: whenever a group member behaves as expected, we duly note the fact and our prior belief is confirmed
• When a member of a group behaves inconsistently with our expectation, we may explain away the behaviours due to special circumstances
• Misinterpretations are likely when someone expects an unpleasant encounter with you –> experiment where a person was told they would meet a friendly v unfriendly person
• When we focus on an atypical example, we can salvage the stereotype by splitting of a new category
• This subtyping- putting people who deviate into a different class of people- helps maintain stereotypes (e.g., all police officers are unfriendly and dangerous and one friendly police won’t change this)
• High-prejudice people tend to subtype positive out-group members; low-prejudice people more often subtype negative out-group members
• A different way to accommodate the inconsistent people is to form a new stereotype for those who don’t fit the original stereotype
• This subgrouping- forming a subgroup stereotype- tends to lead to modest change in the stereotype as the stereotype becomes more differentiated
• Subtypes are exceptions to the group; subgroups are acknowledged as a part of the overall diverse group

Question 32

The Consequences of Prejudice: Self-fulfilling Prophesy

Answer 32

• Allport believed that reactions of victimization are reducible to two basic types:
• Those that involve blaming oneself –> withdrawal, self-hate, aggression against your own group
• Those that involve blaming external causes –> fighting back, suspiciousness, increased group pride
• Discrimination does significantly affect its victims, and social beliefs can be self-confirming
• The process by which your expectations about another person lead you to engage with them in ways that confirm those expectations
• *Word, Zanna, and Cooper (1974)**
• *Study 1: Interviewer’s Behaviour**
• White participants interviewed a Black or White confederates –> all interviewees are trained to give equal responses and act similar to one another
• DVs: distance, interview length, speech errors
• Results:*
• Interviewers of black applicants yielded more physical distance
• Interview lengths were shorter for Black applicants
• Interviewer stuttered more with Black applicants
• Stereotypes fill the first half of self-fulfilling prophesy –> expectations impact how you act towards the group (how interviewer acts towards the applicant)
• Worries applicant might be lower quality, and treats them this way
• *Study 2: Interviewee’s Behaviour:**
• Independent Variable: Behavior of interviewer
• Behaved like Study 1 participants who interviewed White applicant, or
• Behaved like Study 1 participants who interviewed Black applicant
• Dependent variables:
• Interview performance (as rated by blinded judges)
• Speech errors
• Ps attitude toward interviewer once completed.
• Results*: when P treated like black (vs white) applicant:
• More speech errors
• Performance judged lower
• More negative attitude towards person interviewing them
• Second half of self-fulfilling prophesy: lower quality treatment causes applicant to emit lower quality applicant behaviour, which reinforces the cycle

Question 33

The Consequences of Prejudice: Stereotype Threat

Answer 33

• Placed in a situation where others expect you to perform poorly, your anxiety may also cause you to confirm that belief (things that use up our mental energy and attention can result in diminished mental and physical stamina)
• Stereotype threat is a self-confirming apprehension that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype
• The media can provoke stereotype threat –> after seeing commercials with “air-headed” females, women performed worse than men on math tests and reported less interest in obtaining a math or science major
• *How Stereotype threat undermines performance:**
• Stress- stress of a stereotype impairs brain activity associated with mathematical processing and increases activity in areas associating with emotion processing
• Self-monitoring- worrying about mistakes disrupts focused attention
• Suppressing unwanted thoughts and emotions- the effort required to regulate one’s thinking takes energy and disrupts working memory
• Negative stereotype threats can disrupt performance while positive stereotypes can enhance it –> when reminded of their gender identity Asian females performed poorly on a math test, while when reminded of their Asian identity, their performance rose

Question 34

Stereotype Threat Studies

Answer 34

• Claude Steele was interested in why African Americans tended to underperform on aptitude tests, such as the SATs or GREs
• Match white and black people on everything that would predict how well they perform, but black will still perform more poorly
• Hypothesis: Fears that one will confirm the stereotype about one’s group interferes with performance, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy
• Black people have more on their mind because they are thinking about the “black people are dumb” stereotype
• This additional pressure creates fear and anxiety which interferes w their performance
• Stereotype perpetuates itself because during the obstacles they go through, they have added pressure so they don’t perform as well and they don’t make it into the field (i.e. there being less women in STEM)
• Steele and Aronson, 1995 (Chart):
• Participants were Black and White Stanford students
• All took a test (difficult verbal passage from the GRE)
• Half were told that the test was diagnostic of intellectual ability, half were told it was not diagnostic
• Black did worse if told it was diagnostic of intelligence because fears of conformity to stereotype results in underperformance (black get fewer correct)
• White were not affected either way
• Over 300 empirical studies have tested Stereotype Threat –> robust and generalizes over many groups and for many different tests
• Many groups have stereotypes that can interfere with performance:
• Latinx and Academic Performance
• Women and Math
• Low SES and academic performance –> Group has stereotype that they are bad at an ability, when given a test that assesses the ability they will do worse than if not told that it is diagnostic of that ability

Question 35

Stereotype Manipulation (stereotype threat) (3)

Answer 35

• Telling participants that the test is diagnostic (or not)
• Making the social category salient
• Self-reporting race or gender before taking test
• Being the only person of that category present –> only having men in the room highlights the stereotype that women don’t do well in that field; STEM tests with other women improves performance
• Making the stereotype salient
• Davies et al., 2002: Portrayal of women in commercials
• Completing demographic info before math test renders gender salient and women do worse
• Female university students were randomly assigned to watch TV commercials that were gender-stereotypic in nature or not
• Females who watched the stereotypic ads performed worse on a challenging math test, and report less interest in careers requiring quantitative skills (e.g., engineer, accountant)

Question 36

Reducing the Negative Effects of Stereotype Threat (5)

Answer 36

• *Not emphasizing social category**
• Remove situational cues about group membership
• E.g. asking demographic info after the test is completed
• *Self-affirmation**
• Reaffirming sense of self, self-worth, can buffer against the negative effects of stereotype threat
• Hyping yourself up
• *Emphasizing incremental models of ability**
• Fixed growth mindset –> stereotype threat assumes intelligence is fixed and determined by your group membership
• Providing info that intelligence is malleable can undermine stereotype threat and reduce its effects
• *Learning about Stereotype Threat can reduce its effect** (Johns et al., 2005)
• Eliminate stereotype threat
• Labelling your thoughts and emotions (identifying why you feel a certain way) which can help you attribute it properly and “explain it away”
• *Reframing the test**
• Changing what its diagnostic of can remove and reverse stereotype threat
• When a test was said to test for athletic ability, black participants did better, and when athletic strategy, white performed better
• Framing of test determines performance based on which stereotype it is being applied to (whether or not stereotype threat will occur)

Question 37

Consequences of Prejudice: Internalization of Stereotypes

Answer 37

• When one privately accepts that descriptive stereotypes of one’s group as an accurate description of oneself
• Process of learning and accepting stereotypes
• You begin to believe the stereotype when everyone is saying your group does x
• *Clark Doll Experiments:**
• Research done in the context of school segregation
• Viewing black dolls as ugly/bad and white dolls as pretty/good were stronger for students entering segregated schools
• *The heterosexual questionnaires:**
• Questions typically asked to homosexuals but reworded to ask heterosexuals
• Questions like: what do you think caused your heterosexuality? When did you discover you were heterosexual? Is it possible it’s just a phase?
• These questions cause homosexuals to internalize that the idea that they are abnormal
• Exposes prejudiced beliefs that homosexuality is abnormal that underlies these questions that are frequently asked
• The process of internalization occurs in a similar fashion to Sherif’s autokinetic phenomenon (normative/private influence)
• People use the assumptions/statements behind their questions to form your ideas and you internalize this information

Question 38

Consequences of Prejudice: Attributional Ambiguity

Answer 38

• Attribution = inferences we make about why people behave in the way that they do (dispositional/situational)
• Difficulty of people from stereotyped groups interpreting feedback from others (i.e., uncertainty whether the feedback reflects their own performance or others’ biases)
• Negative feedback: Did I do poorly or is the person giving feedback prejudiced?
• Positive feedback: Did I do well or is the person giving feedback being patronizing/compensating for their biases?
• *Attributional ambiguity study:**
• Black participants were told that they were paired with another participant (White) for the study
• Completed Self-Esteem scale
• Participants told partner could see them (or not) –> manipulation of whether the white person can see their race or not
• Completed self-description form, received positive or negative feedback from ‘partner’, self-esteem reassessed
• IV: seen/unseen; positive/ negative feedback –> does being seen result in attributional ambiguity?
• Results:*
• Race introduces racial ambiguity
• Those who were seen felt worse when they received positive feedback due to attributional ambiguity (they believe it’s a pity like bc the partner doesn’t want to seem racist)
• Negative feedback doesn’t really impact self-esteem when seen because they believe the partner is only saying mean things bc they are racist, so their comments are invalid
• When done with white participants, being seen or unseen doesn’t matter (it only seems like the seen condition) –> they don’t think race has anything to do with how people view them
• Ps (Black) were not given any reason to expect that their partner would be prejudiced or biased in any way –> good external validity as person of their university is typically an in-group members
• “Tokenism”: People may not get a boost to self-esteem for their achievements
• Robs them of a sense of achievement as they think they only got hired, or accepted due to a diversity initiative
• Self-esteem boost is guaranteed for white people but not minority groups
• Attributional ambiguity assessed using other groups; strongest findings for people who are obese –> feeling bad in response to good feedback driven by the thought that it’s a pity like, and this is strongest for obese people

Question 39

Consequences of Prejudice: Shooter Bias

Answer 39

• the tendency among the police to shoot black civilians rather than white civilians, even when civilian is unarmed
• IRL: unarmed + black are 3.5x more likely to be shot by police than unarmed + white
• Lab studies show this happens relatively automatically for non-police as well
• *Shooter Bias in the Lab:**
• If the person in the picture has a gun, press the “shoot” button.
• If the person in the picture does not have a gun, press the “do not shoot” button –> have to respond within 2 seconds
• You get points for correct decisions –> enough correct decisions, you win real money (Incentivized to do it as well as possible)
• Results:*
• Slower to not shoot a white target and faster to shoot a black armed vs white armed target –> they are more likely to see guns on Blacks than whites (longer reaction time when a black person is without a gun bc it seems like an unnatural response)
• More mistakes for shooting unarmed black targets than unarmed whites
• More mistakes for not shooting white armed than not shooting black armed
• Explicit racial attitudes measured and it had no bearing on the results
• For both black and white participants, race didn’t matter –> they both had shooter bias due to the stereotype that black people are dangerous so it operates at an automatic level
• White with a lot of contact w black had smaller shooter bias (evidence of contact hypothesis)

Question 40

What Creates Conflict? (4)

Answer 40

• Social Dilemmas (Prisoner’s Dilemma, the tragedy of the commons)
• Competition
• Perceived Injustice
• Misperception (Mirror image perceptions, simplistic thinking, shifting perceptions)

Question 41

Conflict Creation: Social Dilemmas

Answer 41

• When individually rewarding choices become collectively punishing, we have a dilemma: How can we reconcile individual self-interest with communal well-being?
• prisoners dilemma (already in notes –> reciprocity)
• *Tragedy of the commons:**
• The “commons” is any shared resource, including air, water, energy sources, and food supplies
• The tragedy occurs when individuals consume more than they share, with the cost of their doing so dispersed among all, causing the ultimately collapse- the tragedy- of the commons
• we deplete our natural resources because the immediate personal benefits outweigh the seemingly inconsequential costs
• When resources are not partitioned, people often consume more than they realize

Question 42

Features of Social Dilemmas:

Answer 42

• *The Fundamental Attribution Error:**
• Both games tempt people to explain their own behaviour situationally and explain their partner’s behaviour dispositionally
• Most never realize that their counterparts are viewing them with the same fundamental attribution error
• *Evolving Motives:**
• Motives often change –> at first, people are eager to make some money, then to minimize their losses, and finally to save face and avoid defeat
• These shifting motives can make it harder to negotiate a solution
• Early on, mediators can focus on proposing resolutions that maximize the benefits to both sides, but as time progresses, solutions must increasingly address the substantive issues, and they must also let all parties enter an agreement with the sense that they have prevented important losses and avoided defeat
• *Outcomes Need Not Sum to Zero:**
• Most real-life conflicts are non-zero-sum games: two sides’ profits and losses need not add up to zero; both can win and both can lose
• Each game pits the immediate interest of individuals against the well-being of the group and shows how even when each individual behaves rationally, harm can result
• Not all self-serving behaviour leads to collective doom –> individuals who see to maximize their own profit may also give the community what it needs

Question 43

Resolving Social Dilemmas (5)

Answer 43

• Regulation: the use of taxes, and other regulations
• small: making the groups small increases each person’s responsibility and feeling of effectiveness, as well as their identification with the group
• communication: group communication forges group identity, devises norms and expections, reduces mistrust and enables people to reach agreements
• Changing payoffs: in lab experiments, changing payoffs such that cooperation is rewarded and exploitation is punished, increases cooperation (like carpool lanes and electric car incentives)
• Appeals to altruistic norms: most people respond to norms of social responsibility, reciprocity, equity, and keeping commitments, but the issue is taping into these feelings -> can be done with a charismatic leader who inspires cooperation, define situations in ways that involve cooperative norms, communcation can also activate altruistic norms

Question 44

Conflict Creation: Competition

Answer 44

• Hostilities often arise when groups compete for scarce jobs, housing, or resources; when interests clash, conflict erupts
• Even perceived distant threats can increase people’s intolerance
• Perceived threats feed prejudice and conflict, and prejudice also amplifies the perception of a threat in a vicious cycle
• Eagles and Rattlers for ex

Question 45

Conflict Creation: Perceived Injustice

Answer 45

• People perceive justice as equity- the distribution of rewards in proportion to individuals’ contribution
• We may agree with the equity principle’s definition of justice, yet disagree on whether our relationship is equitable
• Those with social power usually convince themselves and others that they deserve what they’re getting –> the golden rule: whoever has the gold makes the rules
• Some noncapitalist cultures define justice not as equity but as either equality (equal distribution of rewards to all individuals) or even fulfilment of need (need-based distribution), from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs
• Children and adults socialized under the influence of collectivist culture have defined justice more as equality or need fulfillment

Question 46

Conflict Creation: Misperception

Answer 46

• Conflict is a perceived incompatibility of actions or goals
• Many conflicts contain but a small core ot truly incompatible goals; the bigger the problem is the misconceptions of others’ motives and goals –> perceptions can subjectively magnify differences
• Here are some seeds of misperception:
• Self-serving bias leads individuals and groups to accept credit for their good deeds and shrink responsibility for bad deeds
• The tendency to self-justify inclines people to deny the wrong of the evil acts
• FAE makes each side see the other’s hostility as reflecting an evil disposition
• One filters information and interprets it to fit one’s preconceptions
• Groups frequently polarize these tendencies
• One symptoms of groupthink is the tendency to perceive one’s group as moral and strong and the opposition as evil and weak
• Being in a group triggers an in-group bias
• Negative stereotypes are often resistant to contradictory evidence once formed
• People in conflict form distorted images of one another
• Groups in intractable conflict almost always:
• See their own goals as supremely important
• Take pride in “us” and devalue “them”
• Believe themselves victimized
• Elevate patriotism, solidarity, and loyalty to the group’s needs
• Celebrate self-sacrifice and suppress criticism

Question 47

Conflict Creation: Misperception: Mirror-Image Perceptions

Answer 47

• The misperceptions of those in conflict are mutual; people in conflict attribute similar virtues to themselves and vices to the other
• When two sides have clashing perceptions, at least one is misperceiving the other and such misperceptions often end up being self-confirming
• If A expects B to be hostile, A may treat B in such a way that B fulfills A’s expectations, thus beginning a vicious cycle
• Opposing sides in a conflict tend to exaggerate their differences
• Group conflicts are often fuelled by an illusion that the enemy’s top leaders are evil but their people, though controlled and manipulated are on our side

Question 48

Conflict Creation: Misperception: Simplistic Thinking

Answer 48

• When tension rises, rational thinking becomes more difficult
• Views of the enemy become more simplistic and stereotyped, and hasty, uninformed judgments become more likely
• Even the mere expectation of conflict can serve to freeze thinking and impede creative problem solving
• In nearly every case of political rhetoric preceding the outset of major wars, surprised military attacks, and revolutions, attacking leaders displayed increasingly simplistic we-are-good/ they-are-bad thinking immediately prior to their aggressive actions
• But, shifts way from the simplistic rhetoric typically preceded major peace arguments

Question 49

Conflict Creation: Misperception: Shifting Perceptions

Answer 49

• Since misperceptions accompany conflict, they appear and disappear as conflicts wax and wane
• The same processes that create the enemy’s image can reverse the image when the enemy becomes an ally
• The extent of misperceptions during conflict provides a reminder that people need not be insane or abnormally malicious to form distorted images of their antagonists
• When we experience conflict with others, we readily misperceive our own motives as good and the others as evil, and just as easily, our antagonists form a mirror-image perception of us
• When in conflict, we shouldn’t assume that the other fails to share our values and morality, but we should share and compare perceptions, assuming that the other likely perceives the situation differently

Question 50

4 Cs of Peacemaking

Answer 50

• Contact
• Cooperation
• Communication
• Conciliation

Question 51

Peacemaking: Contact Hypothesis

Answer 51

• Hypothesis that increased contact between members of various social groups can be effective in reducing prejudice between them
• Presumes prejudice stems from ignorance
• Stereotypes disconfirmed after forming interpersonal relationships with outside groups
• In 1954, the U.S. Supreme court ruled it was unconstitutional to have racially separate schools –> motivated by the contact hypothesis
• Unfortunately, racial desegregation in schools did not reduce stereotypes and prejudice
• Walter Stephan (1986) reviewed the literature assessing prejudice both did not before and after desegregation –> did not reduce it like the contact hypothesis would suggest
• Desegregation of schools did not reduce racial prejudice in America
• But, in other contexts, contact among groups has been more successful:
• Military –> train and work alongside people of different groups, become less prejudiced during their time
• Socially assisted housing projects –> place different groups together and prejudice goes down after living
• Roommates of different races –> randomly assigning roommates of different races, and implicit racial prejudice goes down for those in mixed rooms

Question 52

Peacemaking: Contact Hypothesis Moderators (5)

Answer 52

• What factors moderate whether contact is unsuccessful (e.g., initial desegregation of schools) or successful (e.g., desegregation of military units)? –> Moderators: details that need to be in place for it to work
• Groups need to be equal in status (military = equal status whereas in schools, students were arriving where social hierarchy already existed)
• Personal interaction needs to occur
• Need to have contact with more than one member of out-group
• Individuals have to engage in cooperative activities
• Need to be social norms that favour intergroup contact (or you’ll just have segregation but in the same building)

Question 53

Peacemaking: When contact doesnt improve racial attitudes

Answer 53

• Providing the opportunity for contact does not mean that people will take the opportunity
• Studies have shown that contact can reduce prejudice but prejudice also minimizes contact
• lack of mixing stems from pluralistic ignorance; many whites and blacks say they would like more contact but misperceive that the other does not reciprocate their feelings
• if whites presume that blacks think them prejudiced, and if blacks presume that whites stereotype them, both will feel anxious about making the first move (illusion of transparency –> overestimate the transparency of their feelings)
• Regardless of race, individuals attribute their own inaction in such situations primarily to fear of rejection, and more often attributed the seated students’ inaction to lack of interaction (in a dining hall)
• These social misperceptions constrain actual interracial contact

Question 54

Peacemaking: Contact –> Friendships

Answer 54

• How intergroup contact reduces prejudice and increases support for racial equality:
• Reducing anxiety- more contact brings greater comfort
• Increasing empathy- contact helps people put themselves in others’ shoes
• Humanizing others- enabling people to discover their similarities
• Decreasing perceived threats- alleviating overblown fears and increasing trust
• Group salience (visibility) also helps bridge divides between people –> if you think of a friend solely as an individual, your affective ties may not generalize to others members of the friend’s group
• We are especially likely to befriend dissimilar people when their out-group identity is initially minimized, but if our liking is then to generalize to others, their group identity must at some point be salient
• To reduce prejudice and conflict, we had best initially minimize group diversity, then acknowledge it, and then transcend it
• Friendship is key to successful contact –> if you have a minority group friend, you become much more likely to express sympathy and support for the friend’s group and even somewhat more support for immigration by that group

Question 55

Peacemaking: Equal Status Contact

Answer 55

• Much as positive contact boosts liking, negative contact increases disliking
• Positive contact is more commonplace, but negative experiences have greater effect
• Poor results can be expected when contacts are competitive, unsupported by authorities, and unequal
• Having frequent contact with Blacks as domestic workers and shoeshine men can breed attitudes that merely justify that continuation of inequality
• It is important that the contact be equal-status contact: contact on an equal basis; just as a relationship between people of unequal status breeds attitudes consistent with their relationship, so do relationships between those of equal status
• Thus, to reduce prejudice, interracial contact should ideally be between persons equal in status

Question 56

Peacemaking: Cooperation: Common External Threats

Answer 56

• Survivors of shared pain or extreme crises report a spirit of cooperation and solidarity rather than all-for-themselves panic –> friendliness is common among those who experience a shared threat
• Having a common enemy unified the groups of competing boys in Sherif’s camping experiments and in many subsequent experiments; just being reminded of an out-group heightens people’s responsiveness to their own group
• When facing a well-defined external threat during wartime, the we-feeling soars
• Even just imagining or fearing the extinction of one’s group often serves to strengthen in-group solidarity
• Dividing the world into “us” and “them” entails significant costs, such as racism and war, but also provides the benefits of communal and solidarity
• Group solidarity soars when people face a common enemy and further soars with success –> such as after a football game win (we won v they lost)
• We often reserve our most intense passions for rivals most similar to us –> animosities are formed around small differences

Question 57

Peacemaking: Cooperation: Superordinate Goals

Answer 57

• Superordinate goals are goals that unite all in a group and require cooperative effort (such as in Sherif’s study of the boys)
• Working cooperatively has especially favourable effects under conditions that lead people to define new, inclusive group that dissolves their former subgroups
• Economic interdependence through international trade also motivates peace
• *The robbers cave study:**
• Eagles vs Rattler, group contact did not ease tensions, but staging situations for them to cooperate to achieve a goal did ease tensions
• Goals that require the cooperation of 2+ groups to achieve and usually results in mutual benefit
• Creates a team and team = less prejudice
• *The Jigsaw Classroom:**
• A cooperative learning method where interracial groups work together
• Give each child a piece of an overall lesson to master and teach other students
• Students come together and teach their parts
• Only complete the “puzzle” when the class comes together
• A co-operative learning method, interracial groups work together
• Social outcomes: More positive attitudes toward outgroup
• Academic outcomes: Improvement for minority, no change for majority
• Children in interdependent classrooms grow to like each other better, develop a greater liking for school, greater self-esteem, and cross-racial friendships also begin to blossom
• Cooperative learning provides proof that prejudice may be reduced by equal status contact between majority and minority groups in the pursuit of common goals
• Those of different races who play, and work together are more likely to report having friends of another race and to express positive racial attitudes
• Studies show that adolescents have more positive peer relationships and may even achieve more when working cooperatively rather than competitively

Question 58

Peacemaking: Cooperation: Group and Superordinate Identities

Answer 58

• It can be a challenge in ethnically diverse cultures for people to balance their ethnic identities with their national identities –> may identify with one more than the other
• A positive ethnic identity can contribute to positive self-esteem, and so can positive mainstream cultural identity
• Marginal people who have neither a strong ethnic nor a strong mainstream cultural identity often have low self-esteem
• Bicultural people who affirm both identities, typically have a strong positive self-concept
• Often, they alternate between their two cultures, adapting their language and behaviour to whichever group they are with
• Multiculturalism (celebrating differences) v assimilation (meshing one’s values and habits with the prevailing culture)
• Multiculturalism ensures that all citizens can keep their identities, take pride in their ancestry and have a sense of belonging; acceptance gives people a feeling of security and self-confidence, making them open to and accepting of diverse cultures
• Some worry that multiculturalism separates people; in threatening situations, highlighting multicultural differences enhances hostility prompting people to attend and attach meaning to out-group members’ threatening behaviours
• Highlighting genetic differences between ethnic groups contribute to violence risk, while learning about genetic similarities helps foster peace
• In the space between multiculturalism and assimilation lies “diversity within unity”, an omnicultural perspective
• It presumes that all members of a given society will fully respect and adhere to those basic values and institutions that are considered a part of the basic shared framework of the society
• At the same time, every group in society is free to maintain its distinct subculture- those policies, habits, and institutions that do not conflict the shared ones

Question 59

Peacemaking: Communication: Bargaining

Answer 59

• There is no simple answer to whether you are better off adopting a tough bargaining stance, or beginning with a sincere good-faith offer
• Tough bargaining may lower the other party’s expectations, making the other side willing to settle for less, but toughness can also sometimes backfire
• Being tough is a potential lose-lose scenario; if the other party responds with an equally tough stance, both parties may be locked into positions from which neither can back down without losing face

Question 60

Peacemaking: Communication: Mediation

Answer 60

• A third-party mediator may offer suggestions that enable conflicting parties to make concessions and still save face (attributing their concession to mediator and not to them caving in)
• Mediators also help resolve conflicts by facilitating constructive communication
• Mediator aims to replace the win-lose orientation (successful if oponent is unhappy, and unsuccessful if oponent is pleased) with a cooperative win-win orientation, by prodding them to set aside their conflicting demands and instead think about each other’s underlying needs, interests, and goals
• Integrative agreements are win-win agreements that reconcile both parties’ interests to their mutual benefit, and compared with compromises where both parties sacrifice something important they are more enduring because they are mutually rewarding and lead to better ongoing relationships
• Communication often helps reduce self-fulfilling misperceptions –> outcome of conflict is often dependent on how people communicate their feelings
• A key factor is trust; if you believe the other person is well-intentioned you are more likely to divulge your needs and concerns –> third party mediator can be someone who both parties trust
• The mediator will often structure the encounter to help each party understand and feel understood by the other, asking parties to restrict their statements to those of facts including how they feel
• To increase empathy, the mediator may ask people to reverse roles and argue the other’s position or to imagine and explain what the other person is experiencing –> helps to humanize the other party
• When parties are at an impasse and need to move on, one simple strategy is to go for a walk, as forms of movement synchrony engages people in jointly attending to their environment and coordinating their steps

Question 61

Peacemaking: Communciation: Arbitration

Answer 61

• Some conflicts are so intractable, with underlying interests so divergent that a mutually satisfactory resolution is unattainable
• If a third party does not help resolve the conflict, parties may turn to arbitration by having the mediator or another third party impose a settlement
• Disputants usually prefer to settle their differences without arbitration so that they retain control over the outcome –> when people know they are to face an arbitrated settlement, people often try harder to reach an agreement, and display less hostility
• In cases where differences seem large and irreconcilable, the prospect of arbitration may cause disputants to freeze their positions, hoping to gain an advantage when the arbitrator chooses to
• To combat this, some disputes are settled with a final-offer arbitration in which the third party chooses one of the two final offers, and this motivates each party to make a reasonable proposal
• The final offer is typically not as reasonable as it would be if each party, free of self-serving bias, saw its own proposal through others eyes
• Most disputants are made stubborn by optimistic overconfidence
• Successful mediation is hindered when, both parties believe that have a two-thirds chance of winning a final-offer arbitration

Question 62

Peacemaking: Conciliation (GRIT)

Answer 62

• Sometimes tension and suspicion run so high that communication becomes all but impossible as each party may threaten, coerce or retaliate against the other
• Such acts tend to be reciprocated, thus escalating the conflict
• *GRIT:**
• Charles Osgood advocated a third alternative- one that is conciliatory, yet strong enough to discourage exploitation called graduated and reciprocated initiatives in tension reduction (GRIT)
• GRIT aims to reverse the conflict spiral by triggering reciprocal de-escalation, and to do so, it draws on social-psychological concepts, such as the norm of reciprocity and attribution of motives –> placation
• GRIT Requires one side to initiate a few small de-escalatory actions after announcing a conciliatory intent
• The initiator states a desire to reduce tension, declares each conciliatory act prior to making it, and invites the adversary to reciprocate
• This announcement creates a framework that helps the adversary correctly interpret what otherwise might be seen as weak or tricky actions and bring public pressure on the adversary to follow the reciprocity norm
• Next initiator establishes credibility and genuineness by carrying out to several verifiable conciliatory acts which intensifies the pressure to reciprocate
• Making conciliatory acts diverse keeps the initiator from making a significant sacrifices in anyone area and leaves the adversary freer to choose its own means of reciprocation
• If the adversary reciprocates voluntarily this conciliatory behavior may soften its attitudes
• The remaining acts of the plan protect each side self interest by maintaining retaliatory capability
• The initial conciliatory steps entail some small risk but do not jeopardize either when security but are rather calculated to begin edging both sides down the tension ladder
• if one side takes an aggressive action the other reciprocates in kind making it clear it will not tolerate exploitation
• the reciprocal act is not an over response that would re-escalate the conflict
• if the adversary offers its own conciliatory acts these two are matched or even slightly exceeded
• GRIT negotiators are to be firm in resisting intimidation, exploitation, and dirty tricks; fair in holding to one’s moral principles, nor reciprocating the other’s immoral behaviour despite their provocations; and friendly in the sense that one is willing to initiate and reciprocate cooperation
• Intent does boost cooperation, and repeated conciliatory acts do breed greater trust
• Maintaining an equality of power does protect against exploitation