Inter-group Relations Flashcards
Bondenhausen (1990)
‘Morning people’ tested at night and ‘night people’ tested at morning were more likely to fall back on stereotypes when making a judgement
Stereotype
The belief that certain attributes are characteristic of members of a particular group
Prejudice
Prejudice is a negative attitude or affective response toward a group and its individual members.
Discrimination
Discrimination is unfair treatment of individuals based on their membership in a particular group.
Modern racism
Modern racism is prejudice directed at racial groups that exists alongside the rejection of explicitly racist beliefs.
What are the theoretical perspectives of intergroup relations?
There are three main causal perspectives of group relations according to Gilovich et al (2016), of which Hewstone et al (2015) split into two categories of individual and group level explanations.
The group level explanations are economic (competing interests) and motivational (psychological needs).
The individual level explanations are cognitive (schemas and peoples conflicting beliefs with automatic responses) and personality which is unique to Hewstone.
Realistic group conflict theory
Suggests that when groups are competing for the same limited resource they develop prejudices and discriminate against each other.
This theory predicts that ethnocentrism will also develop which refers to glorifying one’s own group while vilifying other groups. This results in in-group loyalty intensifying with a “circle the wagon” mentality.
(Economic)
Sherif et al (1961)
Used 22 average boys, similar in background ethnicity and education and randomly split them into two groups at summer camp.
Initially they didn’t know about other group and cohesion developed.
Then 5 day tournament between them resulted in insults, vandalism and fighting. Leaders replaced with more athletic/aggressive others.
Interacting in non competitive settings didn’t reduce hostility but when given crisis that required combined effort (superordinate goals) and hostility declined and cooperation afterwards persisted.
What did the Robbers cave study show?
Demonstrated that differences in background, appearance or history of conflict are necessary for intergroup conflict to develop.
Simply competing for goals that only one can achieve, and in this case not even a necessity.
The study also highlights the importance of common goals in reducing intergroup conflict and improving cooperation.
What is the minimal group paradigm?
Tajfel’s minimal group paradigm is an experimental paradigm in which researchers create groups based on arbitrary and seemingly meaningless criteria and then examine how the members of these minimal groups are inclined to behave toward each other.
Results often show that most people are concerned with maximising the relative gain of in-group compared to the absolute gain.
(Motivational)
What is the social identity theory?
The idea that a person’s self-concept and self-esteem derive not only from personal identity and accomplishments but also from the status and accomplishments of the various groups to which a person belongs.
Therefore people have the tendency to favour their in-group and boost it’s status to feel better about themselves.
People also go to great lengths to announce affiliation to a group that is doing well e.g sports, which is known as basking in reflected glory. On the flip side denigrating out-groups can also boost self-esteem.
(Motivational)
Schemas and stereotypes
Stereotyping is inevitable due to out necessity to categorise things into schemas.
It simplifies the task of processing the world in what would otherwise be overwhelming and confusing.
We are inclined to use stereotypes to save cognitive resources when we’re overloaded, tired or mentally taxed.
Negatives of stereotypes
Stereotypes can have negative effects too as people from working class backgrounds will have less expected and demanded of them which consequently reinforces the stereotype that they achieve less academically.
Similarly stereotypes lacking validity can lead to confirmation through biased observations.
These kinds of mistakes are results of other construal processes that help form schemas.
Dividing a continuous distribution into two groups leads people to see less variability within each group and more between them. This can be useful for categories based on personality, religion or interests but not when based on arbitrary details such as skin colour and weight
Out-group homogeneity effect
Is the tendency for people to assume that within-group similarity is much stronger for out-groups than in-groups.
This may partly be down to lack of interactions with a diverse amount fo people from the out-group but also the nature of interactions is likely to be different, we treat them as a representative of their group which we don’t with in-group members.
Illusory correlation
People sometimes see correlations between events, characteristics, or categories that are not actually related
This can result from paying more attention to unusual or distinctive events, which then becomes over represented in memory.
Minority groups are distinctive to the majority and so pairing with distinctive or negative behaviour can result in a strong association. Positive behaviour from minority groups and negative behaviour from majority groups are therefore less distinct which is problematic.
The media also plays a role as they tend to show the most extreme members of minority groups.
Self-fulfilling prophecies
Self-fulfilling prophecies mean that people act towards members of groups that encourage the very behaviour they expect.
How people respond to stereotype disconfirmation
Depends on emotional investment, whether it’s idiosyncratic or widely shared etc
But people won’t give them up easily.
Sub typing refers to explaining away exceptions to a given stereotype by creating a cub category of the stereotyped group that can be expected to differ from the group as a whole.
This shows a bias in processing of evidence (links to social cognition series) known as the self-serving attributional bias.
We can also differentiate processing of evidence in terms of how concretely or abstractly we encode actions of people.
Automatic vs controlled
There is a distinction between conscious processes such as sub typing and unconscious processes like the illusory correlations and the out-group homogeneity effect.
There is often conflict between people’s knowledge of stereotypes which can be activated unconsciously (out of control) and their beliefs and attitudes towards the group which is conscious.
Research has shown that explicit measures of prejudice are often a good predictor of controlled behaviour and implicit measures of automatic behaviour. Correll et al used a simulation where participants had to shoot if a person was armed or not and found they made the mistake of shooting an unarmed black person more than white.
