Topic Nine

Question 1

Topic One - prejudice and discrimination

What is prejudice

What is dehumanisation

Three kinds of behaviour that conceal prejudice:

Answer 1

Prejudice - an unfavourable and sometimes hostile attitude towards a social group and its members

Dehumanisation - stripping people of their dignity and humanity.

Three behaviours that conceal prejudice:

1. Reluctance to help:
   - This is a failure to help other groups improve their position in society.
2. Tokenism:
   - This refers to a relatively small or trivial positive act, a token, towards members of a minority group. allows one to appear unprejudiced, but may not be sincere
3. Reverse discrimination:
   - People with residual prejudiced attitudes may sometimes go out of their way to favour members of a group against which they are prejudiced more than members of other groups.

Question 2

Topic One continued

Racism

• new racism
• detecting racism

Sexism

• four female subtypes
• two male subtypes

What is social role theory

What is sexual selection theory

Answer 2

New racism: also known as aversive racism and modern racism
- New racism reflects how people experience a conflict between deep-seated emotional antipathy towards racial out-groups and values that stress equality

Detecting racism:

• language - discourse analysis used to uncover
• expressions and acts

Four female subtypes:

• Housewife
• Sexy woman
• Career woman
• Feminist/Athlete/Lesbian

Two Male subtypes:

• Businessman
• Macho Man

Social role theory = Traditionally, men and women have occupied different sex roles in

Sexual selection theory = biological imperative behind role assignment.

Question 3

Topic One continued

Types of social stigma (4)

Failure and disadvantage
- how victims may develop sense of failure

What is Attributional ambiguity, and its effects

Define self-fulfilling prophecy

Define Apartheid

Define segregation

Answer 3

Social stigmas:

• Visible - such as race, gender etc.
• Concealable - homosexuality, illnesses etc.
• Controllable - people believe are chosen rather than assigned - obesity, smoking etc.
• Uncontrollable - race, gender, illnesses etc.

Failure and disadvantage:

• Victims of prejudice belong to groups that are denied access to resources that society make available for people to thrive and succeed
• Sense of failure comes from the inability to achieve society’s high standards

Attributional ambiguity = Stigmatised individuals are very sensitive to the causes of others’ treatment of them.
- this can lead to suspicion and mistrust

Self fulfilling prophecy = expectations and assumptions about a person that influence our interaction with that person and eventually change their behaviour in line with our expectations.

Apartheid = target groups are isolated from rest of community, a type of mass discrimination

Segregation = seperation

Question 4

Topic Two - Explanations of Prejudice:

What is an authoritarian personality?

What is authoritarian personality theory?

Define ethnocentrisms

What is social dominance theory?

What is social justification theory?

Answer 4

Authoritarian personality = personality syndrome originating in childhood that predisposes individuals to be prejudiced.

• The historical context for the concept of the authoritarian personality theory was the role of fascism, an extreme form of right­wing ideology
• The theory proposed that autocratic and punitive child­rearing practices were responsible for the emergence in adulthood of various clusters of beliefs.

Ethnocentrisms - evaluative preference for all aspects of our own group relative to other groups

Social dominance theory:
= an approach in which prejudice, exploitation and oppression are attributed to an ideology that legitimises a hierarchy of social groups.
- A society will develop a set of attitudes and values that create an ideology that entrenches social dominance. This enhances hierarchical social relations and maintains prejudice.

Social justification theory:
= theory that attributes social status to people’s adherence to an ideology that justifies and protects the status quo
- fundamental argument is that people vary along a dimension that measures the extent to which they justify the political status quo, and the social and economic policies that go with this.
- Conservatives justify and protect the existing social system - the status quo - even if this means upholding an unfavourable position for one’s own group

Question 5

Define intergroup behaviour

What is frustration-aggression hypothesis theory?

What is relative deprivation?

What is Davies’ J-curve hypothesis?

Define fraternalistic relative deprivation

Three concepts that are fundamental to collective protest

Answer 5

Intergroup behaviour = behaviour among individuals that is regulated by those individual’s awareness of and identification with different social groups

Frustration-aggression hypothesis = a theory that all frustration leads to aggression, and all aggression comes from frustration.
- Used to explain prejudice and intergroup aggression

Relative deprivation is a perceived gap between expectations and achievements.

Davies’ J-curve hypothesis is a model to represent the way that people construct their future expectations from past and current attainments, and that under certain circumstances attainments may suddenly fall short of rising expectations.

Fraternalistic relative deprivation = Sense that our group has less than it is entitled to, relative to its aspirations or to other groups.

Concepts fundamental to collective protest:

1. Injustice - indignation about how authorities are handling a societal problem, e.g. social inequality, or a violation of human rights
2. Efficacy - a conviction that the situation can be changed by collective action at a reasonable cost.
3. Identity - defined by group membership

Question 6

Topic Three: intergroup relations

Rundown of Sheriff’s study

What happens when groups compete for scarce resources?

What is realistic conflict theory?

Answer 6

Sheriff’s study:

• separated camp groups
• The groups made little reference to each other apart from some embryonic ethnocentrism.
• Next, the groups met in organised intergroup contests. They competed fiercely and became antagonistic, even beyond the contests. Ethnocentrism was amplified along with intergroup aggression and ingroup solidarity

When groups compete for scarce resources, intergroup relations, become marked by conflict, and ethnocentrism arises.

Realistic conflict theory - Sherif’s theory of intergroup conflict that explains intergroup behaviour in terms of the nature of goal relations between group

• As with individuals, the nature of the goal relations determines the nature of intergroup relations.
• Individuals who share goals that require interdependence to be achieved tend to cooperate and form a group.

Question 7

Topic Four - Intergroup Relations:

What is the minimal group paradigm?

What is meant by depersonalisation?

What functions does an individual’s social identity hold? (2)

What is the difference between social mobility belief system and social change belief system?

Answer 7

minimal group paradigm: research suggested that the mere act of being categorised into a group was enough to produce ethnocentrism and competitive intergroup behaviour

Depersonalisation = The perception and treatment of self and others not as unique individual persons but as prototypical embodiments of a social group.

Functions of social identity:

1. Self-enhancement: groups stand in status and prestige relations to one another, and we recognise this.
2. Subjective uncertainty reduction: in life, we want to know who we are. We also want to know how to relate to and what to expect from others, how to make life predictable and to plan effective action.

Social mobility belief system = Belief that intergroup boundaries are permeable. Thus, it is possible for someone to pass from a lower-status into a higher-status group to improve social identity.

Social change - Belief that intergroup boundaries are impermeable. Therefore, a lower-status individual can improve social identity only by challenging the legitimacy of the higher-status group’s position.

Question 8

Topic Five - collective behaviour

What is collective behaviour?

What is LeBon’s theory of collective behaviour?

Freud’s theory

What is deindividuation?

What is the emergent norm theory?

What important feature of crowd behaviour is often ignored?

Answer 8

Collective behaviour usually refers to large numbers of people who are in the same place at the same time, behaving in a uniform manner that is volatile, highly emotional and in violation of social norms

LeBon’s theory:

• Believed that by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd he is a barbarian - that is, a creature acting by instinct.
• crowds produce primitive behaviour because they are anonymous

Freud argued that the crowd unlocks the unconscious.
- In crowds, the super­ego is supplanted by the leader of the crowd, who now acts as the hypnotist controlling unconscious and uncivilised id impulses.

Deindividuation - Process whereby people lose their sense of socialised individual identity and engage in socialised, often antisocial behaviours.

Emergent norm theory:

• Rather than treating collective behaviour as pathological or instinctual behaviour, it focuses on collective action as norm governed behaviour
• what is distinct about the crowd is that it has no formal organisation or tradition of established norms to regulate behaviour, so the problem of explaining crowd behaviour is to explain how a norm emerges from within the crowd

Ignored feature of crowd behaviour:

• An important aspect of crowd behaviour that is usually ignored is that it is actually an intergroup phenomenon
• Many crowd events involve a direct collective confrontation between for example police and rioters - even when it isn’t physical, there is a symbolic confrontation.

Question 9

Topic Six: Improving intergroup relations

Contact Hypothesis?

What is Gaertner’s common in group identity model?

What is assimilation?

What is multiculturalism?

Effect of subordinate goals on intergroup relations

Types of negotiation strategies (3)

Answer 9

Contact hypothesis = The view that bringing members of opposing social groups together will improve intergroup relations and reduce prejudice and discrimination.

Gaertner’s common in group identity model suggests that if members of opposing groups can be encouraged to be more inclusive, by re-categorising themselves as members of the same group, intergroup attitudes will, by definition, not only improve but actually disappear.

Assimilation = Ethnic minorities are dissolved, assimilated and stripped of their cultural heritage and cease to exist.

Multiculturalism = society in which intergroup relations between the constituent groups are harmonious.

Subordinate goals:
- Effective, however, Subordinate goals do not reduce intergroup conflict if the groups fail to achieve the goal. Intergroup relations can worsen when groups fail to achieve a common goal: failure can be attributed, rightly or wrongly, to the other group

Types of negotiations:

1. Bargaining:
   - Process of intergroup conflict resolution where representatives reach agreement through direct negotiation
   - Even if a specific problem is solved, broader intergroup issues may well remain unchanged
2. Mediation:
   - Process of intergroup conflict resolution where a neutral third party intervenes in the negotiation process to facilitate a settlement
   - Can be very effective
3. Arbitration:
   - Process of intergroup conflict resolution in which a neutral third party is invited to impose a mutually binding settlement
   - last resort