week 5 Flashcards
Prejudice based upon
Race
Ethnicity
Gender
Sexuality
Nationality
Age
Ability
Class
Prejudice
antipathy, or a derogatory social attitude, towards particular social groups or their members, combined with the feeling and expression of negative affect.
An attitude or orientation that devalues a group
Social discrimination
explicit display of negative or disadvantaging behaviour towards particular social groups or their members.
Origins
Initial focus on racial differences in the U.S.
Between the 20s and 30s, there is a shift from race differences to race prejudice:
Focus on the discriminators.
Concern with prejudice reduction.
Prejudice is one of the problems of our times for which everyone has a theory, but no one has an answer (Adorno et al., 1950).
Nature of prejudice
Ethnic prejudice is an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization. It may be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group as a whole, or toward an individual because he is a member of that group.’
(Allport, 1954; p. 9).
Social psychological explanations
Individualistic: the authoritarian personality theory- social dominance orientation
Intergroup relation approach: realistic conflict theory-social identity theory
Prejudiced personality
People with negative attitudes toward one outgroup also tend to have negative attitudes toward other groups
Authoritarian personality theory
Highly influenced by the psychodynamic theory.
Human behaviour – a dynamic interplay of conscious and unconscious motivations.
Prejudice as a manifestation of a particular pathological personality.
Authoritarian parenting:
Extremely strict parents.
Children concerned with obedience to parents.
Conformity to social norms.
Conflicting feelings of admiration and aggression towards the parents.
Resolution
Negative feelings are displaced onto weaker groups (‘scapegoats’).
Scapegoating – Tendency to blame someone else for one’s own problems(Baumeister & Vohs, 2007).
Parents (authority figures) loved and respected.
Personality syndrome – Reflected in a person’s social attitudes, rigid regard for social conventions, simplistic thinking, etc.
Measuring the authoritarian personality
The California F-scale(Adorno et al., 1947) – personality test.
People’s susceptibility to fascist ideas:
Authoritarian submission (high degree of submissiveness to authority).
Conventionalism (desire to adhere to ingroup norms).
Authoritarian aggression (intolerance of those who violate conventional values).
Several limitations, including:
Use of unrepresentative samples.
Interviewer bias in the clinic interviews.
Right-wing authoritarianism
Research on F-scale declined in the 60s and 70s.
Reviewed in the 80s, with the Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale.
The social environment reinforces obedience, conventionalism, and aggression.
Personality variable – still widely used to predict social attitudes (e.g., support for capital punishment) and prejudice towards social groups.
Renewed interest in individual differences in prejudice
Social Dominance Theory: All human societies tend to be structured as systems of group-based hierarchies (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999).
Universal tendency (in stable societies) to be organized hierarchically (one social group holds disproportionate power over the others).
Social dominance orientation (Pratto et al., 1994)
SDO scale measure acceptance of and desire for group based social hierarchy.
People with higher SDO tend to be more sexist, racist and prejudiced towards immigrants.
14 items, on a very negative (1) to very positive (7) scale:
‘Some people are just more worthy than others’.
‘This country would be better off if we cared less about how equal all people were’.
Legitimizing myths
Social order is maintained by discrimination
This is supported by legitimizing myths – those values, beliefs, or cultural ideologies that provide moral and intellectual justification for group inequality and oppression
Measuring explicit/implicit prejudice
explicit: Collection of attitudes that the holder is aware of having and is able to express consciously.
Assessed via a self-report measure such as a survey.
implicit: Collection of attitudes that the holder is not consciously aware of having it.
Implicit Association Test.
Limitations of individualistic approaches
Methodological individualism – subjective individual motivation to explain a social phenomena.
Assume that individuals are prejudiced (e.g., a personality trait), failing to consider the role of social contexts.
Ignores the intergroup context in which the prejudice is embedded.
Intergroup context
Intergroup relations refer to relations between two or more groups and their respective members. Whenever individuals belonging to one group interact, collectively or individually, with another group or its members in terms of their group identifications, we have an instance of intergroup behaviour. (Sherif, 1962; p.5).
Prejudice is directed at groups
The particular relationship between social groups influences the attitudes and behaviour of its members (Sherif, 1966).
Ethnocentrism – The tendency to judge ingroup attributes as superior to those of the outgroup and, more generally, to judge outgroups from an ingroup perspective
Realistic Conflict Theory
Supported by The Robbers Cave Experiment.
Intergroup conflict – competition over limited resources.
Bringing hostile groups together is not enough to reduce intergroup prejudice.
Superordinate goals – which can only be achieved by both groups acting together.
Minimal Group Paradigm
The mere categorization in terms of an ingroup and an outgroup created instances of discrimination between the members of the different groups (Tajfel, Flament, Billig, & Bundy, 1971).
MGP – Minimal conditions that are required for discrimination to occur between groups.
Social Identity Theory
SIT ‘starts’ from the realistic intergroup conflict theory.
Attempts to explain intergroup relations (attitudes and behaviours) as a function of group-based self-definitions.
SI is the part of our self-concept corresponding to group memberships and the value and emotional significance of those memberships (Spears & Tausch, 2015).
How does SIT explain prejudice?
Social categorization: people categorize themselves as belonging to certain social groups.
Social identification: identification with those categories.
Social comparison: through social comparison, people evaluate their salient in-group relative to relevant out-groups.
Positive distinctiveness: people seek to maintain positive social identities. In-group bias.
Perceived Identity Threat
Perceived threats distinctiveness may lead to increased efforts at differentiation.
The perception of threat is what is important.
Realistic threats: to the ingroup’s power, resources, or well-being.
Symbolic threats: to the ingroup’s values, identity, or way of life. (Stephan, Ybarra, & Rios, 2015)
