Learning goals:

1
Learning goals

• Identify the affective, cognitive, and behavioral
  components of prejudice.
• Distinguish between the various theories that
  explain prejudice.
• Understand modern prejudice.
• Identify means of reducing prejudice.

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Prejudice The Ubiquitous Social Phenomenon

• Ubiquitous- present, appearing, or found
  everywhere.
• Prejudice is ubiquitous it affects all of us --
  majority group members as well as minority.
• Prejudice is dangerous, fostering negative
  consequences from lowered self-esteem to
  genocide.
• Over the past 30 years, blatant discrimination
  has been reduced however, prejudice still exists
  in subtle -- and sometimes blatant -- forms.
• ACTIVITY Entertainment Personality

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Prejudice, Stereotyping and Discrimination Defined

• Prejudice The Affective Component

Prejudice is a hostile or negative attitude
toward a distinguishable group of people, based
solely on their membership in that group.
Prejudiced people direct their prejudice towards
members of the group as a whole, ignoring
distinguishing characteristics. ACTIVITY Subtle
prejudice
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Prejudice, Stereotyping and Discrimination

• Stereotyping The Cognitive Component

A stereotype is a generalization about a group of
people in which identical characteristics are
assigned to virtually all members of the group,
regardless of actual variation among the
members. Stereotypes are not necessarily
emotionally laden and do not necessarily lead to
discrimination. ACTIVITY Gender
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Prejudice, Stereotyping and Discrimination
Defined

• Discrimination The Behavioral Component

Discrimination is an unjustified, negative or
harmful action towards a member of a group,
simply because of his or her membership in that
group.
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What Causes Prejudice?

• The Way We Think Social Cognition

One explanation for prejudice is that it is the
inevitable byproduct of categorization, schemas,
heuristics, and faulty memory processes in
processing information. ACTIVITY Physical
Appearance
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What Causes Prejudice?

• The Way We Think Social Cognition

The first step in prejudice is the creation of
group categorizations. Once we have mental
categories, we group stimuli by similarities,
downplaying differences between members of a
group and exaggerating differences between
members of different groups.
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What Causes Prejudice?

• The Way We Think Social Cognition

These mental categorizations are often referred
to as schemas. Similar to computer files
containing knowledge about people, events or
concepts. Schemas affect what we attend to and
how we interpret things, schemas can influence,
bias, and distort our thoughts, perceptions, and
social behaviours.
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What Causes Prejudice?
The Way We Think Social Cognition

• Schemas provide three functions
• Information about social stimuli
• Influence what social stimuli to pay attention to
• Influence how to respond to social stimuli

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What Causes Prejudice?

• The Way We Think Social Cognition

• There are four different types of schemas related
  to social cognition, and they are divided into
  the following groups
• Person schemas include judgments about traits we
  and others possess, e.g., meet new person, rely
  on person schemas to provide general information
  about that person. Person schemas that contain
  general information about people who have
  membership in groups are stereotypes.

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What Causes Prejudice?

• The Way We Think Social Cognition

2. Role schemas based on the jobs people perform
or the social positions they hold. Often why
asked What do you do? so people can use role
schemas to provide any missing information about
the person and provide mental shortcuts about
what they might say or how may act in social
situations.c
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What Causes Prejudice?

• The Way We Think Social Cognition

3. Event schemas also called scripts, contain
behaviours that we associate with familiar
activities, events or productions. The event
schema for graduations is to celebrate getting
your Year 12 certificate, which is different to
event schema for being in class.
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What Causes Prejudice?

• The Way We Think Social Cognition

4. Self schemas contain personal information
about ourselves, and this information influences,
modifies, and distorts what we perceive and
remember and how we behave. Self schemas tend to
overemphasize our good points, which is why being
criticised in public easily hurts our feelings.
We look for information that supports our schemas
and tend to disregard information that doesnt.
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What Causes Prejudice?

• The Way We Think Social Cognition

Can you think of any disadvantages of
schemas? Can you think of any advantages of
schemas?
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What Causes Prejudice?

• The Way We Think Social Cognition

• Disadvantages
• Restrict, bias or distort what we attend to and
  remember, thus causing us to overlook important
  information.
• Highly resistant to change because select and
  attend to information that supports our schemas
  and deny any information that is inconsistent
  with them.

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What Causes Prejudice?

• The Way We Think Social Cognition

• Advantages
• Contains information to help you analyse and
  respond appropriately in a particular social
  situation.
• Provide guidelines for how to behave in various
  social events (events schemas) and help us
  explain the social behaviour of others (role
  schemas).

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What Causes Prejudice?

• The Way We Think Social Cognition

Schemas/social categorisation An in-group is a
group with which a person identifies and feels
he/she is a member of an out-group is a group
with which a person does not identify. In-group
bias is the especially positive feelings and
special treatment we reserve for people we have
defined as part of our in-group.
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What Causes Prejudice?

• The Way We Think Social Cognition

Tajfel postulates that the underlying motive
behind in-group bias is self-esteem maintenance
and enhancement. Another consequence of social
categorization is the outgroup homogeneity bias,
the perception that those in the out-group are
more similar to each other than they really are.
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What Causes Prejudice?

• The Way We Think Social Cognition

There are two reasons why it is almost impossible
to get a person holding a deep-seated prejudice
to change his or her mind. First, it is primarily
the emotional aspect of attitudes that makes a
prejudiced person hard to argue with Second,
people with strong prejudices have a firmly
established schema for the target group(s).
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What Causes Prejudice?

• The Way We Think Social Cognition

Devine developed a theory about how stereotypical
and prejudiced beliefs affect information
processing. Her theory is based on the
distinction between automatic and controlled
information processing. According to her theory,
when we process information about another, first
the stereotypes that we know about are
automatically triggered, then in the controlled
process we decide whether or not to accept the
stereotype.
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What Causes Prejudice?

• The Way We Think Social Cognition

An illusory correlation is the tendency to see
relationships, or correlations, between events
that are actually unrelated. Illusory
correlations are most likely to occur when the
events or people are distinctive or conspicuous
minority group members are so by definition.
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What Causes Prejudice?

• The Way We Think Social Cognition

Webber and Crocker proposed three possible models
of how stereotypes might change when exposed to
disconfirming information The bookkeeping model
is that each piece of information inconsistent
with a stereotype will lead to its
modification The conversion model is that a
strongly inconsistent piece of information will
lead to radical change in the stereotype The
subtyping model is that information inconsistent
with a stereotype will lead to the creation of a
new substereotype
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What Causes Prejudice?

• The Way We Assign Meaning Attributional Biases

The Bell Curve ignited the latest chapter in a
200-year old debate on whether or not there are
racial differences in intelligence. The question
is whether the reason for differences is
dispositional or situational. Steele and Aronson
have shown that at least one major contributing
factor is situational. They define stereotype
threat as the apprehension experienced by members
of a minority group that they might behave in a
manner that confirms an existing cultural
stereotype.
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What Causes Prejudice?

• The Way We Assign Meaning Attributional Biases

When an out-group member behaves in a way that
disconfirms our stereotypes, we are likely to
make a situational attribution for his or her
performance, leaving the stereotype
intact. Blaming the victim is the tendency to
blame individuals for their victimization
ironically, it is motivated by a desire to see
the world as a fair and just place where people
get what they deserve.
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What Causes Prejudice?

• The Way We Assign Meaning Attributional Biases

The self-fulfilling prophecy is the case whereby
people (a) have an expectation about what another
person is like, which (b) influences how they act
toward that person, which (c) causes that person
to behave in a way consistent with peoples
original expectations.
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What Causes Prejudice?

• The Way We Allocate Resources Realistic Conflict
  Theory

Realistic Conflict Theory is the theory that
limited resources lead to conflict between
groups, and result in increased prejudice and
discrimination. Scapegoating, the tendency for
individuals, when frustrated or unhappy, to
displace aggression onto groups that are
disliked, visible, and relatively powerless, may
occur when people are frustrated but there is no
clear target to blame the frustration on.
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What Causes Prejudice?

• The Way We Conform Normative Rules

Through both explicit and implicit socialization,
we are trained in the norms of our culture.
Stereotypes and prejudiced attitudes are part of
this normative package. Institutionalized racism
refers to the idea that racist attitudes are help
by the vast majority of us because we live in a
society where stereotypes and discrimination are
the norm. Institutionalized sexism is the idea
that sexist attitudes are held by the vast
majority of us for the same reason.
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What Causes Prejudice?

• The Way We Conform Normative Rules

In societies in which racism and sexism are
institutionalized, normative conformity leads to
the tendency to go along with the group in order
to fulfill their expectations and gain
acceptance. Modern racism or symbolic racism is
prejudice revealed in subtle, indirect ways
because people have learned to hide prejudiced
attitudes in order to avoid being labeled as
racist.
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Theories of Prejudice

• Social Learning
• Through socialization, children learn social
  norms
• Motivational
• Psychodynamic approaches focus on displaced
  aggression
• Intergroup competition theories emphasize
  relative deprivation, group position, and social
  dominance hierarchies
• Cognitive
• Prejudice develops through reliance on automatic,
  category-based processing
• Takes into account accessibility, category
  labels, the typicality effect, and the assumed
  similarity effect
• Social Identity Theory
• Relies on the ingroup favoritism effect

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How Can Prejudice Be Reduced?

• The Contact Hypothesis

The contact hypothesis is the idea that merely
bringing members of different groups into contact
with each other will erode prejudice.
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How Can Prejudice Be Reduced?

• When Contact Reduces Prejudice Six Conditions

Allport suggested that six conditions are
necessary for intergroup contact to reduce
prejudice 1. Mutual interdependence 2. A
common goal 3. Equal status of group members 4.
Having informal interpersonal contact 5. Having
multiple contacts with several members of the
outgroup 6. When social norms are in place that
promote equality
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How Can Prejudice Be Reduced?

• Cooperation and Interdependence The Jigsaw
  Classroom

A jigsaw classroom is a classroom setting
designed to reduce prejudice and raise the
self-esteem of children by placing them in small
desegregated groups and making each child
dependent on the other children in his or her
group to learn the course material and do well in
the class. ACTIVITY Social Media
Perpetuate/Combat