PREJUDICE

DISLIKING OTHERS
WHAT IS THE NATURE AND POWER OF
PREJUDICE?
Prejudice is distinct from stereotyping and discrimination. Social psychologists explore these
distinctions and the different forms that prejudice assumes today.

Prejudice - A preconceived negative judgment of a group and its individual members.

- involves a negative evaluation of some group.

Prejudice is an attitude. As we saw in Chapter 4, an attitude is a distinct combination of feelings,

inclinations to act, and beliefs. It can be easily remembered as the ABCs of attitudes: affect
(feelings), behavior tendency (inclination to act), and cognition (beliefs). A prejudiced person may
dislike those different from self and behave in a discriminatory manner, believing them ignorant and
dangerous.
WHAT IS THE NATURE AND POWER OF
PREJUDICE?
Stereotype - A belief about the personal attributes of a group of people. Stereotypes are
sometimes overgeneralized, inaccurate, and resistant to new information (and sometimes
accurate).

To stereotype is to generalize. To simplify the world, we generalize. For example:

- During the 1980s, women who assumed the title of Ms. were seen as more assertive and
ambitious than those who called themselves Miss or Mrs. (Dion, 1987; Dion & Cota, 1991;
Dion & Schuller, 1991). After Ms. became the standard female title, the stereotype shifted. Its
married women who keep their own surnames that are seen as assertive and ambitious
(Crawford & others, 1998; Etaugh & others, 1999).

The 10 percent problem with stereotypes arises when they are overgeneralize or just plain wrong.
WHAT IS THE NATURE AND POWER OF
PREJUDICE?

Discrimination - Unjustified negative behavior toward a group or its members.

Discriminatory behavior often has its source in prejudicial attitudes

WHAT IS THE NATURE AND POWER OF
PREJUDICE?
Attitudes and behavior are often loosely linked. Prejudiced attitudes need not breed hostile acts,
nor does all oppression spring from prejudice. Racism and sexism are institutional practices that
discriminate, even when there is no prejudicial intent.

Racism - (1) An individuals prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behavior toward people of a
given race, or (2) institutional practices (even if not motivated by prejudice) that subordinate
people of a given race.

Sexism - (1) An individuals prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behavior toward people of a
given sex, or (2) institutional practices (even if not motivated by prejudice) that subordinate people
of a given sex.
IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT PREJUDICE

We can have different explicit (conscious) and implicit (automatic) attitudes toward the same
person or event.

For example, people may retain from childhood a habitual, automatic fear or dislike of people
for whom they now express respect and admiration.

Although explicit attitudes may change dramatically with education, implicit attitudes may
linger, changing only as we form new habits through practice.
 RACIAL PREJUCIDE
Is racial prejudice disappearing?
Not much. Although much of the blatant prejudice that existed before isnt commonplace as today, prejudice may be subtle
or automatic.

Subtle prejudice surface when they can hide behind the screen of some other motive. For example;
1. To test for possible labor market discrimination, M.I.T. researchers sent 5,000 rsums out in response to 1,300 varied
employment ads (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2003). Applicants who were randomly assigned White names (Emily, Greg)
received one callback for every 10 rsums sent. Those given Black names (Lakisha, Jamal) received one callback for every 15
rsums sent.
2. In one analysis of traffic stops, African Americans and Latinos were four times more likely than Whites to be searched, twice
as likely to be arrested, and three times more likely to be handcuffed and to have excessive force used against them
(Lichtblau, 2005).
3. Kent Harber (1998) gave White students at Stanford University a poorly written essay to evaluate. When the students thought
the writer was Black, they rated it higher than when they were led to think the author was White, and they rarely offered
harsh criticisms. The evaluators, perhaps wanting to avoid the appearance of bias, patronized the Black essayists with lower
standards. Such inflated praise and insufficient criticism may hinder minority student achievement, Harber noted.
 GENDER PREJUCIDE
Is gender prejudice disappearing?
Not much. Although much of the blatant prejudice that existed before isnt commonplace as today, prejudice may
be subtle or automatic.

Gender stereotypes peoples beliefs about how women and men do behave would often be instrumental in
creating prejudice. For example;
1. Strong gender stereotypes exist, and, as often happens, members of the stereotyped group accept the stereotypes. In one
survey, Mary Jackman and Mary Senter (1981) found that gender stereotypes were much stronger than racial stereotypes. For
example, only 22 percent of men thought the two sexes equally emotional. Of the remaining 78 percent, those who believed
females were more emotional outnumbered those who thought males were more emotional by 15 to 1. And what did the
women believe? To within1 percentage point, their responses were identical.
2. Sexism can be benevolent (Women have a superior moral sensibility) or hostile (Once a man commits, she puts him on a
tight leash).
3. Blatant gender discrimination is dying but subtle bias lives. For example, In the United States, in 1941, 38 percent of expectant
parents said they preferred a boy if they could have only one child; 24 percent preferred a girl; and 23 percent said they had no
preference. In 2011, the answers were virtually unchanged, with 40 percent still preferring a boy
SOCIAL SOURCES OF PREJUDICE

1. Social inequalities
- The social situation breeds and maintains prejudice in several ways. A group that enjoys social and
economic superiority will often use prejudicial beliefs to justify its privileged position.
- Social dominance orientation - A motivation to have ones group dominate other social groups.
- For example, people high in social dominance orientation often support policies that maintain
hierarchies, such as tax cuts for the well-off. They prefer professions, such as politics and business, that
increase their status and maintain hierarchies. They avoid jobs, such as social work, that, by virtue of
their aid to disadvantaged groups, undermine hierarchies. And they express more negative attitudes
toward minority persons who exhibit strong racial identities
SOCIAL SOURCES OF PREJUDICE

2. Socialization
- Children are also brought up in ways that foster or reduce prejudice. The family, religious
communities, and the broader society can sustain or reduce prejudices.
- It includes authoritarian personality (a personality that is disposed to favor obedience to authority
and intolerance of outgroups and those lower in status), ethnocentrism (believing in the superiority
of ones own ethnic and cultural group, and having a corresponding disdain for all other groups),
religion, and conformity.
SOCIAL SOURCES OF PREJUDICE

3. Institutional Support
- Social institutions (schools, government, media) may bolster prejudice through overt policies such as
segregation, or by passively reinforcing the status quo. Schools are one of the institutions most
prone to reinforce dominant cultural attitudes. For example, an analysis of stories in 134 childrens
readers written before 1970 found that male characters outnumbered female characters three to
one
MOTIVATIONAL SOURCES OF PREJUDICE

Various kinds of motivations underlie the hostilities of prejudice. Motivations can also lead people to avoid
prejudice.

Peoples motivations affect prejudice. Frustration breeds hostility, which people sometimes vent on scapegoats
and sometimes express more directly against competing groups.

Realistic group conflict theory - The theory that prejudice arises from competition between groups for scarce
resources.

For example, In South Africa, dozens of African immigrants were killed by mobs and 35,000 people were hounded
from squatter camps by poor South Africans who resented the economic competition. These foreigners have no
IDs, no papers, and yet they get the jobs, said one unemployed South African, noting that They are willing to
work for 15 rand [about $2] a day (Bearak, 2010). When interests clash, prejudice may be the result.
MOTIVATIONAL SOURCES OF PREJUDICE

Various kinds of motivations underlie the hostilities of prejudice. Motivations can also lead people to avoid
prejudice.

People also are motivated to view themselves and their groups as superior to other groups. Even trivial group
memberships lead people to favor their group over others. A threat to self-image heightens such ingroup
favoritism, as does the need to belong.

Social identity - The we aspect of our self-concept; the part of our answer to Who am I? that comes from
our group memberships.

For example, Lea identifies herself as a woman, an Visaya, a Catholic, a Pamantasan ng Cabuyao student, a De
Los Reyes family member. We carry such social identities like playing cards, playing them when appropriate.
MOTIVATIONAL SOURCES OF PREJUDICE

Various kinds of motivations underlie the hostilities of prejudice. Motivations can also lead people to
avoid prejudice.

People also are motivated to view themselves and their groups as superior to other groups. Even trivial
group memberships lead people to favor their group over others. A threat to self-image heightens such
ingroup favoritism, as does the need to belong.

Working with the late British social psychologist Henri Tajfel, a Polish native who lost family and friends
in the Holocaust and then devoted much of his career to studying ethnic hatred, Turner (19472011)
proposed social identity theory. Turner and Tajfel observed the following:
MOTIVATIONAL SOURCES OF PREJUDICE
Various kinds of motivations underlie the hostilities of prejudice. Motivations can also lead people to
avoid prejudice.
Turner and Tajfel(continued)
We categorize: We find it useful to put people, ourselves included, into categories. To label someone as
a Hindu, a Scot, or a bus driver is a shorthand way of saying some other things about the person.
We identify: We associate ourselves with certain groups (our ingroups ) and gain self-esteem by doing
so.
We compare: We contrast our groups with other groups ( outgroups ), with a favorable bias toward our
own group.
We humans naturally divide others into those inside and those outside our group. We also evaluate
ourselves partly by our group memberships. Having a sense of we-ness strengthens our self-concepts. It
feels good. We seek not only respect for ourselves but also pride in our groups (Smith & Tyler, 1997).
Moreover, seeing our groups as superior helps us feel even better. Its as if we all think, I am an X [name
your group]. X is good. Therefore, I am good.
MOTIVATIONAL SOURCES OF PREJUDICE

Various kinds of motivations underlie the hostilities of prejudice. Motivations can also lead people to
avoid prejudice.

People also are motivated to view themselves and their groups as superior to other groups. Even trivial
group memberships lead people to favor their group over others. A threat to self-image heightens such
ingroup favoritism, as does the need to belong.

Ingroup - Usa group of people who share a sense of belonging, a feeling of common identity.

Outgroup - Thema group that people perceive as distinctively different from or apart from their
ingroup.
 MOTIVATIONAL SOURCES OF PREJUDICE

The group definition of who you areyour

gender, race, religion, marital status,
academic majorimplies a definition of who
you are not. The circle that includes us (the
ingroup) excludes them (the outgroup).
This experience of being formed into groups
may promote ingroup bias - the tendency to
favor ones own group.
 MOTIVATIONAL SOURCES OF PREJUDICE
Ingroup bias expresses and supports a positive self concept. For example, College students whose team has
just been victorious frequently report, We won. After their teams defeat, students are more likely to say,
They lost. Basking in the reflected glory of a successful ingroup is strongest among those who have just
experienced an ego blow, such as learning they did poorly on a creativity test

Ingroup bias feeds favoritism. We are so group conscious that, given any excuse to think of ourselves as a group,
we will do soand we will then exhibit ingroup bias. Even forming conspicuous groups on no logical basisfor
instance, merely by composing groups X and Y with the flip of a coinwill produce some ingroup bias.

Yet ingroup bias results at least as much from perceiving that ones own group is good (Brewer, 2007) as from a
sense that other groups are bad (Rosenbaum & Holtz, 1985). Even when there is no them (imagine yourself
bonding with a handful of fellow survivors on a deserted island), one can come to love us (Gaertner & others,
2006). So it seems that positive feelings for our own groups need not be mirrored by equally strong negative
feelings for outgroups.
 MOTIVATIONAL SOURCES OF PREJUDICE
Status is relative: To perceive ourselves as having status, we need people below us. Thus, one psychological
benefit of prejudice, or of any status system, is a feeling of superiority. For example, In one study, members of
lower-status sororities were more disparaging of competing sororities than were members of higherstatus
sororities.

People regard themselves when their self esteem is threatened. They would often exhibit terror
management - peoples self-protective emotional and cognitive responses (including adhering more strongly to
their cultural worldviews and prejudices) when confronted with reminders of their mortality. For example, in
Iran, reminders of death increased college students support for suicide attacks against the United States.

Despising outgroups can also serve to strengthen the ingroup. As we will explore further in Chapter 13, the
perception of a common enemy unites a group. School spirit is seldom so strong as when the game is with the
archrival. The sense of comradeship among workers is often highest when they all feel a common antagonism
toward management.
 COGNITIVE SOURCES OF PREJUDICE
1. Categorization people tend to categorize people into groups through spontaneous categorization and
perceived similarities and differences.

We spontaneously categorize people by race. We label people of widely varying ancestry as simply Filipino or
half Filipino, as if such categories were black and white. When individuals view different people making
statements, they often f.orget who said what but remember the race of the person who made each statement.

People would easily point out groups by looking at similarities and differences. This can create an outgroup
homogeneity effect - Perception of outgroup members as more similar to one another than are ingroup
members. Thus they are alike; we are diverse. This could also lead to what we call as own race bias - The
tendency for people to more accurately recognize faces of their own race. (Also called the cross-race effect or
other-race effect.)
 COGNITIVE SOURCES OF PREJUDICE

2. Distinctiveness - Other ways we perceive our worlds also breed stereotypes. Distinctive people and vivid or
extreme occurrences often capture attention and distort judgments.
 COGNITIVE SOURCES OF PREJUDICE
3. Attribution - Because gender-role constraints were hard to see, we attributed mens and womens behavior solely to their
presumed innate dispositions. The more people assume that human traits are fixed dispositions, the stronger are their
stereotypes and the greater their acceptance of racial inequities. This would often lead to group-serving bias - explaining
away outgroup members positive behaviors; also attributing negative behaviors to their dispositions (while excusing such
behavior by ones own group).

Also, people are prone to thinking of just-world phenomenon - the tendency of people to believe that the world is just and
that people therefore get what they deserve and deserve what they get. For example, Linda Carli and her colleagues (1989,
1999) report that the just-world phenomenon colors our impressions of rape victims. Carli had people read detailed
descriptions of interactions between a man and a woman. In one scenario, a woman and her boss meet for dinner, go to his
home, and each have a glass of wine. Some read this scenario with a happy ending: Then he led me to the couch. He held
my hand and asked me to marry him. In hindsight, people find the ending unsurprising and admire the mans and womans
character traits. Others read the same scenario with a terrible ending: But then he became very rough and pushed me
onto the couch. He held me down on the couch and raped me. Given this ending, people see the rape as inevitable and
blame the woman for provocative behavior that seems faultless in the first scenario.
CONSEQUENCES OF PREJUDICE

1. Self-perpetuating prejudgements - Prejudice involves preconceived judgments.

Prejudgments are inevitable: None of us is a dispassionate bookkeeper of social
happenings, tallying evidence for and against our biases. It guides our attention and our
memories.
subtyping - accommodating individuals who deviate from ones stereotype by thinking of them
as exceptions to the rule.

subgrouping - accommodating individuals who deviate from ones stereotype by forming a new
stereotype about this subset of the group.
CONSEQUENCES OF PREJUDICE

2. Self-fulfilling prophecy - Once formed, stereotypes tend to perpetuate themselves and resist change.
They also create their own realities through self-fulfilling prophecies.

3. Stereotype threat - a disruptive concern, when facing a negative stereotype, that one will be evaluated
based on a negative stereotype. Unlike self-fulfilling prophecies that hammer ones reputation into ones
self-concept, stereotype threat situations have immediate effects. For example, Jeff Stone and his
colleagues (1999) report that stereotype threat affects athletic performance, too. Blacks did worse than
usual when a golf task was framed as a test of sports intelligence, and Whites did worse when it was a
test of natural athletic ability. When people are reminded of a negative stereotype about themselves
White men cant jump or Black men cant thinkit can adversely affect performance, Stone (2000)
surmised.
CONSEQUENCES OF PREJUDICE

How does stereotype threat undermine performance? It does so in three ways;

1. Stress. fMRI brain scans suggest that the stress of stereotype threat impairs brain activity associated
with mathematical processing and increases activity in areas associated with emotion processing (Derks
& others, 2008; Krendl & others, 2008; Wraga & others, 2007).
2. Self-monitoring. Worrying about making mistakes disrupts focused attention (Keller & Dauenheimer,
2003; Seibt & Forster, 2004). In interracial interactions, Blacks and Latinos (concerned with stereotypes
of their intelligence) seek respect and to be seen as competent, whereas Whites (concerned with their
image as racist) seek to be liked and seen as moral (Bergsieker & others, 2010).
3. Suppressing unwanted thoughts and emotions. The effort required to regulate ones thinking takes
energy and disrupts working memory (Bonnot & Croizet, 2007).
CONSEQUENCES OF PREJUDICE

If stereotype threats can disrupt performance, could positive stereotypes enhance it? Margaret Shih,
Todd Pittinsky, and Nalini Ambady (1999) confirmed that possibility. When Asian American females
were asked biographical questions that reminded them of their gender identity before taking a math
test, their performance plunged (compared with a control group). When similarly reminded of their
Asian identity, their performance rose. Negative stereotypes disrupt performance, and positive
stereotypes, it seems, facilitate performance
DO STEREOTYPES BIAS OUR JUDGEMENTS
OF INDIVIDUALS?

Yes, but not always.

1. Our stereotypes mostly reflect reality. People differand can perceive and appreciate those
differences.
2. People often evaluate individuals more positively than the groups they compose. For example, Anne
Locksley, Eugene Borgida, and Nancy Brekke found that after someone knows a person, stereotypes
may have minimal, if any, impact on judgments about that person.
3. Stereotypes, especially when strong, can predispose how we perceive people and interpret events.