Prejudice and Discrimination

I. Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination

A. Stereotype: a generalized belief about a group of people inwhich identical characteristics are assigned to virtually allmembers of the group, regardless of actual variation among themembers.

B. Prejudice: an attitude or feeling, favorable or unfavorable,toward a person or group of people, prior to, or not based on,actual experience.

C. Discrimination: an unjustified negative or harmful behaviortoward a member or members of a group simply because oftheir membership in that group.

D. Reverse Discrimination: when, in an effort to act on behalfof people who have been discriminated against in the past,people end up discriminating against another group.

II. The Many “isms” of Prejudice andDiscrimination

I. Racism: an individual’s or group’s prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behaviors toward people of a given race or ethnicity.

A. Individual Racism: the racist acts of one person based onconscious or unconscious prejudice.

B. Institutional Racism: when economic, educational, political,social, and corporate institutions favor one race or ethnicityover another.

C. Cultural Racism: the discriminatory acts of one race orethnic group against another race or ethnic group, at timesattempting to change or eliminate the other group.

E. Are most people individual racists?

1) Subtle Racism

2) Automatic Racism

D. Racial Discrimination… Does it still exist?

The ImplicitAttitude Test

II. Sexism: an individual’s or group’s prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behaviors toward menor women.

A. Gender Stereotypes: the perceived cognitive, affective,and behavioral traits possessed by females and males, andthat distinguish the two sexes from each other.

B. Women are seen as kind, nurturing, and considerate(positive) as well as dependent, weak, and overlyemotional (negative). Thus, women are “warm” (nice) butthey are not competent.

C. Men are seen as decisive, assertive, and accomplished(positive) and aggressive, insensitive, and arrogant(negative). These traits are thought to show that men are ahigher status group than women.

D. The Women are Wonderful Effect!

E. Benevolent Sexism…Women: Women have a superior moral sensibility.Men: Men are powerful.

F. Hostile Sexism…Women: Once a man commits, she puts him on a

tight leash. (He’s whipped!)Men: Men are immoral.

G. Gender Role: a set of behavioral expectations (norms) formales and females.

H. Gender Discrimination… Does it still exist?

I. Glass Ceiling: a barrier based on attitudinal or organizationalbias that prevents qualified females from advancing to top-levelpositions.

J. Glass Elevator: when men enter predominantly femaleoccupations, they may get an easy ride to top-level positionsor at least get promoted much faster in these occupations.

K. Tokenism I: hiring based on group membership.

1) Token hires are liked less by their coworkers andviewed as less competent.

L. Tokenism II: when individuals perform trivial positive actionsfor members of out-groups that are later used as an excuse forrefusing more meaningful beneficial actions for members ofthese groups.

1) For perpetrators of tokenism, prior positive actionsserve as a credential that indicates their “non-prejudiced”identity, which in turn frees them to later discriminate.

III. Ageism: discrimination against people of a certain age group, typically older people.

IV. Classism: discrimination against people of a certain socio-economic status.

V. Other Common Categories of Prejudice and Discrimination

A. Religion

B. Culture

C. Attractiveness

D. Obesity

E. Homophobia

III. Prejudice and Discrimination:Different Groups… Different Feelings A. Some theorists have argued that prejudice is more

thanjust generic negative feelings toward a group, but

rather iscomprised of distinct negative emotions.

B. Depending on what emotion underlies prejudice toward

a particular group, the discriminatory action that might be

expected could be different.

1) When people’s prejudice primarily reflects anger,

they may attempt to harm the out-group directly.

2) Prejudice based on pity or guilt might lead toavoidance of the out-group because of the

distresstheir characteristic can evoke.

IV. Social Influence in Prejudice andDiscrimination

A. Social Learning and Conformity…

1) We form ideas and feelings about other peoplewhich lead to behaviors directed towards otherpeople from observing and conforming to theattitudes and behaviors of others we like orbelieve (family, friends, the media, etc.).

B. Authoritarian Personality: a personality that is disposed tofavor obedience to authority and intolerant of out-groups andthose lower in status.

C. Ethnocentric: believing in the superiority of one’s own ethnicand cultural group, and having a corresponding disdain for allother groups.

D. Social Dominance Orientation: motivation to have one’sgroup dominate other social groups. Being in a dominanthigh-status position tends to promote this orientation andjustification.

V. Motivational Influence in Prejudiceand Discrimination

A. Scapegoating: the idea that you use a particular person orgroup of people (usually people not in a position to effectivelyretaliate) to act out aggression upon in order to vent frustration.

B. Realistic Group Conflict Theory: prejudice anddiscrimination arise from competition between groups forscarce resources.

C. Social Identity Theory: the “we” aspect of our self-concept;the part of our answer to “Who am I?” that comes from ourgroup memberships.

This involves three steps…

1) We categorize: “I’m an Italian, a Democrat, a Biologist”

2) We identify: We associate ourselves with certain groups

(in-groups: “Us” – groups of people who share a sense

of belonging, a feeling of common identity) and gainself-esteem by doing so.

3) We compare: We contrast our groups with other groups

(out-groups: “Them” – groups that people perceive as

distinctly different from or apart from their in-group)with a favorable bias toward our group.

D. In-Group Bias: the tendency to favor one’s own group overanother group.

E. Out-Group Rejection: the tendency to demonstrate dislikefor an out-group.

1) As in-group size decreases, in-group bias and out- group rejection increases.

F. Terror Management Theory: when people are primed to thinkabout their mortality, they become observably hostile to peoplewith different beliefs (out-groups) and observably more fond ofpeople with similar beliefs (in-group). This serves to reduce theactivated anxiety associated with thinking about dying.

G. Group-Serving Bias: making internal attributions forpositive in-group and negative out-group behaviors, whilemaking external attributions for negative in-group and positiveout-group behaviors.

VI. Cognitive Influence in Prejudiceand Discrimination

A. Social identity theory implies that those who feel theirsocial identity strongly will concern themselves withcorrectly categorizing people as us or them.

B. Out-Group Homogeneity Effect: the perception ofout-group members as more similar to one another than arein-group members.

H. Evolutionary Survival Instinct: difference is a sign ofdanger.

C. Own-Race (and Own-Age) Bias: the tendency for people tomore accurately recognize faces of their own race and own age.

D. The Ultimate Attribution Error: the tendency to makedispositional attributions from one individual’s characteristicsor behavior to an entire group of people.

E. Subtype: a subset of a group that is not consistent with thestereotype of the group as a whole due to multiple distinctivefeatures.

F. Stigma Consciousness: a person’s expectation of beingvictimized by prejudice or discrimination.

G. Just-World Phenomenon: the tendency for people tobelieve that the world is just and that people therefore getwhat they deserve and deserve what they get.

VII. Prejudice and Discrimination:Consequences and Remedies

A. Stereotype Threat: people’s perceived risk that they mightdo something that supports an unfavorable stereotype abouttheir group.

B. Do Stereotypes Bias Interpretations of Interactions?

C. Do Stereotypes Bias Judgments of Individuals?

D. Contact Hypothesis: the idea that prejudice anddiscrimination will decline as we have more contact withpeople who we would have discriminated against.

E. Mutual Interdependence: the need to depend on eachother to accomplish a goal that is important to each group.

Robbers Cave Experiment