factors affecting prejudice - social

• what are the three factors that can affect prejudice

  1 - dispositional factors (personality)

  2 - situational factors

  3 - cultural factors
• how do dispositional factors affect prejudice

  people with authoritarian personalities are seen to have more prejudice
• how was the authoritarian personality theory developed

  stage 1 - interviewed two American college students about their political beliefs, how they were raised, attitudes to minorities

  stage 2 - designed a series of personality questions that would measure authoritarian personality

  stage 3 - carried out interviews with 40 males and 40 females
• what are the features of authoritarian personalities

  . posses characteristics that mean they are more likely to be prejudiced

  - rigid in thinking and intolerant to change

  - hostile to people they see as inferior, particularly minority groups

  - submissive to authority
• how can authoritarian personality develop

  through overly harsh parenting
• how does overly harsh parenting cause authoritarian personality

  . the parenting style expects high standards of their children, and offers conditional love - only given if the child behaves correctly

  . this makes the child feel hostile towards their parents conditional love but they can't express these feelings due to fear of punishment

  . instead they displace this anger onto someone/something else (scapegoating)

  . the people are usually socially inferior - authoritarian personality developed
• what factor does the dispositional factor theory take into account

  how the role of upbringing (nurture) can affect prejudice
• what does this idea suggest certain personality traits are, what does this mean

  innate (genetic), meaning they are fixed and unchangeable
• what examples from history go against the fact some personality traits are innate

  rwanda
• what can this theory explain

  individual differences eg bullies at school, individuals with extreme political ideas
• what can't the individual differences part of the theory explain

  society wide prejudice
• what are situational factors that affect prejudice

  social norms and social threats
• what three people gave evidence for situational factors

  1 - Guimond et al

  2 - sherif et al

  3 - Akrami et al
• what did Guimond et al suggest

  that prejudice can not be down to personality alone and can rise and fall over time
• what did sherif et al suggest

  competition can cause prejudice as it creates subordinate goals leading to intergroup hostility and prejudice
• what did Akrami et al suggest/find

  personality isn't the only factor affecting prejudice, found that manipulating social norms on a uni campus to reduce sexism led to participants reporting that discrimination of women was no longer a problem
• how can culture affect prejudice

  if the culture has existing social norms that legitimise prejudiced practice then prejudice can be influenced
• what is a downside to looking into cultural factors, why

  it is hard to establish whether one culture is particularly more prejudiced than the other due to changing social norms, law and events
• what did Katz and Brady investigate

  national stereotypes of americans about other cultures
• how did Katz and Brady carry out their investigation

  gave uni students a questionnaire where they had to pick 5-6 traits from a list f 84 personality traits that they thought represented each ethnic group best
• what were the results of their investigation

  most american students classified african americans as superstitious and ignorant, and jews as shrewd
• what may these results have been based on though instead of their actual beliefs

  the students may have responded in a socially desirable way from the time
• what did Karlins et al do

  replicated Katz and Brady's study 20 years later
• what did they find

  while some national stereotypes changed, others persisted
• what did this suggest

  that culture does affect prejudice, but as culture changes, so do the prejudices they hold
• how do people in individualistic cultures tend to behave

  behave more independently, resist conformity, emphasise individuals within the group as important
• how do people in individualistic cultures tend to behave in link to prejudice

  would encourage more interpersonal prejudice - an individuals biased attitude towards another specific person
• how do people in collectivist cultures tend to behave

  behave as a collective group based on interdependence, emphasise the importance of the whole group as a collective
• how do people in collectivist cultures tend to behave in link to prejudice

  encourage more intergroup prejudice - a groups based attitude towards another specific group
• which group would you find more prominent prejudice to outgroups in

  collectivist cultures
• which two people did research into cultural factors affecting prejudice

  1 - Al-Zahrani and Kaplowitz

  2 - Guimond et al
• what did Al-Zahrani and Kaplowitz find/do

  found in a comparison of saudi (collectivist) and american (individualist) people, saudis tended to show more outgroup derogation
• what did further research show however

  that collectivism is associated with greater tolerance and lower racism
• what did GUimond et al do/find

  tested the hypothesis that cultures where there was multiculturalism would show less prejudice compared to less diverse cultures, found that anti-muslim attitudes were reduced when multiculturalism was high
• what are the issues with cross-cultural research (4)

  - culture applies usually to whole countries/continents but small groups within these will have their won subcultures that may affect their prejudice or obedience

  - there will be different personality types which are more less obedient and prejudice in groups of people regardless of their culture

  - research into cultural differences can be expensive and time consuming

  - researchers may be subjective and not interpret cross-culture behaviour accurately