prejudice and discrimination

• inter-group prejudice and conflicts

  • ethnic and racial prejudice and discrimination underlie many of the most prominent recent and contemporary conflicts
  • israelis and palestinians
  • burmese and rohingya in myanmar
• discrimination

  • differential behaviour - directed toward another person or group based on their group membership
  • protected characteristics
  • sex
  • gender reassignment
  • sexual orientation
  • marriage
  • race
  • age
  • religion
  • pregnanct and maternaty
• direct discrimination: when someone is at a disadvantage or treated less favourable because of a protected characteristics

  indirect discrimination: when a policy that applies to anyone has a worse effect due to protected characteristic
• more subtle forms of discrimination

  reluctance to help

  • failure to help others improve their position

  tokenism

  • small or trivial positive act towards marginalised group member

  reverse discrimination

  • more extreme version of tokenism
• prejudgment

  - formed without adequate consideration of relevant evidence, especially an unfavourable judgement based on group membership

  • a prejudice is a type of social attitude - affective component
  • supported by stereotypes
• stereotypes

  • an overgeneralised belief about the characteristics of a particular group that is applied to most members of the group
  • imgaes of various types of people we carry around in our head

  cognitive process

  • stereotypes can bias attention because people often look for information that will confirm a stereotype
• stereotypes are beliefs about the characteristics of a group
• prejudice is a positive or negative feeling towards a group
• discrimination is a behaviour - treating someone differently based on their group membership
• targets of prejudice

  • sex
  • race
  • age
  • ethnicity

  particularly potent when:

  • category is vivid and omnipresent
  • occupy lower positions in society
• explicit vs implicit

  • dual processing - the brain processes thoughts, memories, and attitudes on two different tracks - dual processing
  • processing is explicit - on the radar screen of our awareness
  • implicit - an unthinking knee - jerk response operating below the radar, leaving us unaware of how attitudes influence our behaviour
  • unconscious prejudices can lead to discrimination
• charlesworth and banaji study on change and stability over time of implicit and explicit attitudes

  • over 13 years
  • six social groups: sexual orientation, race, skin tone, age, disability and body weight
  • explicit bias decreased in all six
  • implicit decreased on some (sex orientation, race, skin tone)
  • implicit was unchanged on others (age, disability)
  • Implicity increased on body weight
• racism

  over racism - blatant, explicit and generally unmistakeable - illegal, socially censored and more difficult to find

  modern racism: covert or symbolic opposition to policies designed to help a specific racial group, arising from hidden prejudice
• modern racism scale (McConahay

  7 likert scale items

  • ' discrimination against blacks is no longer a problem in the US
  • it is easy to understand the anger of black people in america

  very culturally and temporally specific

  • relates to one racially marginalised group
• Implicit prejudice operates unconsciously and unintentionally

  – Use subtle, indirect techniques to measure it (e.g., quickly pair a person’s image with a trait)– Implicit Association Test (IAT)

  – Introduced by Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz

  – Attracted a huge amount of research

  – Test cannot be faked like other attitude scales
• IAT - racial bias

  first round

  • ppts asked to use 2 buttons on keyboard to identify a series of faces that flash on the screen as black or white and a series of words that flash on screen (e.g. happy, peace, agony, hurt)

  subsequent rounds

  • participants presented with images of faces of black and white people mixed with good and bad words
• IAT - racial bias

  • this does not causes conflict for those who favour whites over black
  • congruent with stereotype
• IAT - racial bias

  • difference between reaction times and errors provides a measure of the implicit attitude
  • because it can't be faked, it is thought to be especially useful for measuring implicit prejudice
  • knowles et al: IAT scores predicted opposition to obama
  • also been used to look at implicit attitudes to body weight
• IAT

  • considerable heterogeneity and difficulty to draw strong conclusions
  • minimal evidence of racial bias in physicians
  • greenwald et al find that implicit associations do not strongly predict prejudice, but the effects are large enough to explain discriminatory impacts
• micro-aggressions: subtle and stunning

  • pathologizing difference: e.g. ridiculing or considering cultural differences inferior
  • denigrating and pigeonholing: accusing PoC of cheating because they obtain 95% an exam
  • colour blindness
  • excluding or rendering invisible "where were you born"
• micro-aggressions: subtle and stunning

  future directions

  • disaggregating ethnic group experiences
  • extern to other white-dominated contexts
  • intersections with gender
• sexism

  • historically and cross-culturally, men have held more resources, power and status than women
  • the global gender gap score in economic participation and opportunity stood at 67.7%
  • if progress toward gender equality continues at the same pace, it will take until 2095 to completely close this gap
• ambivalent sexism: is characterised by 2 components

  • hostile sexism _ negative, resentful beliefs towards women who pose a threat to the gender hierarchy
  • benevolent sexism - a set of interrelated attitudes that tend to view women in a stereotypical way (e.g. innocent, caring, pure fragile) that are subjectively positive in feeling
• a systematic review of ambivalent sexism

  • more evidence for effectiveness at reducing hostile than benevolent sexism
  • few studies overall
  • experimental interventions to reduce sexism and implicit prejudice remain rare