Social psychology

• Targets of prejudice

  • Almost any social group
  • Race
  • Ethnicity
  • Sex
  • Age
  • Sexual preferences
  • Physical and mental health
• Origins of prejudice

  • Personality
  • Authoritarian personality
  • Right-wing authoritarianism
  • Social dominance orientation
  • Realistic conflict theory
  • Social identity theory
• LaPiere (1934) conducted a field study investigating the relationship between the components of prejudice
• Preference for your group is present even in experimentally induced artificial groups
• Racial inequalities occur even in places with abundant resources
• New forms of racism are proposed to have a conflict between deep-seated beliefs
• LaPiere's study

  1. Wrote to 250 establishments asking about serving Chinese people

  2. 92% replied 'No', 1% replied 'Yes'

  3. Went to these places with a Chinese couple requesting service, only 1 place refused to serve them
• Components of prejudice

  • Cognitive: Beliefs about the object
  • Affective: Feelings about the object
  • Behavioural: Intentions towards the object
• Resources are scarce, so we prefer to have them for our group (Sherif, 1957)
• Social dominance orientation: Some groups are better than others (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999)
• Racism: Prejudice and discrimination against people based on their ethnicity or race
• Disadvantage of segregated groups

  • Usually a minority
• Solutions to improve intergroup relationships

  1. Superordinate goals: When groups cooperate in a task that groups cannot perform separately, they have positive interdependence

  2. Redrawing the category boundaries: Using the same categorisation process to remove boundaries

  3. Cross-categorisation: Two or more social categories crossing each other, leading to differentiation between categories and assimilation within categories
• New forms of racism

  • Conflict between deep-seated emotional antipathy towards racial groups and modern egalitarian values
  • Resulting in denial of racism, prejudice, and discrimination, opposing affirmative action
• Increased contact

  Reduces prejudice by leading to recognition of similarities between groups, changing negative stereotypes, and challenging the outgroup homogeneity effect
• Meta-analysis of 515 studies by Pettigrew & Tropp (2006) revealed a highly significant inverse correlation between contact and prejudice, with more contact leading to lower prejudice
• New forms of racism

  • Aversive racism: implicit bias and avoidance
  • Can be measured using the Implicit Association Test (IAT) or experimental paradigms
• The Contact Hypothesis
• Racism


  Prejudice and discrimination against people based on their ethnicity or race
• The contact hypothesis has underpinned the main policy initiatives in Northern Ireland in an attempt to overcome segregation
• Research on the contact hypothesis has highlighted five important conditions for favourable outcomes of intergroup contact
• Jigsaw Classroom


  • Children in jigsaw classrooms perform better and show greater increases in self-esteem than those in traditional classrooms
  • They show evidence of true integration and better abilities to empathise with, and see the world through the eyes of others
• Cairns et al., (2006) analysed data from earlier surveys to test the contact hypothesis on intergroup attitudes of Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. They found that contact was positively related to attitudes toward denominational mixing, trust and forgiveness, even amongst those most affected by sectarian violence
• Pervasive prejudices

  • Sex
  • Race
  • Ethnicity
  • Age
  • Sexual orientation
  • Physical and mental disability
• In Wahdat al Salaam/Neve Shalom (Oasis of Peace), Arabs and Jews have lived together as neighbours since 1970. The children play together, they visit each other's homes, they go to the cinema together. They are friends. ‘The day I visited, the children were making kites in honour of their guest, the author of numerous books for young people, Michael Morpurgo. He has just written a children's book about the Arab-Israeli conflict’ (BBC, December, 2010)
• Paluck and Green (2009) examined reports of interventions between 2003-08 that had a stated intention of reducing prejudice. This produced a database of 985 research reports, the targets of which were the reduction of racism, homophobia, ageism, racism, and other prejudices such as prejudice toward the poor, overweight and disabled
• Contact effects typically generalized to the entire outgroup and emerged across a broad range of outgroup targets and contact settings
• Legislation and social disapproval have inhibited more extreme expressions of prejudice. Prejudice is more difficult to detect when it is expressed covertly or in restricted contexts, and it may go almost unnoticed as it is embedded in ordinary everyday assumptions, language and discourse
• Prejudice may be a relatively ordinary reaction to frustrated goals, in which people vent their aggression on weaker groups that serve as scapegoats for the original source of frustration. However, by no means can all prejudices be explained in this way
• The contact hypothesis has also been supported in cases where Israeli and Palestinian children have been given the chance to grow up together
• This finding was not the result of either participant selection or publication bias, and the more rigorous the study the larger the mean effects
• Co-operative Learning

  To change the atmosphere of the classroom so that it met Allport’s six conditions, Aronson et al., developed the jigsaw classroom
• The contact hypothesis has underpinned the main policy initiatives in Northern Ireland in an attempt to overcome the segregation and improve relations between Catholics and Protestants (Cairns and Hewstone, 2002)
• Gaertner et al., (1990) suggests that the process is effective because it breaks down in-group and out-group categorization and fosters the notion of class as a single group
• Prejudice can be considered an attitude about a social group, which may or may not be expressed in behaviour as overt discrimination
• The victims of prejudice can suffer material and psychological disadvantage, low self-esteem, stigma, depressed aspirations and physical and verbal abuse. In its most extreme form, prejudice can express itself as dehumanisation and genocide
• Legislation and social attitudes have significantly reduced these prejudices in recent years in most Western nations, but there is still a long way to go