Lecture 6 - Prejudice

• Realistic conflict theory


  • Resources are scarce, so we prefer to have them for our group
  • We separate our group and like our group more
  • Racial inequalities occur even in places with abundant resources
• Classic study by LaPiere (1934)


  1. Conducted a field study investigating the relationship between components of prejudice

  2. Wrote to 250 establishments asking about serving Chinese people

  3. 92% replied 'No', 1% replied 'Yes'

  4. Went to these places with a Chinese couple, only 1 place refused to serve them
• Authoritarian personality

  • Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) are extensively studied characteristics
  • RWA and SDO can account for most of the variance observed in prejudice
  • RWA predicts prejudice towards 'dangerous' groups, SDO predicts prejudice towards 'derogated' and 'dissident' groups
• Origins of prejudice

  • Personality: Some people are more authoritarian than others (Adorno, 1950)
  • Authoritarian personality results from upbringing, prefer strict rules, conventions, and order, prefer submission to authorities and do not challenge orders
• Components of prejudice

  • Cognitive: Beliefs about the object
  • Affective: Feelings about the object
  • Behavioural: Intentions towards the object
• Social dominance orientation

  • Tendency to accept social hierarchies and legitimize them
  • Belief that those at the top deserve to be at the top
• Random grouping

  • Preference for ingroup present even in experimentally induced artificial groups
  • Mere categorisation creates ingroup favouritism
• 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
• Disadvantage of segregated groups

  • Usually a minority
• Contact effects typically generalize to the entire outgroup and emerge across a broad range of outgroup targets and contact settings
• Solutions to improve intergroup relationships

  1. Superordinate goals: groups cooperate in a task with positive interdependence

  2. Redrawing category boundaries: redefining members into an inclusive superordinate category

  3. Cross-categorisation: social categories crossing each other
• Increased contact reduces prejudice


  • By leading to recognition of similarities between groups
  • Changing negative stereotypes with sufficient information
  • Challenging the outgroup homogeneity effect
• Research on the contact hypothesis has highlighted five important conditions for favourable outcomes
• New forms of racism

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

  Prejudice and discrimination against people based on their ethnicity or race
• In the 'Robbers Cave' study, prejudice lessened when hostile groups were forced to cooperate
• Meta-analysis of 515 studies revealed an inverse correlation between contact and prejudice
• 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
• Contact effects typically generalized to the entire outgroup and emerged across a broad range of outgroup targets and contact settings
• 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.
• Paluck and Green (2009) examined reports of interventions between 2003-08 that had a stated intention of reducing prejudice.
• Most pervasive prejudices

  • Sex
  • Race
  • Ethnicity
  • Age
  • Sexual orientation
  • Physical and mental disability
• 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
• 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
• Prejudice can be considered an attitude about a social group, which may or may not be expressed in behaviour as overt discrimination
• 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)
• Jigsaw classroom - 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
• 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
• The more contact the lower the prejudice - 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 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