Key studies

• LaPiere (1934) - field study

  · He wrote to 250 establishments (hotels, restaurants) asking about whether they would serve Chinese people.

  · 92% replied 'No', and 1% replied 'Yes'.

  · But when he went to these places with a Chinese couple requesting service... Only 1 place refused to serve them.
• Adorno (1950) - Authoritarian personality is a personality type that is characterized by obedience to authority figures
• McFarland and Adelson (1996) - RWA and SDO could account for most of the variance observed whatever the prejudice.
• Altemeyer (1998) - different kinds of prejudice can be explained by matters of personality
• Asbrock et al. (2010) - RWA, but not SDO, predicted prejudice towards ‘dangerous’ groups.

  • SDO predicted prejudice towards ‘derogated’ (deviated) groups.
  • Both RWA and SDO predicted prejudice towards ‘dissident’ (oppose official policy) groups.
• Sherif (1957)- Realistic conflict theory (Resources are scarce, so we prefer to have them for our group)
• Sidanius & Pratto (1999) - Social dominance orientation (Some groups are better than others)
• Rabbie & Horowitz (1969) - Mere categorisation create ingroup favouritism
• Brown (1954) - Racial Segregation (segregated groups were disadvantaged in schools)
• Gaertner & Dovidio (1986) - aversive racism: implicit bias and avoidance
• Sherif (1956) - When groups cooperate in a task that groups cannot perform separately, they have positive interdependence when task is achieved
• Turner (1980)- redefinition of members of groups into an inclusive superordinate category can reduce the distinctiveness between groups
• Contact hypothesis - In the ‘Robbers Cave’ study by Sherif et al. (1954) prejudice lessened only when members of the two hostile groups were forced to cooperate with each other.
• Stephan (1978) - mere contact does not work (school desegregation: There was tension, and in more than half of the studies, prejudice increased)
• Deutsch and Collins (1951) - white and black families randomly assigned to an integrated housing unit showed reductions in racism compared to those in segregated units.
• Pettigrew & Tropp (2006) - the more the contact, the lower the prejudice under ideal conditions
• Aronson et al. - jigsaw classroom designed to reduce prejudice and raise the self-esteem of children by placing them in small, desegregated groups and making each child dependent on the other children in the group to learn the course material
• Gaertner et al. (1990) - jigsaw process is effective because it breaks down in-group and out-group categorization and fosters notion of class as a single group.
• Paluck and Green (2009)- much more rigorous and broad-ranging empirical assessment of prejudice reduction strategies is needed to determine what works
• o   Brown (1995) adds to the definition of prejudice the presence of discriminatory behaviour – when people become aware their prejudices are widely shared they form a group to represent their views which might lead to more extreme behaviours against prejudiced group
• Gaertner and Dovidio (1977) - Bystander apathy: weak bystander apathy when the victim was black than white when there was potential other helpers