Stereotypes, Prejudice, Discrimination

• Stereotypes - Beliefs that associate groups of people with certain traits
• Stereotypes - Difficult to change. If there are exceptions, we create a subtype.
• Stereotypes as Heuristics

  • "The law of least effort" Gordon Allport
  • Use to simplify the process of thinking about other people
  • We learn this from other people than direct experience
• Being Stigmatized

  Being persistently stereotyped, perceived as deviant, and devalued in society because of membership in a particular social group or because of a particular characteristic
• Stereotype Threat (Steele, 1997)

  • The experience of concern about being evaluated based on negative stereotypes about one’s groups
• Can hamper achievements in academic domains in 2 ways:

  1. Can interfere with performance – increases anxiety and triggers distracting thoughts
  2. Can cause an individual to disidentify with that domain (e.g., academic domain)
• Causes of Stereotype Effects

  1. Triggers physiological arousal and stress
  2. Drains cognitive resources
  3. Causes a loss of focus to the task at hand
  4. Impairs working memory (short-term memory)
  5. Activates negative thoughts, worry, feelings of dejection, and concerns about trying to avoid failure than trying to achieve success
• 4 ways Stereotypes Persist

  1. Illusory Correlations
  2. Stereotypes as Subcategories
  3. The Media
  4. Power and Stereotypical thinking
• 1. Power and stereotypical thinking

  • Powerless individuals pay close attention to the powerful persons – pay attention to information that is inconsistent with the stereotype of these individuals
  • Powerful individuals have less time to pay attention to powerless individuals and may consider them as unimportant so they rely on social categories
• The Media

  Through repetition and reinforcement, stereotypical portrayals of women provide implicit scripts, or guidelines, for behaviors that some researchers believe may inhibit career aspirations
• 1. Stereotypes Subcategories

  • When people meet others who do not meet their stereotypes (global), they create subcategories who do not have the characteristics of their stereotype
• Illusory Correlations

  • Belief that two variables are associated with one another when in fact there is little or no correlation
• Shared Distinctiveness

  People are more likely to associate things that are infrequent (Hamilton & Gifford)
• Shared Distinctiveness

  Selective attention to the infrequent behaviors of the minority group members appears to set the stage for the illusory correlation effect
• PREJUDICE

  • Affect
  • Evaluating a person or multiple persons based on membership in a group or category of people
  • A negative attitude directed toward people simply because they are members of a specific group
• Discrimination

  • A negative action toward members of a specific social group
  • Behavioral component of prejudice
• Racism

  • Best known form of prejudice
  • Having negative views toward people based on race
  • Can take the form of overt, blanket statements of disliking and disparaging groups
• Aversive Racism

  • Simultaneously holding egalitarian values and negative feelings toward people of other races
• Old-fashioned Racism

  • Blatant expression of negative and unfair stereotypes of others based on their category membership
• Implicit Prejudice

  • Attitudes that are unintentionally activated by the mere presence of the attitude object, whether actual or symbolic
  • Measured by the Implicit Association Test
  • Demonstrates that people show intergroup bias
• Prejudice is a major cause of social exclusion
• 5 Social Causes of Prejudice & Discrimination

  1. Unequal Power and Oppression
  2. Intergroup competition
  3. Social Identity
  4. Personality Trait
  5. Religious Beliefs & Intolerance
• 1. Religious Beliefs and Intolerance

  • Positive relation between religion and prejudice
  • Extrinsic orientation and intrinsic orientation

  Extrinsic Orientation

  • An instrumental way of gaining rewards

  Intrinsic Orientation

  • Their religion is a central part of their self-concept; teachings guide their life
• 2 ways to reduce Prejudice

  1. Contact Hypothesis
  2. Indirect Contact
• 1. Indirect Contact

  Types of Indirect Contact:

  1. Extended Contact

  • Just the knowledge that other people in your group have friends in the outgroup can reduce intergroup bias

  1. Imagined Contact

  • Mental simulation of a social interaction with a member/s of an outgroup
  • Mentally simulating a positive contact experience activates concepts normally associated with successful interactions with members of other groups
• 1. Contact Hypothesis

  • Contact between members of indifferent social groups, under appropriate conditions, can lead to reductions in intergroup bias
• Necessary Conditions in Contact Hypothesis

  1. Groups interacting must be roughly equal in social status
  2. Groups must be in sustained close contact
  3. Intergroup cooperation

  • Cooperating members of different groups appear to cognitively re-categorize one another into a new ingroup

  1. Social norms favoring equality must be in place

  • Social conditions (government and school policies, laws) should all promote integration