13.5: Prejudice and Discrimination

Some of the causes of prejudice can be identified.

If we prejudice the drawing of negative conclusions about a specific group of people, whether they be African Americans, women, gays, about a person, group of people, Norwegians, or hair stylists, it means we've jumped to a premature and negative situation.

In the early 20th century, printing companies used a metal plate to make copies of original documents.

Walter Lippmann used that term for the first time in the 1920s to describe our tendency to place people into rigid and unrealistic categories.

Stereotypes are needed to understand prejudice.

Stereotypes are usually based on the psychological characteristics of members of processes.

The group strives to conserve mental energy by simplification.
Stereotypes help us make sense of our often confusing social worlds by lumping enormous most members of the group numbers of people who share a single characteristic, like skin color, sexual orientation, nationality, or religion, into a single category.
They help us to streamline information processing by being similar to other schemas.
It's probably inevitable that a certain amount of people will be stereotyped.
According to data, many stereotypes have a core of truth, and some are even accurate.
Laypersons' estimates of the magnitude of sex differences on various psychological traits correspond closely to the actual magnitude of these differences found by researchers.

Our stereotypes can be the seeds of prejudice if we don't keep a close eye on them.

When we cling to them too rigidly and are unwilling to modify them, they can be deceptive.

Stereotypes can affect our interpretations of ambiguous stimuli.

In ethnic, or gender stereotypes, rapid decisions can be accurate in some cases, but they can also be disastrous in others.

A line of research was inspired by a real-life tragedy.

Four New York City police officers mistakenly shot Amadou Diallo 41 times in 1999 because they thought he was reaching for a gun.

He reached for his wallet in a desperate attempt to show his identification to the officers.

Joshua Correll and his colleagues brought the Diallo incident into the laboratory by showing participants a video of a man, in some cases white, in other cases African American, reaching for a cell phone, a wallet, or a handgun.

The participants had less than a second to make a decision.

African American men were more likely to be shot by participants than white men.

The man in the picture is holding a cell phone.

More than half of the story described the African American man as holding the razor, was warped as the story was passed from participant to participant.

The source is based on Pelham, B. W., Mirenberg, M. C., and Jones.

Although most people think that there's a correlation between mental illness and violence, studies show that the risk of violence is only elevated among a small subset of mentally ill individuals.

Even though lesbian women have lower rates of HIV infections than heterosexuals, Americans still believe that they are at higher risk for the disease.

We tend to attribute any positive behaviors of disliked groups to luck or rare exceptions that prove the rule.

The ultimate attribution error leads us to underestimate the impact of situational influences on people's behavior.
Caucasian students are more likely to see a shove from an African American as aggressive than from another Caucasian.

Mental work is needed to overcome stereotypes.

The key difference between prejudiced and nonprejudiced people is not that they hold stereotypes of minority groups, but that they don't.
It's not that prejudiced people don't try hard to resist their stereotypes, it's that nonprejudiced people do.

The perception of threat is linked to the activation of the amygdala.

Whites who are presented with these images for a longer duration (500 milliseconds or about half a second) have lower amygdala activation as well as higher levels of activation in the frontal lobes.
The finding suggests that many whites have an automatic negative reaction to black faces.
When our self-control is weakened, we default to prejudiced beliefs.
In one study, heterosexual undergraduates drank lemonade sweetened with sugar and then wrote an essay about a day in the life of a gay male named Sam.
When our brains receive Glucose, we're better at blocking impulses.
Students who drank lemonade sweetened withglucose wrote essays that contained less gay-related stereotypes and negative statements about Sam than did students in the control group.
The findings suggest that many of us hold stereotyped beliefs about sexual orientation, but that we can stop them with mental effort.

We all have biases against certain groups of people.

The human species has a tendency to prejudice.
From the standpoint of natural selection, organisms benefit from forging close alliances with people who are familiar with them.

Members of one race tend to show large evolutionary principle that creates skin conductance responses to fear-inducing stimuli--such as a snake and a spider--that a predisposition toward distrusting have been matched repeatedly with faces of a different race.

We associate scary things with people from other races.

Our tendency to forge alliances is associated with two major biases.

As early as preschool, this bias appears to emerge.

The home team Demonizing an outgroup will happily spend several hours out of their day cheering them on.

The brains of immigrants in Eastern Europe were imaged using fMRI.

When participants thought about the liberal, the prefrontal cortex became more active.

When they thought about the Christian conservative, it became less active.

Out-group homogeneity makes it easy for us to dismiss members of other groups, such as different races, because we can simply tell ourselves that they all share at least one undesirable characteristic.

We don't need to go to chapter 13 to know them.
We can see the negative feedback as coming from "one big blob" of people if we view out-groups as homogeneity.

You witnessed prejudice or discrimination recently.

Just as some stereotypes can lead to prejudice, prejudice in turn can lead to discrimination thanks to psychological research.

We can be treated differently.

Discrimination can cause negative behavior toward members of a sequence.

A research team looked at how music judges evaluated female musicians.

In some cases, judges could see the musicians; in others, they played behind a screen.
Women were 50 percent more likely to pass an exam if judges were blind to musicians' sex.
Most major American orchestras use blind auditioning.

Caucasian undergraduates were observed as they interviewed both Caucasian and African American applicants for a job.

When interviewing African American applicants, interviewers made more speech errors and ended the interview sooner.

The findings didn't show whether the different treatment affected the applicants' behavior.

The researchers trained interviewers to treat Caucasian job applicants the same way they treated African American job applicants.
The behavior of applicants from videotaped interviews wascoded by independent evaluators.
The results were striking.
The quality of interactions can be adversely affected by subtle discrimination.

Discrimination can be subtle and powerful.

Don't try this at home.

It's very easy to make discrimination.
No matter how trivial, create two groups that are different on any characteristic.

They gave participants the chance to give money and resources to other people.

The people within each group gave more goodies to the people inside their group.

In her third grade classroom, Jane created random discrimination.

Informing her pupils that brown-eyed children are superior because of excess melanin in their eyes, she deprived blue-eyed children of basic rights, such as having second helpings at lunch or drinking from the water fountain.

She called blue-eyed children lazy, dumb, and dishonest.

The results were dramatic; most brown-eyed children became arrogant and condescending, and most blue-eyed children became submissive.

The first author of your textbook was a participant in one of these demonstrations as an elementary school student in New York City.

The effects of this demonstration on prejudice towards minorities are being investigated by a follow-up study.
Students who went through this demonstration may have felt demand characteristics to report less prejudice, so more studies are needed to rule out this alternative explanation.

The roots of prejudice are complex.

We'll look at a few of the culprits.

Competition claim that prejudice arises from over scarce resources can also be used.

Data shows that as unemployment goes up, hatred toward immigrants goes up (Cochrane misfortunes & Nevitte, 2012).
We don't know if immigrants are to blame for poor economic conditions in Europe.
Maybe higher employment rates are tied to prejudice against other members of society, not just immigrants.
There's more research support for the scapegoat hypothesis.
When the African American student was unfriendly, Caucasian students gave more intense electric shocks to the African American student than to the Caucasian student.
This finding is consistent with the idea that frustration can lead to aggression.

The need for a sense of fair play is related to a deep prejudice.

It can lead us to place blame on groups that are already in a seated assumption that the world one-down position, including women who are discriminated against by men, is fair and all things happen.
Many people with a strong belief in a just world believe that victims of serious illnesses, including cancer and AIDS, are responsible for their plights.
This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as "blaming the victim" by sociologists and psychologists.
African Americans who believe strongly in a just world are more likely to suffer adverse physical health outcomes, such as high blood pressure, if they are discriminated against.

Conformity to social norms may be the root of some prejudiced attitudes and behaviors.

A study done in South Africa half a century ago found that Caucasians with a high need for conformity were more likely to be prejudiced against blacks.
There is a need for social approval.
In a study of college fraternities and sororities, researchers found that established members of Greek organizations were about equally likely to express negative views of other fraternities and sororities regardless of whether their opinions were public or private.
When their opinions were public, new pledges were more likely to express negative views of out-groups.

Some people have high levels of prejudice against other people.

People with authoritarian personality traits are prone to high levels of prejudice against many groups, including Native Americans and gay individuals, as are people with a strong need.

For people who have a religion deeply ingrained in their belief system, they have equal or lower levels of prejudice than people who don't have a religion.

Over the past four to five decades, most surveys show that interracial prejudice has declined in the United States, although some evidence shows an increase in prejudice over the past few years.

Despite the decrease in prejudice in America, some scholars contend that a good deal of prejudice has gone underground, that is, become subtler.

When Hillary Clinton was running for president, she argued that a better understanding of implicit bias is needed to improve race relations.

One research team asked whites to believe in blacks on a task.
Although white participants claimed to like their black partners, sensitive which we're unaware regarding the measures of their facial activity implied otherwise, their forehead muscles involved in characteristics of an out-group frowning became active.

Over the past decade or so, the Implicit Association Test has received a lot of attention.

After performing this task for a number of trials, researchers ask participants to again press the left and right keys, but this time for the reverse pair, meaning to press the left key for a photograph of an African American or a negative word.

A number of studies show that Caucasians respond more quickly to negative and positive words when compared to African American faces.

The finding suggests that many whites have prejudice against African Americans.
40 percent of African Americans have the same bias on the IAT, suggesting that some may harbor biases against their own race.
The IAT has been expanded to detect subtle prejudice, including racism, sexism, homophobia, religious discrimination, and ageism.
The researcher found that people who were prejudiced against Jews and African Americans also disliked the other ethnic groups.

The Implicit Association Test is the most widely researched measure of implicit prejudice.

Many African American participants display the same effect as white participants when they associate the IAT with negative words.

Does the test measure unconsciousness?
The debate continues.

Some positive findings linking the IAT to real-world racism may stem from only a handful of participants with extreme scores; as a result, the IAT may not measure implicit prejudice for the majority of people.

The question of whether the IAT and similar implicit measures assess prejudice is still being debated by scholars.

Minority members' similarity to majority group members' racial stereotypes is examined in a final avenue of implicit prejudice research.

When examining crimes of equal severity, African Americans who fit White's views of a "typical" African American are more likely to be sentenced to death than are other African Americans.
The findings point to potential biases in the criminal justice system that will require close attention in the coming years.

We're happy to close our chapter with a piece of good news, that we can overcome prejudice, at least to some extent.

Robbers Cave, Oklahoma, is the location of a study that Muzafer Sherif and his colleagues conducted.

Sherif split the fifth graders into two groups, the Eagles and the Rattlers, and sent them to summer camp.
Sherif introduced the groups to each other and engaged them in a four-day sports and games tournament.
There was pandemonium when he did.
The Eagles and Rattlers had a lot of animosity towards one another.

Sherif wanted to know if he could "cure" the prejudice he helped to create.

The treatment was simple: get the groups to cooperate in order to achieve the overarching goal.
A breakdown of a truck carrying food supplies forced the Eagles and Rattlers to work together.
The groups were less hostile after cooperation toward a shared goal.
One way to reduce prejudice is to encourage people to work toward a higher purpose.
"We're all in this together" is part of a larger Beginning with the classic Robber's Cave and more inclusive group.

One could talk about Virginia's role, another about New York's approach to education, and so on.

The students need an integrated lesson to assemble the pieces.
A number of studies show that jigsaw classrooms result in significant decreases in racial prejudice.

Many attempts to reduce prejudice during the early Civil Rights era may have backfired, assuming a small but essential role.

The advocates of these wellintended efforts thought that contact alone could heal the deep wounds of prejudice.

Intergroup contact can be helpful in reducing prejudice against individuals of different races and sexual orientations.
Sometimes contact is not effective.
If prejudice-reducing interventions make majority group individuals feel pressured to be nonprejudiced, it can backfire.
Intergroup contact and other prejudice-reducing interventions are likely to work when they satisfy several conditions, especially those that emphasize mutual respect and cooperation across groups.
The optimistic conclusion is that prejudice is neither inevitable nor irreversible.

The groups should work together.

The contact between groups should be enjoyable.

Equal status is what the groups should be.

The other group has negative stereotypes.

Group members can become friends.

Based on Kenrick, D. T., Neuberg, S. L., and Cialdini.

Social psychology: unraveling the mystery.
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The need-to-belong theory suggests that humans have a bio.

Social people are enhancing our performance in certain situations.

Some girls are more aggressive than others.

Murder rates in the southern United States are higher than in other parts of the country because of the culture of honor.

As a result of this error, we tend to underestimation 13.4: Attitudes and Persuasion: Changing mate the impact of situations on others' behavior.

When stripped of their usual identities, there is a discrepancy.

The unpleasant state of tension study shows the effects of deindividuation on behavior, that we're motivated to reduce.
Although it has been criticized on methodological grounds, we reduce in some cases.

Interventions that encourage dissent can be used to treat it.

A central route that involves care by intense and unquestioning devotion to a single individual is one of the routes marked by dual process models of persuasion.

The power market pseudoscientific products largely make use of destructive disobedience to authority and helps to clarify the peripheral route to persuasion, thanks to many techniques designed to the classic work on authority.

The prejudice is coming to a negative conclusion.

According to research, there's no safety in in-group bias and out-group numbers.

Stereotypes are beliefs that we apply to most members of a group.

Discrimination and the second affect the act of treating out-group members differently from when we identify situations as emergencies.

A variety of situational variables, including provocation, members of different groups work together to achieve frustration, aggressive cues, media influences, and shared overarching goals.