PREJUDICE: DISLIKING

OTHERS
WHAT IS THE NATURE AND
POWER OF PREJUDICE?
• Defining Prejudice
• Preconceived negative judgment of a group and its individual
members
• It is a negative attitude.
• It is a distinct combination of ABCs
• A prejudiced person may dislike those different from self and
behave in a discriminatory manner, believing them ignorant and
dangerous.
• Supported by stereotypes
• Beliefs about the personal attributes of a group of people
WHAT IS THE NATURE AND
POWER OF PREJUDICE?
• Defining Prejudice
• Discrimination
• Unjustified negative behavior toward a group or its members
• A prejudiced person may dislike those different from self and behave in
a discriminatory manner, believing them ignorant and dangerous.
• Racism
• Prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behavior toward people of a
given race
• Sexism
• Prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behavior toward people of a
given sex
WHAT IS THE NATURE AND
POWER OF PREJUDICE?
• Prejudice: Implicit and Explicit
• Dual attitude system
• Explicit
• Conscious
• Implicit
• Automatic
 WHAT IS THE NATURE AND
POWER OF PREJUDICE?
• Racial Prejudice
• Is racial prejudice disappearing?

Changing Racial Attitudes of White Americans from 1958 to 2011

WHAT IS THE NATURE AND
POWER OF PREJUDICE?
• Racial Prejudice
• Subtle forms of prejudice
• Labor market discrimination
• Patronization
• Avoiding criticisms
• Overpraising accomplishments
WHAT IS THE NATURE AND
POWER OF PREJUDICE?
• Racial Prejudice
• Automatic prejudice
• Involves primitive regions of the brain associated with fear
(amygdala)
• Critics note that unconscious associations may only indicate
cultural assumptions, perhaps without prejudice
WHAT IS THE NATURE AND
POWER OF PREJUDICE?
• Gender Prejudice
• Gender stereotypes
• Strong gender stereotypes exist
• Members of the stereotyped group accept the stereotypes
• Most believe that men and women are different yet equal
WHAT IS THE NATURE AND
POWER OF PREJUDICE?
• Gender Prejudice
• Sexism: Benevolent and hostile
• Attitudes toward women have changed rapidly
• Most see women as understanding, kind, and helpful
• Gender discrimination
• Disappearing in democratic Western countries
• Non-Western countries gender bias is still strong
WHAT ARE THE SOCIAL
SOURCES OF PREJUDICE?
• Social Inequalities: Unequal Status and Prejudice
• Social dominance orientation
• Motivation to have one’s group dominate other social groups
• Being in a dominant high-status position tends to promote this
orientation and justification
WHAT ARE THE SOCIAL
SOURCES OF PREJUDICE?
• Socialization
• Authoritarian personality
• Personality that is disposed to favor obedience to authority and
intolerance of outgroups and those lower in status
• Ethnocentricity
• Believing in the superiority of one’s own ethnic and cultural group,
and having a corresponding disdain for all other groups
WHAT ARE THE SOCIAL
SOURCES OF PREJUDICE?
• Socialization
• Religion and prejudice
• In almost every country, leaders invoke religion to sanctify the
present order
• Use of religion to support injustice helps explain a pair of
findings concerning North American Christianity
• White church members express more racial prejudice than
nonmembers
• Those professing traditional or fundamentalist Christian beliefs
express more prejudice than those professing more progressive
beliefs
WHAT ARE THE SOCIAL
SOURCES OF PREJUDICE?
• Socialization
• Conformity
• If prejudice is socially accepted, many people will follow the
path of least resistance and conform to the fashion
• If prejudice is not deeply ingrained in personality, then as
fashions change and new norms evolve, prejudice can diminish
WHAT ARE THE SOCIAL
SOURCES OF PREJUDICE?
• Institutional Supports
• Government
• Schools
• Magazines and newspapers
• Face-ism
• Films and television
WHAT ARE THE MOTIVATIONAL
SOURCES OF PREJUDICE?
• Frustration and Aggression: The Scapegoat Theory
• Displaced aggression
• Hate crimes
• Realistic group conflict theory
• Prejudice arises from competition between groups for scarce
resources
WHAT ARE THE MOTIVATIONAL
SOURCES OF PREJUDICE?
• Social Identity Theory: Feeling Superior to Others
• The “we” aspect of our self-concept; the part of our answer to “Who
am I?” that comes from our group memberships
• We categorize
• We identify
• We compare
WHAT ARE THE MOTIVATIONAL
SOURCES OF PREJUDICE?
• Social Identity Theory: Feeling Superior to Others
• Ingroup bias
• Tendency to favor one’s own group
• Because of our social identifications, we conform to our group
norms
• When our group succeeds, we feel better by identifying strongly
with it
WHAT ARE THE MOTIVATIONAL
SOURCES OF PREJUDICE?
• Social Identity Theory: Feeling Superior to Others
• Need for status, self-regard, and belonging
• Terror management
• People’s self-protective emotional and cognitive responses when
confronted with reminders of their mortality
WHAT ARE THE MOTIVATIONAL
SOURCES OF PREJUDICE?
• Motivation to Avoid Prejudice
• Motivation to avoid prejudice can lead people to modify their
thoughts an actions
• Self-conscious people will feel guilt and try to inhibit their
prejudicial response
WHAT ARE THE COGNITIVE
SOURCES OF PREJUDICE?
• Categorization: Classifying People into Groups
• Spontaneous categorization
• Social identity theory implies that those who feel their social
identity keenly will concern themselves with correctly
categorizing people as us or them
• Necessary for prejudice
WHAT ARE THE COGNITIVE
SOURCES OF PREJUDICE?
• Categorization: Classifying People into Groups
• Perceived similarities and differences
• Outgroup homogeneity effect
• Perception of outgroup members as more similar to one another
than are ingroup members
• Own-race bias
• Tendency for people to more accurately recognize faces of their
own race
WHAT ARE THE
COGNITIVE SOURCES OF
•PREJUDICE?
Distinctiveness: Perceiving People Who Stand Out
• Distinctive people
• Feeds on self-consciousness
• Stigma consciousness
• Person’s expectation of being victimized by prejudice or
discrimination
WHAT ARE THE COGNITIVE
SOURCES OF PREJUDICE?
• Distinctiveness: Perceiving People Who Stand Out
• Vivid cases
• Given limited experience with a particular social group, we
recall examples of it and generalize
• Can prime the stereotype
WHAT ARE THE COGNITIVE
SOURCES OF PREJUDICE?
• Distinctiveness: Perceiving People Who Stand Out
• Distinctive events foster illusory correlations
• Stereotypes assume a correlation between group membership
and individuals’ presumed characteristics
• Attentiveness to unusual occurrences can create illusory
correlations
WHAT ARE THE COGNITIVE
SOURCES OF PREJUDICE?
• Attribution: Is It a Just World?
• Group-serving bias
• Explaining away outgroup members’ positive behaviors; also
attributing negative behaviors to their dispositions
• Just-world phenomenon
• Tendency of people to believe that the world is just and that
people therefore get what they deserve and deserve what they
get
WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES
OF PREJUDICE?
• Self-Perpetuating Prejudgments
• Whenever a member of a group behaves as expected, we duly note
the fact; our prior belief is confirmed
• When a member of a group behaves inconsistently with our
expectation, we may interpret or explain away the behavior as due to
special circumstances
WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES
OF PREJUDICE?
• Self-Perpetuating Prejudgments
• Subtyping
• Accommodating individuals who deviate from one’s stereotype
by thinking of them as “exceptions to the rule”
• Subgrouping
• Accommodating individuals who deviate from one's stereotype
by forming a new stereotype about this subset of the group
WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES
OF PREJUDICE?
• Discrimination’s Impact: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
• Social beliefs can be self-confirming
• Prejudice affects its targets
WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES
OF PREJUDICE?
• Stereotype Threat
• Disruptive concern, when
facing a negative
stereotype, that one will be
evaluated based on a
negative stereotype

Stereotype Vulnerability and Women’s Math Performance

WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES
OF PREJUDICE?
• Do Stereotypes Bias Judgments of Individuals?
• Yes, but people often evaluate individuals more positively than the
groups they compose

• Strong Stereotypes Matter

• Stereotypes Bias Interpretations
• Affect how events are interpreted
• We evaluate people more extremely when their behavior
violates our stereotypes