Jim West/Alamy
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What Is the Nature and Power of
Prejudice?
 Defining Prejudice
 Preconceived negative judgment of a group and its
individual members

Supported by stereotypes
 Beliefs about the personal attributes of a group of people
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What Is the Nature and Power of
Prejudice?
 Defining Prejudice
 Discrimination

Unjustified negative behavior toward a group or its members
 Racism

Prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behavior toward
people of a given race
 Sexism

Prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behavior toward
people of a given sex
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What Is the Nature and Power of
Prejudice?
 Prejudice: Implicit and Explicit
 Dual attitude system


Explicit
 Conscious
Implicit
 Automatic
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What Is the Nature and Power of
Prejudice?
 Racial Prejudice
 Is racial prejudice
disappearing?
Changing Racial Attitudes of White Americans from 1958 to 2011
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What Is the Nature and Power of
Prejudice?
 Racial Prejudice
 Subtle forms of prejudice


Labor market discrimination
Patronization
 Avoiding criticisms
 Overpraising accomplishments
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What Is the Nature and Power of
Prejudice?
 Racial Prejudice
 Automatic Racial Prejudice


Involves primitive regions of the brain associated with fear
(amygdala)
Critics note that unconscious associations may only indicate
cultural assumptions, perhaps without prejudice
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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
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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
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What Is the Nature and Power of
Prejudice?
 Gay and Lesbian Prejudice
 Gay marriage support is mixed but increasing.
 Harrassment hurts.
 Rejection happens.
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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
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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
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What Are the Social Sources of
Prejudice?
 Socialization
 Religion and Racial 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
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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
Copyright 2016 © McGraw-Hill Education. Permission required for reproduction or display.
What Are the Social Sources of
Prejudice?
 Institutional Supports
 Government
 Schools
 Magazines and newspapers

Face-ism
 Films and television
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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
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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
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What Are the Motivational Sources
of Prejudice?
 Social Identity Theory: Feeling Superior to Others
 Ingroup bias



Ingroup bias expresses and supports a positive self-concept
Ingroup bias feeds favoritism
Must ingroup liking foster outgroup disiking
Copyright 2016 © McGraw-Hill Education. Permission required for reproduction or display.
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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What Are the Consequences of
Prejudice?
 Discrimination’s Impact: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
 Social beliefs can be self-confirming
 Prejudice affects its targets
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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
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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
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