INTRO TO SOC PSY – INTRO STRUCTURED
1. prejudice (i.e. dislike for members of an outgroup)
2. prejudice
a. as either an outflow of a prejudiced personality disposition (authoritarian
personality; see Chapter 14) or as
b. the result of displaced frustration (scapegoat theory)
i. scapegoat theory the theory that prejudice is due to aggression
displaced towards members of an outgroup (scapegoats), because the
group (or circumstances) that was the source of frustration is not
within reach.
3. realistic conflict theory
a. assumed that intergroup hostility and intergroup prejudice are usually the result
of a conflict of interest between groups over valued commodities or opportunities.
b. Goals were the central concept in Sherif’s theory:
i. he argued that when two groups were competing for the same goal,
which only one could achieve, there would be intergroup hostility.
c. realistic conflict theory a theory developed by Sherif that holds that conflict and
competition between groups over valued resources can create intergroup hostility
and prejudice.
4. Henri Tajfel called into question the assumption that competitive goals are a necessary
condition for the development of intergroup hostility (Tajfel, Billig, Bundy, & Flament,
1971).
a. Experimental procedure became known as minimal group paradigm.
These groups were minimal, because they were created using arbitrary criteria,
involved no interaction between members of the two groups, and group
members had no knowledge of who belonged to the group
b. These studies were again quite innovative, because they showed that
intergroup conflict was not an essential cause of intergroup discrimination (or at
least ingroup favouritism). Apparently, the mere fact of division into groups was
sufficient to trigger discriminatory behaviour.
c. minimal group paradigm a set of experimental procedures designed to
create groups based on essentially arbitrary criteria (with no interaction
within or between them, and with no knowledge of who else belongs to each
group) whose members show intergroup discrimination.
5. In 1994, Neil Macrae and colleagues studied people’s ability to suppress their
prejudicial thoughts (Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, & Jetten, 1994). After all,
there is a great deal of evidence that people acquire their prejudices quite early and
may not be able to get rid of them later in life, even if these prejudicial thoughts have
become inconsistent with their egalitarian values (Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler,
2000).
a. Their study evidenced the rebound effect (Chapter 4 – Social Cognition, )
b. The second essay of these ‘suppressors’ was more stereotypic than that of the
control group. Thus, when people no longer tried to suppress their
stereotypes, they showed a higher level of stereotypical thinking than if they
had never tried to suppress their thoughts in the first place.
c. they also wanted to know whether attempts to suppress one’s stereotype
would affect people’s behaviour. They therefore conducted a second
study. The first part of this study was identical to that of their first
experiment. However, after having written an essay under either
stereotype suppression or no-suppression instructions, participants
were told that they would now go next door to meet the person
depicted in the photograph (i.e. the skinhead)
d. And in line with the findings of the previous study, participants who
had (successfully) suppressed their stereotype on writing the essay
now chose a chair that was significantly further away from the
skinhead than did individuals in the control group.
e. Thus, the rebound effect of stereotype suppression affected not only thoughts,
but also behaviour (but for some constraints on the general effect, see
Monteith, Sherman, & Devine, 1998)
f. impact of stereotypes on behaviour was still restricted to the way the
individual behaved towards a member of the group towards whom
the stereotype was held
g. Stereotypes can be more pervasive
6. John Bargh (see Leader in the Field, John Bargh, in Chapter 4) and his
colleagues (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996) at New York University (US)
a. In the first part of this experiment, participants had to complete a
‘scrambled sentence test’ in which they had to form sentences from
scrambled sets of words.
b. Experimental group = primed with sentences containing words that
were part of the (American) stereotype of the elderly, such as ‘Florida’,
‘Bingo’ and ‘grey’.
c. Control group, no priming
d. words will bring the elderly stereotype to participants’ minds (i.e.
make it more accessible), including characteristics of elderly people
that were not even mentioned in the priming procedure.
e. One such characteristic that is typically attributed to the elderly, but
which was not mentioned in the priming procedure, is that elderly
people move rather slowly.
f. The researchers assumed that participants who were primed with the
stereotype of the elderly would also think of ‘moving slowly’ as
another salient characteristic of the elderly.
g. It was further assumed that this thought would affect the participants’
own behaviour.
h. The researchers predicted that participants primed with the elderly
stereotype would move more slowly than participants in the control
condition who had been exposed to neutral primes.
i. The experimenters then measured the time it took participants to walk
from the experimental room to the nearest lift.
j. In line with the hypothesis, participants who were primed with the elderly
stereotype took significantly longer to reach the lift than did participants
who had been primed with neutral words.
k. It appears that thinking of the concept ‘slow’ influenced behaviour, and that
consciousness did not play any part in this process, because
participants were aware neither that they had been primed nor that
they had been led to walk more slowly
7. Thus, most sociologists agree with social psychologists in espousing what has been
called methodological individualism, namely the assumption that even collective
behaviour is essentially behaviour of the individuals who form the collective and
therefore has to be explained in terms of rewards and costs of this behaviour to the
individual (e.g. Klandermans, 1997).
8. Sociologists are more likely to trace social behaviour upwards to structural
variables such as norms, roles or social class, whereas social psychologists will
trace it downwards to the individual’s goals, motives and cognitions. For
example, both sociologists and social psychologists are interested in
aggression and violence. Social psychologists have studied the cognitive and
affective processes through which anger can, given the right contextual cues,
explode in aggressive behaviour – that is, behaviour performed with the
express intention of hurting another person (Figure 1.3; Chapter 9).
Sociologists, on the other hand, have been more interested in why levels of
aggression are higher in some societies or groups than in others. Why is the
murder rate in the US so much higher than in Canada, even though guns are
widely available in both countries?
9. social psychological experiments may have been performed even earlier by
the French agricultural engineer Max Ringelmann, who between 1882 and
1887 conducted investigations into the maximum performance of workers
pulling a load under different conditions (Kravitz & Martin, 1986). Although
the comparison of individual and group performance was of only secondary
interest to Ringelmann, he found the first evidence of productivity loss in
groups, a phenomenon that was later named social loafing (see Chapter 13).
Ringelmann found that eight men who pull at a rope together achieve only
about 50 per cent of the pulling power that could be expected on the basis of
their pulling measured individually. However, since Ringelmann only
published this research in 1913, Triplett predates him
10. Thurstone’s article was remarkable because he described the first
psychometrically sound method for the measurement of attitudes. Sherif’s study
became a classic, because he devised an experimental paradigm that allowed him to
study the development of group norms in a laboratory situation (see Chapter 8)
11. Newcomb’s Bennington study became a classic, because it is an ingenious
longitudinal field study of social influence on a college campus. It maps out the way in
which the political attitudes of students, all women who came from conservative
homes, changed over time towards the liberal attitudes that were predominant on
this college campus. Thus, it illustrates how individual beliefs and attitudes can be
shaped by the group context, and thus supports one of the basic assumptions of
social psychology. The study is particularly interesting because these students
were followed up for 50 years, allowing researchers to demonstrate the stability of
their attitude change over a lifetime (Alwin, Cohen, & Newcomb, 1991).
12.