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CHAPTER. 9
PREJUDICE
overlapping terms:
1) prejudice (attitude)
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a pre-conceived negative (rarely positive) judgment of a group & its
individual members
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ABCs of attitude: you may dislike (Affect) the person, behave in a
discriminatory manner (Behavior), believing (Cognition) them dangerous
2) stereotype (belief)
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prejudice are supported by negative beliefs called stereotypes
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tend to be over-generalized, inaccurate, resistant to new information
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if accurate, they can be useful in understanding what to expect & how to
get along with others
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when they are over-generalized or plain wrong, problem arises
3) discrimination (behavior)
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links between attitude (prejudice) & behavior (discrimination) are loose
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prejudice needs not breed hostile acts or all discriminatory acts stem from
prejudice
Prejudiced & stereotyped evaluations can occur both in (i.e., explicit, deliberate,
conscious) and outside person’s awareness (i.e., implicit, automatic unconscious)
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e.g., you may express respect & admiration for Asians, yet you may still have
from childhood a habitual, automatic dislike for them
Toda, for both racial and gender prejudice, subtle forms as opposed blatant are more
prevalent (called modern racism or cultural racism)
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people may express prejudicial attitudes & discriminatory behavior when they
can hide them behind some other motive
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such forms often appear subtly, in their preferences for what is familiar,
similar, & comfortable
1) racial prejudice
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e.g., research on car sale price negotiation showed Black females got 8%
higher than the average for White males
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it also appear as patronization (applying lower standards)
o experiment: White students rated higher and rarely offered harsh
criticisms a poorly written essay when told the writer was Black than
White
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there is automatic prejudice
o “angry face” experiment (Hugenberg & Bodenhausen, 2003):
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the more strongly people showed implicit prejudice (as
indicated by taking longer reaction time in identifying pleasant
words such as “paradise” as good when associated with Black,
the more they perceived anger lingering in ambiguous Black
than White faces
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i.e., race influenced perceptions and reactions
2) gender prejudice
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gender norms (beliefs about how men and women ought to behave,
prescriptive) v. gender stereotypes (people’s beliefs about how women
and men do behave, descriptive)
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gender stereotype do exist although less common now
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members of the stereotyped group tend to accept the stereotypes
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sometimes they mirror reality (e.g., stereotypes regarding men’s
aggressiveness and women nonverbal sensitivity)
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sexism: benevolent & hostile
o benevolent or favorable stereotypes (perceptions) of woman as
more understanding, kind, helpful, that result in favorable
attitude; yet the underlying belief is patronizing and patriarchal
(i.e., men is protector of women) thus sexist, often resulting in
ambivalent attitudes
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gender discrimination
o Goldberg’s classic study (1968): women students gave higher
ratings to short articles when attributed to male author (John T.
McKay) than to female (Joan T. McKay)
o i.e., women discriminated against women
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but Myers et al., (1980) who replicated this & examined all studies in
this line of work on gender bias in the evaluation of men’s and
women’s work found that judgments of work were unaffected by the
gender of the author
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outside of the U.S., it is more blatant (e.g., due to Chinese parents’
strong preference for boys, gender ratio became disturbingly
disproportionate)
what are the social sources of prejudice?
a) unequal status breeds prejudice
o masters view slaves as lazy, irresponsible in order to justify the slavery,
to justify their own high status
o such tendency is especially strong in those with “social dominance
orientation,” that refers to a motivation to have their own social groups
to be in high status or dominate other social groups
o people high in social dominance orientation often support policies that
maintain hierarchies (e.g., tax cuts for the affluent) & oppose polices
that undermine hierarchy (e.g., affirmative action)
b) socialization:
o ethnocentric people, who strongly believe in the superiority of one’s
own ethnic & cultural group and have a corresponding disdain for all
other groups, seem to have authoritarian personality (Adorno, 1959)
(i.e., prejudice appears to be an entire way of thinking about those who
are “different”)
o these people tend to have:
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intolerance for weakness
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punitive attitude
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submissive respect for their ingroup’s authorities
o the worst scenario probably is when high social dominance orientation
(manipulative power-monger) & authoritarian personality (bigot)
combined
o inquiry into their early lives revealed that they often had harsh discipline,
that may lead them to repress their hostilities & impulses & to project
them onto outgroups
o conformity: if prejudicial practice is the norms (e.g., segregation), people
tend to conform to it out of the need to be accepted, rather than to hate
people of other groups
c) institutional support (government, schools, the media)
o they often reflect & reinforce the views that maintain the status-quo
o they often tend to go unnoticed
o e.g., gender stereotypes reinforced in children’s storybooks: male
characters outnumber women; they are portrayed as brave &
competent
o e.g., in advertisement, males have visual prominence: face is
highlighted with men, body with women (“face-ism” phenomenon);
people tend to view others whose faces are prominent in photos as
more intelligent and ambitious
o it reflects and also perpetuate gender bias; recently, a crayon color
labeled as “skin color” changed to “beige” in Korea
what are the motivational sources of prejudice?
a) frustration & aggression: the scapegoat theory
o displaced aggression:
o being blocked of a goal breeds frustration, which evokes hostility
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o especially when cause of frustration is unknown or intimidating,
people re-direct their hostility
o e.g., lynchings often occurred in economically hard times; burning
witches in public
o scapegoats provide outlet for frustrations & hostilities
o realistic group conflict theory:
o prejudice arises when groups compete for scarce resources (e.g.,
jobs, housing, social prestige)
o e.g., opposition to immigration goes up and down with
unemployment rate
o e.g., in the U.S., those with lowest incomes have greatest concern
about immigrants’ taking jobs
b) social identity theory (feeling superior to others)
o our sense of self consists of not only personal (our sense of our
personal attributes & attitudes), but also social identity (we define
ourselves by our groups)
1) we categorize: we find it useful to put people into categories such as
Argentinean, Cuban, Christian, Buddhist
2) we identify: we associate ourselves with certain groups (ingroups)
3) we compare: we compare out groups with other groups (outgroups),
with favorable bias toward own group
o group identity is a source of pride: it goes like: “I am a yuppie; yuppies
are good; ergo, I’m good”
o e.g., many disadvantaged youths, who more likely lack a positive
personal identity, may find pride, power, identity in gang affiliation
1) in-group bias:
o it refers to the tendency to favor one’s own group
o even composing groups merely with the flip of a coin will
produce ingroup bias
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o experiment (Tajfel & Billing, 1974):
those favoring the work of Klee as opposed to Kandinsky
(modern abstract painting) showed favoritism to Kleefavoring group members, without ever meeting them, by
awarding significantly greater points to own group when
dividing money
o why so compelling? Because it promotes positive self-concept
o the more important our social identity becomes & the more we
become strongly attached to it, the more we react prejudicially
to members of another group
o however, ingroup favoritism does not always require disliking
for outgroup (i.e., it is not an automatic sequence that follows
liking of own group)
2) need for status, self-regard:
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people whose status is insecure or low have more need to
feel superior
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“terror management”: when feeling vulnerable (e.g.,
become conscious of own mortality), people want to
protect themselves from threat of their own worldviews;
prejudice help bolster their own belief system
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self-acceptance and prejudice: men with low selfacceptance may want to boost masculine image by
derogating women to be weak, inferior
o experiment: viewing young female job applicants,
men with low self-acceptance disliked strong,
nontraditional women while men with high selfacceptance preferred them
o i.e., when self-esteem is threatened, people restore it
by derogating outgroup
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perception of a common enemy unites a group (e.g., Hitler
used the “Jewish menace” to solidify the Nazi hold over
Germany)
c) motivation to avoid prejudice:
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although unwanted, judgmental thoughts about another
group often persist (e.g., knee-jerk, habitual responses)
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experiment on facial muscles
o White people were shown slides of White and Black
people, and asked to imagine themselves interacting
with them, rated their liking
o although they saw themselves liking Blacks more
than Whites, their facial muscles told otherwise
o when Black face appeared, there were more activity
in frowning than smiling muscles
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but, the key is, being aware of the gap between how you
should feel & how you do actually feel: self-conscious
people feel guilt & try to modify their prejudicial response
what are the cognitive sources of prejudice?
o stereotyped beliefs and prejudiced attitudes are also by-product of normal human
thinking process
a) categorization: people classify people into groups for cognitive efficiency
1) people tend to spontaneously put people in clusters of race and gender
o categorization is not prejudice by itself; rather, prejudice requires
racial categorization
o experiment: in categorizing people by race, especially when shown
faces whose race was ambiguous, prejudiced people took longer,
with more apparent concern for classifying faces as either “us”
(own race) or “them” (another race)
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2) once we classify people into groups, we are likely to exaggerate similarities
within groups & differences between them
o outgroup homogeneity effect refers to a sense that they are “all alike”
and different from “us” & “our” group
o they are alike; we are diverse
o thus, it results ingroup bias since we tend to like people who
are similar to us, dislike those we perceive as dissimilar
o the less familiarity, the more we stereotype (see as alike); the
more familiarity, the more we see its diversity
o e.g., Anglo Americans tend to lump Latinos together; however,
Mexican Americans and Cuban Americans see import
differences between them
o own-race bias refers to the tendency for people to more accurately
recognize faces of their own race
o e.g., people more accurately recognized those of own race out
of a photographic lineup
o this is because people tend to attend to group feature (“that
man is Black”) whereas they attend more to individual details
when viewing someone of thier own group
b) distinctiveness: perceiving people who stand out
o introduced to someone who is a skydiver & tennis player, you’d remember him as
skydiver
o a Black intellectual would be perceived as more distinctive
o distinctiveness feeds self-consciousness: people misperceive others as reacting to
their distinctiveness
o facial scar experiment:
a) women who were led to believe their faces were disfigured by
wearing a theatrical makeup became acutely sensitive to how
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their partners were looking at them; rated them as more tense,
distant, patronizing
b) but observers who later analyzed videotapes found no such
differences in treatment
c) made self-conscious by scar, they misinterpreted comments &
mannerisms of conversational partners
o stigma consciousness:
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refers to a person’s expectation that others will
stereotype them
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downside: having to live with stress of stereotype
threats & presumed antagonism, thus lower wellbeing
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upside: it may buffer individual self-esteem (e.g., “it’s
not directed at me personally.”)
vivid cases:
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people tend to generalize from a few vivid cases
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e.g., All Asians are good at math because I had such classmates
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however, vividness does not necessarily ensure representativeness of the
larger group
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e.g., people tend to overestimate minority populations
distinctive events:
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people tend to believe a illusory correlation occurs, which breeds a
formation of stereotypes
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in real life, the media often reflects and feeds the phenomenon
o e.g., for Hinckley, Jr. an assassin of Reagan, the media highlighted
his mental hospitalization history
o being an assassin & a mental patient are both relatively infrequent
(i.e., distinctive), thus, the media made the co-occurrence
especially newsworthy
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o such reporting adds to illusion of a large correlation between
violent tendencies & mental hospitalization (i.e., stereotype’s
formed)
c) fundamental attribution error
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group-serving bias: discounting outgroup members’ positive behaviors &
attributing negative behaviors to their dispositions while excusing the same
behavior committed by one’s own group
o e.g., “she donated because she has a good heart v. she donated to gain
favor”)
o attitude (favoritism v. denigration)
perceptions (we differ v. they’re alike)
attributions for negative behavior (to situations v. to dispositions)
what are the consequences of prejudice?
1) self-perpetuating stereotypes
o prejudice is pre-conceived judgment; as such, it guides attention,
memories, and interpretations
o once we classify a person as belonging to a category such as race or sex,
our memory for it shifts toward the features we associate with that
category
o the tendency is so compelling that people salvage stereotypes by splitting
off a new category (subtyping) or by creating a more differentiated
subcategory (subgrouping), when noticing information that is inconsistent
with a stereotype
o subtyping: seeing people who deviate as exceptions
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experiment: British schoolchildren perceived friendly school police
officer as a special category or subtype of police officers in general
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subgrouping: e.g., homeowners who have desirable Black neighbors can
form a new, different stereotype of “professional, middle-class Black”
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subtypings are exceptions to the group; subgroups are acknowledged as a
part of the overall group
2) self-fulfilling prophecy
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possible effects (reactions) of victimization (Allport) can be
categorized as either:
a) blaming oneself (withdrawal, self-hate, aggression against one’s
own group) or
b) blaming external causes (fighting back, suspiciousness, increased
group pride)
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social beliefs regarding groups can be self-confirming
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experiments revealed that part of a problem of poor performance in Black
participants stemmed from being treated in a discriminatory way
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stereotype threat (Steele, 1997) refers to
a) self-confirming apprehension that one will be evaluated based
on negative stereotype
b) e.g., you’re the player of having the poorest record in team play,
then your thinking of being expected by others to perform
poorly, may cause you to confirm that belief by actually
messing up
c) but this has rather immediate effects from a situation than
becomes part of self-concept
d) it hinders performance
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experiment on athletic performance: Black males did
worse than usual when a golf task was framed as a test
of “sports intelligence”; White males did worse when it
was a test of “natural athletic ability”
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i.e., when people are reminded of a negative stereotype
about themselves, it adversely affects performance
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e) it makes people disidentify with stereotyped domain
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if you tell students they’re at risk of failure, the
stereotypes may erode their performance and cause
them to disidentify with school, and seek self-esteem
elsewhere (Steele, 1997)
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thus, it is better to challenge students to believe in their
potential; to give criticism with telling them of high
expectation you have toward their competence
do stereotypes bias judgments of individuals?
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Yes, but if you get to know the individual, the power of stereotypes
diminishes in judging that person
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implication: the importance of exposure to diversity, multi-racial
interaction (prejudice issues), diverse views (persuasion)
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when stereotypes are strong & information about someone is ambiguous,
it affects subtly our judgment of the individual
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we tend to evaluate people more extremely when their behavior violates
our stereotypes (e.g., perceived as aggressive but successful female exec
received negative evaluations by others; gender bias is at work,
“encouraging men, but not women, to be aggressive” (Fiske))