Exam 1 Lecture Notes
Culture: “a unique meaning and information system, shared by a group and transmitted across generations”
- Affects our behavior
- People can be unaware of culture
- Individualism vs collectivism
- Gender roles
- Clothing (sweats vs real clothes)
- Subtle anti-semintism vs direct
- Unlimited refills of soda
- Can reinforce certain identities (e.g., race, gender) as a social category
What does it mean to be white?
- Doesn’t have a marginalized racial identity
- Synonymous as being American
Has it changed over time?
- Hypodescent: fair skin has a single drop of black blood, they are considered black
- Religion: if they are jewish, they aren’t white
- Heritage: Italians weren’t considered white and so was the Irish
What does it mean to be Christian?
- Has this changed over time?
- Catholics weren’t considered to be Christian
Norms:
- Rules of behavior in a group
- Includes prevailing beliefs
- Can be formal or informal
- Social behavior involves
- Figuring out group norms
- Deciding if we will follow group norms
- Human nature to align our behavior with the perceived norm
- EVERYONE IS BIASED (descriptive)
- Cause interventions to backfire
- Independent variable: bias is common vs not
- Dependent variable: # of stereotypes used in writing activity
- Caused more people to use stereotypes
Two Types:
- Descriptive norms - what people do
- Example A: Most students on campus wear jeans and t-shirts to class
- Example C: Most people in my office take a short lunch break
- Can backfire
- Injunctive norms - what people should do
- Example B: Most students should wear jeans and t-shirts to class
- Example D: Most people in my office believe taking a long lunch break is inappropriate
Daily Questions
- The effect of context on identity
Identity & Group Membership
- Who Am I?
- Personal Identities
- Birth order
- Number of siblings
- Personal values
- Hobbies
- Personality traits
- Emotions
- Social Identities
- Gender
- Race
- Sex
- Sexual Orientation
- Religion
- Marginalised-Group: social identity groups that have historically and/or currently do experience discrimination, oppression
- Dominant-Group: social identity groups that have historically and/or currently do have positions of power, privilege, and (often) numerical majority in society
- Multiple marginalized identities = intersectional identities
Identity
- Changes based on situation, context, setting, location, culture
- “We see ourselves as we are”
- “We see others as we are”
- “Others see us as they are”
Norms = Stereotypes about identity
- Stereotypes: a generalized belief about the characteristics, attributes, and behaviors members of a group
- Can be positive or negative!
- Both can have negative consequences
3 Key things of Stereotypes
- Pictures in an individual’s head
- But also shared beliefs that are a part of culture
- “Exist in the air”
- Refine beliefs with personal observations, but there is typically group consensus about what stereotypes are
- Even if you don’t endorse them
- Sometimes contain “a kernel of truth”
- Bit of accuracy becomes exaggerated
- Exaggerate the similarity between groups (ALL males are more aggressive than most females)
- Can be prescriptive or descriptive
- Different terms, but same definitions as norms!
- Prescriptive stereotypes = Injunctive norms; should be
- Descriptive = Descriptive norms (dirty, no work ethic); what they do
- Both have negative consequences for perceptions, judgements, and behavior towards people w/ that identity
- Deviating from prescriptive stereotype = punishment
- Often to get the group member “back in line”
Stereotype:
- Ex: “Susie is white and from the south, so she doesn't like people who are black”
Prejudice: a generalized attitude toward members of a group (motion/affect)
Discrimination: behaviors directed toward people on the basis of their group membership
- Treating people differently from others based on membership in a social group
- Can be verbal or behavioral
- Occurs on various levels in society
Attitudes (prejudice) → Behavior (discrimination) → Cognitions (stereotype)
- ABCs
Cultural source of stereotypes: MEDIA
BIAS:
Unfair
Beliefs
Prejudice
Preferences
Stereotypes
Discrimination
- Types of Bias
- Implicit
- Explicit
Implicit Bias
- Can have it even if we identify with it
- Mismatch between consciously endorsed attitudes (and often subtle) behavioral bias
- Happen without you even knowing it
2 distinct types of bias
- Automatic = implicit
- Controlled = explicit
- Can be high in one bias while low in another
Implicit vs Explicit Bias
- IMPLICIT
- Automatic
- Not conscious
- Outside of awareness
- Non-deliberate (without intention/control)
- Endorsement is not necessary!
- EXPLICIT
- Conscious
- Aware
- Deliberate
- Endorse stereotypes
- More ok with it (ex. Women should work at home)
Implicit associations test (IAT)
- Based on reaction times
- Pairings groups of people with stereotypes or evaluations
- Controversy
- What is the IAT actually measuring? What is the nature of implicit bias?
- Cultural associations
Implicit Bias matters
- Measured implicit bias among physicians
- Higher implicit bias → less likely to treat black patients
- Poor family → rated as having less ability
System of bias/Levels of SP&D
- Interpersonal
- Occurs on the person-to-person level
- Organizational
- Occurs when “the practices, rules, policies, and formal organizations (corporations or government agencies)’ have discriminatory outcomes
- Institutional
- Occurs when norms, policies, and practices associated with a social institution result in different outcomes for members of different
- Stop-and-Frisk → discrimination of African-Americans
- Cultural
- Occurs when one group retains the power to define cultural values as well as the form those values should take within a culture
- Stereotypic beliefs about social groups work to maintain social hierarchy
“-Isms”
- “-isms” go beyond bias to encompass an entire belief system of superiority
- Not just PERSONAL biases - they are systematic social biases that lead to power differences
- Examples:
- Prejudice based on Religion
- Classism
- Sexism
- Ageism
- Heterosexism
- Racism
Racism
- The interaction of individual level biases with societal and cultural level biases, creating a social hierarchy which is rooted in race (power difference)
- A system of bias
- Eight conversations about race and ethnicity
Prejudice as a Universal Concept
- Phenomena and processes about bias towards one marginalized-group generally applies bias to other marginalized-groups
- Similar effects of black people applies to Asian-American
Research Methods
- How are experiments effect and correlational are not casual?
- Experiments have random assignment and you know the variables that are being manipulated so you know what the cause and effect are
- Explaining Real-World Events
- Multi-method approach
- Rules out measurement-specific explanations for the effect
- Example: direct report vs sitting distance
- Multi-experiment approach
- Examines multiple “micro-explanations” that are likely influencing a specific real-world event or scenario
- Example: reading for January 16
- Manipulates each micro-explanation individually in different studies
- Establish a broader cause of event or phenomenon
- Scenarios
- Micro-explanations:
- Interviewer thinks women are too emotional to deal with difficult clients
- Interviewer thinks women are more likely to quit once/if they decide to have children
- Interviewer thinks women will put in less hours because of child-rearing & household chores
- Interviewer thinks women are less competent
- Measures of prejudice
- LOTS of measures
- Measures reflect changing face of prejudice
- 1950: “There is something inherently primitive and uncivilized in the Negro”
- 2000: “Some say that Black leaders have been trying to push too fast”
- Direct Measures-Types of Direct Measures
- Likert scale questions with ratings of agreement or disagreement (1-5)
- Frequently include self-reports
- Assume that Ps are aware of their responses
- Assume that Ps are willing to share their responses
- Adjective checklists of traits that apply to a social group
- Free response list of traits associated with a social group
- Feeling thermometer
- “My impression of Republicans is”
- Scale (0 degrees to 100 degrees)
- Social distance measures
- What is the nearest you would want to live…?
- Ask people to report behaviors
- How many times have you confronted someone for …?
- Have people anticipate their reaction in hypothetical situations
- What would you do if you heard…?
- How likely would you be to confront someone for…?
- Would you apply for a job at this company?
- Indirect Measures (Implicit Cognition)
Youtube Short Assignment
- Provides rubrics
- Graded on professionalism and clarity
- Annotated Bibliography: maximum of sentences: 8; 2-4 sentences per paper/book discussing the purpose for it in the Youtube Short, cite 4 papers or books
- Change a source for annotated bibliography, has to make an appointment or go to office hrs to get approval
- Topic Choice
- Do I have a general idea about the topic I chose
- Legal:
- All humans have bias
- Eberhardt (2019), Ch. 1-2
Social Categorization
- Simplifying the environment by creating categories based on shared characteristics (most of the time, unconsciously)
- Ex. red vs black: people who drive red cars are most likely to speed
- Makes interaction predictable
- Facilitates social behavior
- Create categories of people in head, information about the person who fits into the category occurs
- Mental shortcuts
- Causes stereotypes/prejudices
- Ex. when encountering a woman on the street, the mind processes that the person is female.
Schemas
- Stereotypes belong to a class of categories called schemas
- Definition: cognitive structures that contain a person’s knowledge and beliefs about a particular object or social group
- Maintaining the balance
- Not the best at balancing proficiency and accuracy
Why do we categorize?
- Functional
- Cognitive efficiency
- Social Identity
- Optimal Distinctiveness
- Helps differentiate ourselves from others
Basic social categories
- Most commonly used social categories
- Easily observable
- Lots of information stored in memory
- Associated with specific cultural meaning
- Comes from comments, news, and culture
Subtypes
- Smaller stereotyped groups that are within a basic category
- Middle-aged woman
- Asian man
- Career woman
- Can be positive or negative
Intersectionality
- People are members of more than one category at a time
- Has more than one marginalized identities
- Black woman
- Gay asian man
- Studying intersectionality of these identities is difficult
Consequences of categorization
- Ingroups and outgroups:
- Most basic cognitive distinction
- Ingroups = us (groups you are part of)
- Outgroups = them (groups you are not part of)
- Minimal Group Paradigm:
- Groups can be created by random assignment based on an unimportant variable:
- Number of dots counted on screen
- Liking for abstract art
- Indirect Measures (Implicit Cognition)
- Measures that tap into spontaneous and uncontrollable cognitive processes
- Provide a way around social desirability concerns
- Implicit Associations Test (IAT) - tests how performance is hurt when unassociated concepts, versus associated concepts, are paired
- Two categories are paired together, then they are switched
- Insects/bad and flowers/good
- Next, insects/good and flowers/bad
- Takes longer to respond if the categories are not typically linked in memory
- Shooter Bias Task - Shooting reaction times
- How quickly someone shoots one armed person versus another armed person
- How quickly someone mistakenly shoots an unarmed person versus another unarmed person
- Priming - exposure to a category activates concepts associated with the category
- Activate related thoughts
- Activated thoughts should be easier to respond to on the relevant dimension (goo/bad)
- Dependent variable is speed of responding to different pairings
- If there response differs on what the image was shown
- Example of automatic activation
- Affective misattribution procedure -unrelated image is presented after key manipulation, with the assumption that feelings reported “towards the image” are actually from the manipulation, not the image
- “Misattributed” to the image, not the manipulation
- All participants see the same unrelated image
- Unobtrusive Measure
- Measures that are seemingly unrelated to the study and/or prejudice
- Behaviors - willingness to help, distance from others, speech errors, eye contact, whether the the participant confronts the sexist joke
- Judgements - evaluating people for jobs, admissions, etc
- Sitting distance
- Physiological Measures
- Examines changes in physiology to assess mental state
- Heart rate and blood pressure
- Electrodermal Activity (EDA)
- Facial muscle movement (EMG)
- Brain activity - ERPs and fMRI
- Can distinguish novel/familiar, positive/negative, emotional intensity
- To Sum Things Up
- Measurement is incredibly important
- Different drawbacks to study prejudice and stereotyping
The Outgroup Homogeneity effect
- Perceiving outgroup members as more similar to one another than members of the ingroup
- Perceiving ingroup members as very different from one another
- “They’re all alike. We’re diverse.”
- Reasons why we see them more similar than outgroup people
- More interaction and information
- Relates to Dr.’s talk
- Bad experience with people from an outgroup → avoidance
- Types of informal information
- Example: at the dinner table
- Motivated to see ourselves as distinct
- Similar to optimal distinctiveness
- Don’t really need to be distinct with outgroup
- Ingroup vs. outgroup comparisons are typically made at the group level
The Ultimate Attribution Error
- Similar to the Fundamental Attribution
- If we someone who is lazy, we typically blame that they are lazy (dispositional) vs ourselves, we say I had two other tests (situational characteristics)
- Error only in relation to intergroup interactions
- Negative ingroup behavior is situational
- Negative outgroup behavior is dispositional
- Specific to NEGATIVE information
- Opposite for in-group members
The Cross-Race Identification Bias
- People of other races tend to “all look alike” to most people
- Bias occurs when cognitive resources for processing information are limited
- Found for many groups … not just race
- Age
- Gender
- Political groups
- Related to outgroup homogeneity
Ingroup overexclusion
- Drawing a tight circle around ingroup to avoid treating outgroup members as if they belong
- Safer to misclassify ingroup members as outgroups rather than extend ingroup privileges to the “wrong” people
- More likely among highly ethnocentric people
- Highly identified with people in their ingroup
Prototypicality
- A member who fits the observer’s concept of the essential features characteristic of that group
- Prototypical bird is something that can fly (cardinal)
- Non-prototypical bird is something that can’t fly (penguin)
- Hypodescent: when someone is ambiguous or not “prototypical” of one or the other, more likely to be categorized as minority group
Situational influences
- Intervene in the categorization process to emphasize one category over another
- People may need motivation to subcategorize on the basis of other
Prejudice
- Play a role in categorization
- Racially prejudiced people tend to pay more attention to race
- Take longer to classify racially ambiguous faces (want to be accurate)
- More likely to rely on stereotypes to help classify ambiguous faces
Origins of stereotypes
- Parents
Social Role Theory
- Women are more likely to be kindergarten teachers so the characteristics of being a kindergarten teacher starts to be apply/associate to women
- Correspondence bias- misjudging demands of situation; believe actions reflect personality traits (people are naturally suited to the roles they play)
Illusory Correlation
- Perceiving correlations (co-relations) between uncorrelated variables
- Won’t drink until my team win, but them drinking doesn’t help with them win
- Occurs when events or facts share some distinctive feature, occurs infrequently (negative behaviors)
Transmission of stereotypes
- Model behaviors after others
- Parents and peers (social learning theory)
- Media
- Language
- Qualifying descriptions
- Man-first principle
- Men to be mentioned before womenfolk
- Jack and Jill
- Husband and Wife
- Viewing a “standard” accent
- Common expressions
- Jewish American Princess
- Barbarian
Media as source of Stereotypic Beliefs
- Exposes us to members of powerful groups more than subordinate groups
- Representations of groups are very stereotypic
- The more media people are exposed to, the more they hold stereotypic beliefs
The role of avoidance in negative stereotyping
- Social categories: race, age,gender,occupation, social status, sexuality
- Form beliefs, feelings, and behaviors →prejudice, stereotype, discrimination
- Active agents in our own experiences
- Early avoidance cause inaccurate negative beliefs to persist
- Methods
- Show a person, say yes: positive or negative outcome; no: partial feedback condition, full feedback condition
- Partial Feedback Condition
- Show a person, say yes: get a point; show another person, say yes: lose a point; say no to the same person as second: no interest
- Avoidance revents people to update initial beliefs
- Full Feedback Condition
- Show a person, say yes: get a point; show another person, say yes: lose a point; say no to the same person as second: gain a point
- Reduce negative stereotyping, try to foster exploration of new people despite negative expectations
Stereotype Accuracy
- What is accuracy?
- Researchers don’t agree on how accurate something needs to be to be called “accurate”
- What if 80% of a group had the trait? Would that make it “accurate?”
- Risk of assuming accuracy?
- Can hurt the 20% that does not have the stereotype (especially if it is not true)
- Stereotypes will be applied prescriptively to all individuals examples of a time this happened to you or someone you know
- Methodological issues mean all assumptions of accuracy should be viewed skeptically
STEREOTYPE ACTIVATION AND APPLICATION
STEREOTYPE ACTIVATION AND APPLICATION
- Stereotype endorsement: NOT knowledge; the extent to which a person actually agrees with the social stereotype of a group
- Stereotype activation: the extent to which a stereotype is accessible in one’s mind. Stereotypes lay dormant until activated, usually by encountering a member of a group
- Stereotype application: the extent to which a person actually uses a stereotype to judge a member of the stereotyped group.
- Three step process of stereotype usage
- Categorization - connecting a person to a stereotyped group membership
- Stereotype activation
- Stereotype application
- Things to think about:
- Stereotypes most likely to be activated and applied to people we do not know very well
- When people interact with others, behavior is driven by goals
- An activated stereotype must be applied to the person
- Progression from categorization through activation to application is
- Rapid
- Automatic
- Often unconscious
- Motivated perceivers can counteract unwanted stereotypes
- Step 2: Stereotype Activation
- Automaticity vs. Control
- Automatic process: rely on when not motivated to think
- Unconscious, unintentional, involuntary, effortless
- Example: “auto-pilot”
- Almost all activation
- Contrasts w/ controlled: motivated to versus can think
- Factors that Affect Activation
- Prototypicality - facilitates activation
- Context - can influence which aspect of a stereotype becomes activated
- Prejudice - facilitates activation
- High prejudiced people have stronger associations between stereotypes and categories
- Cognitive Load - a state of mental overload that impairs our ability to think
- Under cognitive load we are
- Less likely to activate stereotypes
- More likely to use stereotypes, if they have been activated
- Example: happens when under a lot of stress; multi-task
- Goals that motivate stereotype activation
- Directed more by people (thus relying more on emotions) than situations
- Comprehension - need to understand why events happened and form clear impressions
- Accuracy goals
- Less likely to activate stereotypes?
- Desire for accuracy → focus on individuating info
- Accountability → more accuracy → more individuating info
- When a stereotype helps us with accuracy, we are more likely to activate it.
- Self-enhancement/self-protection - the desire to see the self in a positive light and to feel good about the self
* Motivation to protect threats to self-esteem
- Social Adjustment - automatically adjusting behavior to be consistent with behavioral norms
- Motivation to control prejudice - the desire to avoid acting prejudiced
* Internal (personal value to be non prejudiced)
* External (don’t want others to see me as prejudiced)
* Internal and External are separate, but can occur at the same time and have one high and one low
* “Socially acceptable” prejudices
* Prejudices to homeless people, fat people, and rapists/school shooters
* Requires lots of cognitive effort
- Cognitive style
- Need for Cognition
- Enjoyment of thinking
- Amount of cognitive resources willing to expend
- Someone who is high in need for cognition is less likely to use stereotypes
- Need for Closure
- Need for definitive answers & dislike of ambiguity
- Willingness to not see “shades of grey” and complexity
- Someone who is high in need for closure is more likely to use stereotypes
- Because they are less likely to see the shades of grey
- Social Power
- More power=more likely to apply stereotypes
- Why?
- Less accountable so cares less about explaining their stereotypes
- Tend to judge others more often → cause feelings of entitlement
- Able to maintain being in power
- The Activated Stereotype
- Dissipate within 12 minutes of activation
- Dissipated stereotypes can be reactivated quite easily
- Stereotype activation is more likely when people see a prototypical group member
- Stereotype activation is more likely when perceivers are not cognitively busy
- Stereotype application
- Unactivated stereotypes can’t be applied
- Stronger prototypical = more activation
- People can inhibit the application of a stereotype, depending on certain factors
- Consciously or unconsciously
- Moral credentials = The phenomenon where individuals feel less concerned about appearing prejudiced if they have established a non-prejudiced self-image.
- Decision tree = study in slides
- Consequences of stereotype application
- Biased interpretation of behavior
- Example: Study on “teacher evaluation methods”
- IV 1: “Hannah” is low vs high SES
- Ps viewed video of “Hannah” taking academic test
- DV: The grade level that represented Hannah’s abilities
- Comprehension & Activation
- Comprehension/accuracy goals →
- GREATER activation
- LESS application
- Kunda et al., 2003
- White Ps had convo with Asian confederate (someone who is part of the research team but participants don’t know that)
- IV: Goal
- Form impression of interviewer’s personality & career choice vs understanding of topic
- Impression → More stereotype activation
- Old-fashioned prejudice
- Explicit belief in the inferiority of some groups and negative stereotypes
- Traditional prejudice
- Informal discrimination
- Formal, legalized discrimination
- Hate Crimes
- Changed over time…But Still Exists
- Two processes contribute to the contradiction between people’s non prejudiced responses to survey questions and their sometimes prejudiced everyday behaviors
- Dramatic change in racial attitudes and acceptance of prejudice since WWII
- But 400 yrs of racism cannot be eliminated
Theories of Contemporary Prejudice
Theories of Contemporary Prejudice
- Share 3 propositions
- Social norms have changed towards equality
- But norms are not accepted by all to the same degree
- Even those who have no yet accepted norm are still motivated to act in non prejudiced ways
- Contemporary prejudices are expressed in ways that can be justified on unprejudiced grounds
- Voting for black candidate because he is too liberal
- Could be true but could be conscious or nonconscious justification for prejudice
- Don’t support for affirmative action bc it is against America’s standards
- Could be true but could be conscious or nonconscious justification for prejudice
- Modern symbolic prejudice
- Five themes = “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps”
Racial prejudice and discrimination no longer exist, so we can stop worrying. Opposing things like affirmative action is rooted in “fairness”, not prejudice
Any remaining differences in economic outcomes result form African Americans’ lack of motivation to work hard enough
Because African Americans are unwilling to work to get what they want, their continuing anger over inequality is unjustified
Rather than working to get ahead, African Americans seek special favors
Relative to whites, African Americans have been getting more than they deserve economically
- More likely to be endorsed by:
- People who believe in equality of opportunity, not outcome
- Promote the interests of groups important to them from perceived disadvantage
- People who believe in traditional values, like hard work, individualism, self-reliance, self-restraint, etc.
- People with little personal knowledge/experience with African Americans
- People motivated by group self-interest
- Promote the interests of groups important to them from perceived disadvantage
Priming Obama = not moral credentially, but enforces the idea that the black community can pull themselves from the bootstraps because a successful black man did it
- Ambivalent Prejudice
- Involves two simultaneous feelings towards outgroups
Genuine positive feelings - from egalitarianism or personal beliefs
Negative feelings - from socialization or personal beliefs
- Consequences of ambivalence
Becoming aware of inconsistent attitudes → negative emotions
2. High ambivalence → cognitive dissonance (two different ideas make you uncomfortable leads to negative emotions)
3. Solution: reduce conflict by making one attitudes central
- Conflicting implicit beliefs
- Ambivalent Sexism
Hostile sexism (HS)
4. Based on the belief that women are trying to take men’s power, are controlling, and/or are competent
Benevolent sexism (BS)
5. Based on the belief that women are warm, nurturing, innocent, and should be put on a pedestal
1. “A good woman should be set on a pedestal by her man”
2. “Women, compared to men, tend to have a superior moral sensibility”
6. Can hold benevolent and hostile sexism at the same time, both women and men
7. Where does BS come from?
1. Protective paternalism - that men should provide for and protect women
2. Gender differentiation - men and women have different traits, such that they need each other
1. “The better half”
3. Intimate sexuality - romanticizes women as sexual objects
8. What’s the problem with BS?
1. Seemingly positive, but insidious consequences & implications
1. Insidious consequences a harder to recognize
2. Targets (e.g., women) more likely to endors this kind of prejudice (e.g., benevolent sexism)
2. Maintains the gender status quo
1. Nuturing, innocent → the idea that women are weak and cannot protect themselves
2. Often internalized by women themselves
1. More than other targets of pejudice
3. Traits imply deference
1. Related to communality, which put women in a subordinate position
4. Serves as a reason groups shouldn’t have power
1. E.g., Polictical power → women & voting rights
9. Consequences of BS
1. Hurts women’s cognitive performance than HS (examples: tests)
2. Undermines collective action for change
3. Leads to cardiovascular threat
4. Causes women to support gender inequalities in society
5. Neuroscience: activates brain regions related to intrusive thought suppression
- Aversive Prejudice
- Involves the combination of two beliefs
- Cultural belief in egalitarianism
- Implicit negative feelings towards minority groups
- Implicit belief vs explicit belief
- Can refer to blacks about whites
- People who experience aversive prejudice avoid contact with minority groups
- Because of the discomfort they feel when they do
- Try to be polite and correct when they do have contact with members of minority groups
- Express negative feelings subtly through nonverbal behavior
- Similarities:
- Differences:
- Reject the racialized traditional beliefs & support equality-enhancing social programs
- More strongly motivated to see themselves as unprejudiced because it’s important to self-concept
- Prefer to avoid most interracial interactions
- Conflicting implicit and explicit beliefs
- Need these things to level the playing field but still have discomfort with it (try a little bit harder to fit in)
- Characteristics fo situation determine behavior
- When there is ambiguity in judgment criteria
- No clear answer
- When someone can come up with race-neutral (non-race-related) explanations for behavior
- E.g., a posthoc explanation for a hiring decision
- Examples
- Overall, white people are equally willing to help Black and White people who need help
- But are less likely to help people when not helping can be justified on race-neutral grounds (in separate situations)
- E.g., not having enough time
The Social context of prejudice
Influence of Social Context on Prejudice
- Not just individual differences
- Environment
- Other people
- Tangible resources (e.g., food, money, goods)
- Intangible resources (e.g., power, status)
- Even the literal environment
Development of Social Context Research
- Individual differences and “prejudiced personalities”
- See Carmen supplement ← Responsible on your own
- WWII → “What is it about the Nazis?”
- Milgram: The social context, not individual differences
Self-fulfilling Prophecy
- Behavior or performance of those group members → others’ beliefs about members of a group → others’ behaviors towards members of that group → (go back to the first one)
- Perceptual bias
- How you evaluate and perceive a person
- Overlaps with self-fulfilling prophecy
- Accurate assessment
- Are teachers biased? Or just learning from experience
Social Identity Theory
- Social Identity: The part of a person’s self-concept that derives from membership in groups that are important to the person
- Motivated to
- Develop and maintain positive social identities
- Distinguish our group from other groups
- Ingroup favoritism: favor ingroup
- Outgroup homogeneity: thinks everybody in the outgroup is the same
- All old people are bad at technology
- Factors that Influence Social Identity
- Self-Categorization: Determining for oneself which group we are a part of
- Self-Stereotyping: View oneself in terms of group membership
- Self becomes one with group
- Positive view of group reflected onto self
- Motivated to identify with groups that:
- Fulfill needs for certainty and reduce anxiety
- Provide clear norms for beliefs/behavior
- The greater perceived distinctiveness → The more likely a person is to self-categorize along the relevant dimension
- Optimal Distinctiveness
- Motivated to identify with groups that provide positive identities and reduce uncertainty
- Need for distinctiveness and need for inclusion is met when group size is at a happy medium for the person
- Threat to group
- Events that threaten the well-bein of the group → Stronger identification with group
- E.g., “How important is your country?” before and after 9/11
- Contemporary example: Majority-minority nation
- Increased ingroup solidarity, identification, fear, anger, and bias among White Americans
- Chronic social identities
- Have identities that are always with us regardless of the situation
- Minority group members might be more likely to have important active “chronic” social identities, because they might have characteristics that make them unique in almost all situations!
- Complexity of social identity
- E.g., More identities → More Tolerant
- Perception of Differences
- SOOO different → No common values → Not a threat to values → Tolerance
- Individual differences
- Ethnocentrism: The tendency to favor one’s own ethnic and nationality groups
- Group narcissism: Belief that my ingroup’s values are more valid than other group’s values
- Situation x Individual Difference Interactions
Relative Deprivation Theory
- Things that another group has that you don’t have/thing that you are losing out of
- Relative comparison to
- What you had before
- Societal revolutions happens after a long period of bad circumstances after a golden age to a long period of bad circumstances
- What others have
- Coined around WWII
- AirCorp members → Promoted more, but less satisfied
- Sees people get promoted all the time, so they questioned why they weren’t getting the same thing
- Military policy → Promoted less, but more satisfied
- Black soldiers more satisfied than White soldiers (despite experiencing discrimination, worst living conditions)
- Comparing their situation to others back home/what they had before
- Personal (or egoistic) relative deprivation
- Sense that you are doing less well than other individuals
- Not related to prejudice
- Group (or fraternal) relative deprivation
- Sense that your group is doing less well than other groups → Prejudice
- Prejudice can emerge from perceptions of unfairness
- Distributive justice - outcomes are unfair
- Procedural justice - process is unfair
- Affirmative action: Just a few arguments
- Support: Increases distributive justice, or fairness of outcomes
- Oppose: Lacks procedural justice, or fairness of process is unfair
- Perception of unfairness → Dissatisfaction and resentment → Hostility towards outgroup that is believed to benefiting at ingroup’s expense
Realistic Conflict Theory
- Groups often compete for limited resources - material resources or value dominance
- Concrete resources/ outcomes (e.g., jobs, land)
- Less tangible
- Competition → Conflict → Prejudice
- Comes with perception (do you perceive someone taking the job away from you?)
- Example
- Robber’s Cave Study
- Rattlers & Eagles
- Stage 1: group bonding
- Stage 2: introduction & competition
- Behaviors (based on observations
- Theft, flag burning, physical fights
- Stage 3: cooperative contact/interdependence
- Mere contact not enough
- Requires interdependence & common goals
- E.g., drinking water problem
- Immigration
- Contemporary Example: Sports Fans
- Power Differential?
- Classic work → competition w/ equal groups
- Duckett's Extension → Domination of outgroup by ingroup
- Stable oppression: subordinate group submits to avoid conflict
- Example of assimilation and acceptance
- Example: Prison population (inmates will submit to the guards even if they are innocent)
- Unstable oppression: subordinate rejects the stereotypes and lower status
- Sees dominating group as oppressive → Hostility and challenge
- Examples: British vs Indians (Indians rose up and gain their independence while the oppression got unstable due to WWII)
- False Consciousness & System Justification
- Justifying one’s disadvantaged place in society
- Ex: women should be protected → shouldn’t be in certain jobs
- Integrated Threat Theory
- Three types of threat
- Realistic threats
- Threat to tangible or intangible resources
- Millennials to boomers
- Stronger negative racial attitudes for Blacks than Whites
- Symbolic threats
- Threat to culture, values, worldview
- Boomers to millennials
- Stronger negative racial attitudes for Whites than Blacks
- Intergroup Anxiety
- Concerned interactions will bring embarrassment or rejection
- Strongest predictor of negative attitudes for BOTH groups
- Beyond integrated threat theory, to intergroup interactions more broadly
- What people find demanding can differ based on different identities
Tab 7
Spotlight Session
- Racial Group Status Threat
- Worry about losing social-status - includes material advantage and cultural centrality
- Examples: Elon musk saying “Disney sucks” when Ayo is supposed to be apart of Pirates of the Caribbean
- Threat over shifting racial demographics causes:
- Increased bias against racial minorities
- Decreased support for integration
- Support for right-wing groups and affinity for
Does increasing racial diversity change support for democracy?
- Measures racial group status threat
- What it means to be a true American is becoming less clear
- Prediction: racial group status threat
- As conservatism increases, group status threat increases
- Conservatism: continuous measure (1-7); ideology; not a manipulated independent variable
- As racial shift increas, conservatism increases
- As condition increased, conservatism increases
- For S2: as control increase, participant conservatism increases
- As increasing diversity increases, participant conservatism increases
- Implications:
- Racial group status threat is multifaceted
- Numeric, economic, political, cultural, and moral
- Changes to
Exam 2 Lecture Notes
The Experience of Discrimination
Stigmatized groups
- Groups without social privilege are defined as “stigmatized”
- Experience “stigma”
- Differences in appearance and/or behavior
- Depends on culture and historical context
- Deviant
- Usually deviant from morality
- Examples:
- People with herpes
- Incarcerated people
- Sex workers
- Non-straight sexualities
- HIV
Characteristics of stigma
- Concealability - visible vs. sharing is a choice
- Someone with herpes vs a person of color
- Can vary (black people can pass at white)
- Hide a scar or birthmark
- Origin - controllable or not
- Drug addiction (controllable) vs. skin color
- Getting herpes (controllable but could be uncontrollable if raped)
- If uncontrollable → pity; uncontrollable → anger
- Peril/Danger - dangerousness associated with group membership or not
- Mental illness
- Stereotype to be more dangerous but in reality, they have the same likeness as someone without mental illness to commit crimes
- HIV epidemic
- People associated it with gay men
Sterotype Threat
- This idea as not wanting to perceive yourself as a negative stereotype
- When people are at risk of confirming a negative stereotype of their group and it interferes with their performance
- Related to desire to avoid confirming the stereotype
- Often occurs among highly domain-identified individuals
- People care about how they see in a specific environment
- Example: women in STEM cares about how they do on a math/science test
General Features of stereotype threat
- Stems from situational pressures that bring the stereotype to mind, not merely from internalization of the negative stereotype
- Situational cues
- A general process that can affect ANY GROUP that has a negative stereotype
- Nature of threat varies by context and stereotype
- “The threat in the air” Claude Steele
- Societal stereotypes
- Working memory is affected
- Basically, can’t think clearly
- More enhanced thoughts about the negative stereotype
Steele & Aaronson (1995)
- IV 1: Race of Ps (Black, White)
- IV 2: Test description (measures intelligence, doesn’t measure anything specifically)
- DV: correct # of SAT questions
Spencer, Steele, and Quinn (1999)
- IV 1: Sex of Ps (male, female)
- IV 2: Test description (has found gender differences, has not found gender differences)
- DV: correct # of math GRE questions
Shih, Pittinsky, & Ambady (1999)
- Tested whether two self-relevant stereotypes could affect performance differentially in the same participants
- Participants were Asian-American women
- Women = bad at math stereotype
- Asian = good at math stereotype
- IV: prime (gender, race, control)
Stereotype lift
- Awareness that your group is relatively advatnaged allows you to relax and actually improves performance
- Information about group performance can provide a performance boost for members on nonstereotyped groups
- Members of nonstereotyped groups engage in downward social comparison
- These differences can have several real-world implications
- High-stakes testing, e.g., SAT
Gaither et al. (2015)
- Ps are biracial Black-White
- IV: identity priming (Black, White, control)
- DV: # correct GRE questions
Rios et al. (2015)
- Studied stereotypes related to science and Christianity
- Ps are self-identified Christians and non-Christians
- IV: task description (scientific reasoning or intuitive thought)
Stereotype threat spillover (Inzlicht & Kang, 2010)
- Stereotype threat → ego depletion
- Ego depletion is the temporary reduction in self-control after exerting self-control
- The effect will appear on a stereotype-irrelevant domain
- By depleting self-control, stereotype threat increases aggression, eating, and risky decision making
Class notes
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