Midterm 3: Prejudice
Prejudice
Holding negative attitudes/feelings about others purely for being part of a different group.
Sterotypes
A belief about the characteristics of others in a different group with no emotional quality to those beliefs.
Prejudice vs discrimination
Prejudice is the attitude, discrimination is the behaviour following the attitude.
Explicit prejudice
prejudice that are concious, controlled and could be verbalized.
Studied with a simple self-report test.
Implicit prejudice
Prejudice that is unconctrolled, inconcious, and cannot be verbalized.
Tested with an IAT (implicit association test)
Implicit Association Test (IAT) and what it tests
People are shown a word they must categorize as "good" or "bad".
People are shown faces they must categorize as "black" or "white".
The word and faces are shown together, and must be sorted.
If they are racist, they will sort the good word and black face combination slower than when they sort the bad word black face combination.
It could be testing for implicit racism, or it could be testing for societal cultural associations that make a specific pairing come more quickly to mind.
Minimal Group Paradigm
People love to and desire being seperated into different groups based on completely arbitruary reasons.
But if those reasons are more meaningful, it could cause big issues.
Eye of the Storm Experiment and its corresponding concept
Schoolteacher seperated her students based on eye colour and gave privilages to one group. Students instantly started fighting with the other group and bullying based on their eye colour.
Concept: minimal groups paradigm
What influences prejudice:
Group divisions, Realistic conflict theory, empathy.
Realistic conflict theory
Conflict arises and hostility between groups grow when groups start to compete over limited resources
2 parts of empathy
Mentalizing/perspective-taking and emotion/experience sharing
Mentalizing/perspective taking
A cognitive understanding of another's sitation and mental state.
Theory of mind
The understanding that other people have mental states that differ from our own.
Sally-Anne Task and its corresponding concepts
Children are presented with a scenario.
Sally puts marbles in a basket and leaves. Anna takes those marbles and puts them in the drawer.
If the child answers the question of where Sally would look for her marbles correctly, they will have theory of mind.
Concept: theory of mind.
Temporial Pariental Junction (TPJ)
Plays a role in mentalizing/perspective taking.
Those that have it damaged have issues with the false-believe task and theory of mind. Comparied to controls they do everything else just fine.
Emotion/experience-sharing
Mirroring another's emotional state. Not understanding why someone is feeling something, but feeling what they are feeling anyway.
Emotion contagion
We catch the emotions of others involuntarily and automatically.
MEP Pain Experiment and its corresponding concept
Motor-evoked potential (MEP) is a signal in the brain that is repressed when someone feels pain. When people are shown videos of others in pain, this surpression shows up as well. This does not happen with videos of unpainful stimuli or pain to an innaminnet object. How much surpression depends on whether or not they are of the same race as you.
Infrahumanization
The denial of human characteristics to out-group members.
There are primary emotional states for all animals and secondary emotional states for humans only and secondary emotional states are less likely to be given to those in the out group.
How to reduce prejudice
1. Use minimal group paradigm against itself.
2. When conjuring up sterotypes, think of counterarguments.
Harvard IAT Exposure Experiment
People with implicit racism are told to think of Martin Luther King Jr, and they showed a rejection of the race bias on the IAT.
Smaller anti-black bias for the IAT database during Obama's presidency because he was a more readily avaliable counterexample.
Lions vs Tiger Experiment
Assign people to the Lions/Tigers team and they need to learn the faces of those on their team.
Presented with a black/whit face and a good/bad word and made to sort the word.
If there is an anti-black bias, they would be quicker to sort the word to be bad if primed with a black face.
That did happen, but only for those in the outgroup.
Altruism
The act of helping someone else at the cost of yourself.
Why altruism is puzzling.
It should have gotten cancelled out by evolution since it does not encourage survival.
Evolutionary causes of altruism:
It gives a reproductive advantage (ex: the scorpian fly).
Kin selection where we help those that are genetically similar to us. The more genes shared, the more likely we are going to help them and those helpful genes are going to get passed down.
Recipricacy, where we help others survive so at a later date they would help us survive.
Proximal causes of altruism:
Warm glow motive
True altruism motive
Warm goal motive:
People are altruistic because they get pleasure from the voluntary aspect of helping others.
Pure altruism motive:
People help others because they get satisfaction from seeing others benefit.
Money Donation Experiment and its corresponding concept
People were given a certain amount of money and their nucleus accumbus is measured.
They are forced to give it all to one charity or they got to choose how much they gave to some charities.
The nucleus accumbus showed activity for both, but more for when they got to choose. Both the warm glow motive and the true altruism motive are valid, but the warm glow is more so.
Identifieable Victim Effect
People are more likley to help individuals wgo are identifieable. Empathy seems to be more strongly activated than a whole group's suffering.
Racism
An individual's prejudicial attitudes or discriminatory behaviur of a person with a certain race.
Single/Double Victim Experiment and corresponding concepts
People were asked how much they would donate to Child A, Child B, or a group of bother child A and B. People gave more to single victims than groups, even if they were part of the group.
Concept: the Identifieable Victims Effect
Sexism
An individual's prejudicial attitudes or discriminatory behaviour of a person with a certain sex.
3 common forms of prejudice
Racial prejudice, gender prejudice and LGBTQ prejudice.
All of which have declined and are mostly implicit prejudices down (aka modern/cultural racism) but it is still definately there and impacts these minorities.
People may not have bias perception, but bias reactions.
Women-are-wonderful Effect
The idea that all women are nice and caring.
Social dominence orientiation
The motivation for your group to dominant over other social groups.
Why people in dominent groups often support heiarchies.
Unequal status breeds prejudice. It justified inequality.
People are often seen as competent or unlikeable, but not both.
Ethnocentric
The belief that your own ethnicity is the most surperior and having a distain for others.
Authoritarian personality
A personality type that predisposes someone to like social order and look down upon those with lower status and in outgroups.
People with this personality likely submit to those with higher power and dominates over those with lower status
Those most likely to hold prejudice
People with high social dominence orientation and authoritarian personality.
The difference between the 2 is that social dominence orientation is more about social status while authoritarian personalities are more about social order and control.
The Realistic Group Conflict Theory
The isea tha prejudice arrises from competition between groups for resources because it is a source of frustration.
Scapegoating
Displacing hostility when the source of our frustrations are unknown.
Social identity
the "we" aspect of our self concept, the part of ourselves that interacts with group identification.
In-groups
People in the group that we are a part of that share similaries and a sense of common belonging and identity.
Out-groups
the "them" group that we percieve as different.
Social Identity Theory
We seperate people into groups.
We identify the group we are a part of and recieve pride from the identification.
We compare our in-groups and out-groups with a bias towards our own group.
Group identification and self-esteem
Individual achievement and self-serving bias results in personal identity and pride, leading to self-esteem.
Group ahcievements and in-group bias results in group identitiy and pride, leaning to self-esteem.
Terror management
People's self-protective emotional and cognitive responses when confronted with reminders of their mortality.
When people feel insecure status, they become scared of their mortality, and in-group favouritism and out-grou prejudice increases. Prejudice becomes a terror management strategy.
Out-group homogeneity effect
The idea that all those in the out-group are more similar to eachother than those in the in-group because you only see diversity within your own group.
Own-race bias
Tendency for people to more accurately recognize the faces of people in their own race.
This is because we tend to pay attention more to the race of those who is of a different race than our own instead of their facial features.
Own-age bias
People tend to recognize the faces of those in their own age more than those that are not.
Vivd/extreme differences and how they contribute to prejudice
Someone's differences in a group will make them stand out. Their differences and how different they are become exaggerated and they will be defined for that specific trait. People start noticing the correlation between that trait and the entire group, when generalizes to the entire group.
If this correlation happens again with another member of the group, it is more noticible since sterotypes make us see correlations that aren't actually there.
Group-serving bias
Explaining away all the positive traits of an out-group member as just a coincidence while attributing all negative traits as something dispositional.
Just-world phenomenon
The idea that the world is fair and just, and that everyone gets what they deserve and deserve what they get.
This is why people look unfavourably at victims if they see that they are getting victimized, they will see them as less worthy. Otherwise, it would threaten people's sense of justice.
Subtyping
When someone doesn not fit into a sterotype, they are thought of as seperate and in a distinct category with different properties.
Subgrouping
When someone does not fit with their sterotype, they are thought of as a special subcategory with their own new sterotype.
A sterotype threat
The fear people have that their performance will be judged based on their sterotypes.
The sterotype could undermine performance by causing stress, redirecting their attention to self-monitoring and draining energy from surpressing unwanted thoughts.
Once performance is undermined, people would often disidentify themself from the task.
Conflict
Percieved incompatibility of goals.
You see it as one winning while the other losing.
Signals commitment, investiment and care.
Peace
Lack of hostility with mutually beneficial relationships.
Social trap
A situation in which two people, by logically trying to achieve their goals, work themselves into a corner, caught in mutually distructive behaviour.
Prisoner's Delimma and corresponding concept
2 prisoners given a) light sentences both if neither comfess, b) moderate sentences if both confess or c) the one that confess would get off free while the other that doesn't gets a heavy sentence.
The best answer for both is to not say anything, but this does not happen often due to miscommunication and mistrust so it is a paradox.
Concept: social trap
Tragety of commons
A "common" being a resource that will collpase if anyone consumes more than their fair share actually collapsing because everyone assumes that all others are going to take them all so they set out to hoard the resource first.
Non-zero-sum games
Games where there is no winner or loser and that has no sum of zero. People will win only by cooperating and lose my competing.
AKA: mixed-motive situations
Ways to resolve social delimas:
Regulate everything to be fair
Small groups
Communication
Changing the payoffs
Appeals to altruistic norms
Hostilities vs threats
Hostilities arise in response to conflicts and threats, which in turn will increase the amount of hostility someone will interpret.
Equity
Everyone getting an equal share in relation to how much they contribute.
Nearly everyone will agree to this, however, people will often disagree on what is fair.
The golden rule: who decides what is fair is who makes the money and has social power.
Needs-based distribution
The sharing of resources depending on how much they are needed by everyone.
Equality
Everyone getting the same amount of rewards.
When is conflict more likely to arise?
Not when goals are incompatible, but when there are misconceptions with goals.
Both sides will intitally believe that the other are just victims to circumstance, but rational thinking will go out the window when conflicts escalate and the enemy becomes more sterotypes and simplified.
Conflict will continue until circumstances force both sides to clear up misconceptions and reconcile.
4 different ways of peacemaking
Contact
Communication
Cooperation
Concilliation
Group saliance
When you recognize that an individual coule represent a group and build bridges between people.
Equal status contact
Best for resolving conflict, people meeting with equal amounts of power.
Superordinate goals
Goals that everyone has to work together to achieve. Could help bring peace, but if it is not achieved, it could propel conflicts as people start blaming eachother.
Bargaining
Negotiating between 2 parties to some sort of agreement everyone would be satisfied with.
Mediating
Having a third, unbiased party help 2 groups communicate and offer suggestions for peace.
Strategies by mediators: taking eachother's perspectives for empathy, suggesting proposals otherwise rejected by another group, identify compatable goals, get an integrative agreement instead of just a win-or-lose scenario.
Integrative agreement
A win-win agreement that reconciles both parties' interest to their mutual benefit.
Arbitration
A resolution of a conflict by a third party who studies both side and imposes a settlement.
Final offer arbitrition
Settlements chosen from one of the 2 finals offers on both sides of the conflict. Might motivate people to compromise.
GRIT
Graduated and Reciprocated Initiatives in Tension reduction.
Start out by making a declaration to resolve tension and taking a first step back. The other side sees this as genuine and match/reciprocate the action. This goes on until tension is gone.
Each step is carefully matched and extended upon. There is no big over-response.