Download Prejudice: The Ubiquitous Social Phenomenon by E. Aronson, T.D.

Prejudice: The Ubiquitous Social Phenomenon
by E. Aronson, T.D. Wilson, and R.M. Ekert
Adapted from Social Psychology, 2005
1.
Prejudice is ubiquitous; in one form or another, it affects us all. It would be
wrong to conclude that only minority groups are the targets of prejudice at the hands of
the dominant majority. Of course, this aspect of prejudice is both powerful and
poignant. But prejudice is a two-way street; it often flows from the minority group to the
majority group as well as in the other direction. And any group can be the target of
prejudice.
2.
Prejudice is an attitude. Attitudes are made up of three components: an
affective or emotional component (prejudice), representing both the type of emotion
linked with the attitude (e.g., anger, warmth) and the extremity of the attitude (e.g.,
mild uneasiness, outright hostility); a cognitive component (stereotyping), involving the
beliefs or thoughts (cognitions) that make up the attitude; and a behavioral component
(discrimination) relating to one's actions—people don't simply hold attitudes: they
usually act on them as well.
PREJUDICE: THE AFFECTIVE COMPONENT
3.
Prejudice refers to the general attitude structure and its affective (emotional)
component. Technically, there are positive and negative prejudices. For example, you
could be prejudiced against Texans or prejudiced in favor of Texans. In one case, your
emotional reaction is negative; when a person is introduced to you as "This is Bob
from Texas," you will expect him to act in particular ways that you associate with
"those obnoxious Texans." Conversely, if your emotional reaction is positive, you will
be delighted to meet another one of "those wonderful, uninhibited Texans," and you'll
expect Bob to demonstrate many positive qualities, such as warmth and friendliness.
4.
While prejudice can involve either positive or negative affect, social
psychologists (and people in general) use the word prejudice primarily when referring
to negative attitudes about others. In this context, prejudice is a hostile or negative
attitude toward people in a distinguishable group, based solely on their membership in
that group. For example, when we say that someone is prejudiced against blacks, we
mean that he or she is primed to behave coolly or with hostility toward blacks and that
he or she feels that all blacks are pretty much the same. Thus the characteristics this
individual assigns to blacks are negative and applied to the group as a whole. The
individual traits or behaviors of the individual target of prejudice will either go unnoticed
or be dismissed.
STEREOTYPES: THE COGNITIVE COMPONENT
5.
Close your eyes for a moment and imagine the looks and characteristics of the
following people: a high school cheerleader, a New York cab driver, a Jewish doctor, a
black musician. Our guess is that this task was not difficult. We all walk around with
images of various "types" of people in our heads. The distinguished journalist Walter
Lippmann (1922), who was the first to introduce the term stereotype, described the
distinction between the world out there and stereotypes—"the little pictures we carry
around inside our heads." Within a given culture, these pictures tend to be remarkably
similar. For example, we would be surprised if your image of the high school
cheerleader was anything but bouncy, peppy, pretty, nonintellectual, and (of course!)
female. We would also be surprised if the Jewish doctor or the New York cab driver in
your head was female—or if the black musician was playing classical music.
6.
It goes without saying that there are male cheerleaders, women doctors who
are Jewish, and black classical musicians. Deep down, we know that New York cab
drivers come in every size, shape, race, and gender. But we tend to categorize
according to what we regard as normative. And within a given culture, what people
regard as normative is very similar, in part because these images are perpetuated and
broadcast widely by the media of that culture. Stereotyping, however, goes a step
beyond simple categorization. A stereotype is a generalization about a group of
people in which identical characteristics are assigned to virtually all members of the
group, regardless of actual variation among the members. Once formed, stereotypes
are resistant to change on the basis of new information.
7.
But be aware that stereotyping is not necessarily emotional and does not
necessarily lead to intentional acts of abuse. Often stereotyping is merely a technique
we use to simplify how we look at the world—and we all do it to some extent. For
example, Gordon Allport (1954) described stereotyping as "the law of least effort."
According to Allport, the world is just too complicated for us to have a highly
differentiated attitude about everything. Instead, we maximize our cognitive time and
energy by developing elegant, accurate attitudes about some topics while relying on
simple, sketchy beliefs for others. To the extent that the resulting stereotype is based
on experience and is at all accurate, it can be an adaptive shorthand way of dealing
with complex events. However, if the stereotype blinds us to individual differences
within a class of people, it is maladaptive, unfair, and potentially abusive.
8.
The potential abuse of stereotyping's mental shortcuts can be blatant and
obvious—as when one ethnic group is considered lazy or another ethnic group is
considered greedy. But the potential abuse can be more subtle—and it might even
involve a stereotype about a positive attribute. For example, in 1992, Twentieth
Century Fox produced an amusing film about two-on-two street basketball called
White Men Can't Jump. The implication is that African American men are better at
basketball than white men. Well, it turns out that during the past twenty-five years,
some 75 to 80 percent of the players in the National Basketball Association have
been African American (Gladwell, 1997; Hoose, 1989). This figure is far greater than
one would expect from comparative population statistics (approximately 13 percent of
the U.S. population is African American).
9.
So what here is abusive to the minority? What's wrong with the implication
that black men can jump? The abuse enters when we ignore the overlap in the
distributions—that is, when we ignore the fact that a great many African American
kids are not adept at basketball and a great many white kids are. Thus if we meet a
young African American man and are astonished at his ineptitude on the basketball
court, we are, in a very real sense, denying him his individuality. And there is ample
evidence that this kind of potentially abusive stereotyping occurs (Brinson &
Robinson, 1991; Edwards, 1973).
10.
A particularly interesting manifestation of stereotyping takes place in the
perception of gender differences. Almost universally, women are thought to be more
nurturant and less assertive than men (Deaux & Lewis, 1984). It is possible that this
perception may be entirely role-related—that is, women have traditionally been
assigned the role of homemaker and thus may be seen as more nurturant (see
Deaux and La France, 1998). At the other end of the continuum, evolutionary social
psychologists (Buss. 1995, 1996b; Buss & Kenrick, 1998) suggest that female
behavior and male behavior differ in precisely those domains in which the sexes
have faced different adaptive problems. From a Darwinian perspective, there are
powerful biological reasons why women might have evolved as more nurturant than
men. Specifically, among our ancient ancestors, for anatomical reasons, women
were always the early caregivers of infants; women who were not nurturant did not
have many babies who survived. Therefore, their non-nurturing genes were less
likely to be passed on.
11.
Although there is no clear way of determining whether or not care-giving is
more likely to be part of a woman's genetic nature than a man's, it does turn out that
the cultural stereotype is not far from reality. Research has shown that compared to
men, women do tend to manifest behaviors that can best be described as more
socially sensitive, friendlier, and more concerned with the welfare of others, while
men tend to behave in ways that are more dominant, controlling, and independent
(Eagly, 1994; Eagly & Wood, 1991; Swim, 1994). Indeed, if anything, some of the
data indicate that the stereotype tends to underestimate the actual gender
differences (Swim, 1994). Again, as with our basketball example, considerable
overlap exists between men and women on these characteristics. Nonetheless, as
Eagly (1995, 1996) has argued, the differences are too consistent to be dismissed as
unimportant.
12.
Needless to say, the phenomenon of gender stereotyping often does not
reflect reality and can cut deeply.
In one experiment, for example, when
confronted with a highly successful female physician, male undergraduates
perceived her as being less competent and having had an easier path toward
success than a successful male physician (Feldman-Summers & Kiesler, 1974).
Female undergraduates saw things differently: Although they saw the male physician
and the female physician as being equally competent, they saw the male as having
had an easier time of it. Both males and females attributed higher motivation to the
female physician. It should be noted that attributing a high degree of motivation to a
woman can be one way of implying that she has less skill than her male counterpart
(i.e., "She's not very smart, but she tries hard").
13.
This possibility comes into clear focus when we examine a similar study
(Deaux & Emsweiler, 1974). Male and female students were shown a highly
successful performance on a complex task by a fellow student and were asked how it
came about. When a man succeeded, both male and female students attributed his
achievement almost entirely to his ability; when it was a woman who succeeded,
students of both genders thought the achievement was largely a matter of luck.
Apparently, if the sexual stereotype is strong enough, even members of the
stereotyped group tend to buy it.
14.
But this research was done three decades ago. American society has
undergone a great many changes since then. Have these changes affected the
stereotypes held of women? Not really. In a careful analysis of some fifty-eight more
recent experiments Janet Swim and Lawrence Sanna (1996) found that the results
were remarkably consistent with the earlier research. Specifically, they found that if a
man was successful on a given task, observers of both sexes attributed his success
to ability; if a woman was successful at the same task, observers attributed her
success to hard work. If a man failed on a given task, observers attributed his failure
either to bad luck or to lower effort; if a woman failed, observers felt the task was
simply too hard for her ability level.
DISCRIMINATION: THE BEHAVIORAL COMPONENT
15.
This brings us to the final component of prejudice—the action component.
Stereotypical beliefs often result in unfair treatment. We call this discrimination: an
unjustified negative or harmful action toward the members of a group simply because
of their membership in that group. For example, if you are a fourth-grade math
teacher and you have the stereotypical belief that little girls are hopeless at math, you
might be less likely to spend as much time in the classroom coaching a girl than
coaching a boy. If you are a police officer and you have the stereotypical belief that
African Americans are more violent than whites, this might affect your behavior
toward a specific black man you are trying to arrest.
16.
In one study, researchers compared the treatment of patients in a psychiatric
hospital run by an all-white professional staff (Bond, Di Candia, & McKinnon, 1988).
The researchers examined the two most common methods used by staff members to
handle patients' violent behavior: secluding the individual in a timeout room and
restraining the individual in a straitjacket and administering tranquilizing drugs. An
examination of hospital records over eighty-five days revealed that the harsher
method—physical and chemical restraint—was used with black patients nearly four
times as often as with white patients. This was the case despite the virtual lack of
differences in the number of violent incidents committed by the black and white
patients. Moreover, this discriminatory treatment occurred even though the black
patients, on being admitted to the hospital, had been diagnosed as slightly less
violent than the white patients.
17.
This study did uncover an important positive finding: After several weeks,
reality managed to overcome the effects of the existing stereotype. The staff
eventually noticed that the black and the white patients did not differ in their degree
of violent behavior, and they began to treat black and white patients equally. While
this is encouraging, the overall meaning of the study is both clear and disconcerting:
The existing stereotype resulted in undeserved, harsher initial treatment of black
patients by trained professionals. At the same time, the fact that reality overcame the
stereotype is a tribute to the professionalism of the staff, because, in most cases,
deeply rooted prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination are not easy to change.
A PROGRESS REPORT
18.
Significant changes have taken place in American society in the past 50 years.
For example, the number of blatant acts of overt prejudice and discrimination has
decreased sharply, legislation on affirmative action has opened the door to greater
opportunities for women and minorities, and the media have increased our exposure to
women and minorities doing important work in positions of power and influence. As
one might expect, these changes are reflected in the gradual increase in self-esteem
of people in these groups. Recent research suggests that there might not be any major
differences in global self-esteem between blacks and whites or between men and
women (Aronson, Quinn, & Spencer, 1998; Crocker & Major, 1989; Steele, 1992,
1997).
19.
While this progress is real, it would be a mistake to conclude that prejudice has
ceased to be a serious problem in the United States. Prejudice still exists in countless
subtle and not-so-subtle ways. However, for the most part in America, prejudice has
gone underground and become less overt (Pettigrew, 1985, 1989). Fortunately, during
the past half-century, social psychologists have contributed greatly to our
understanding of the psychological processes underlying prejudice, which has helped
them begin to identify and demonstrate some possible solutions. Perhaps in the future,
prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination will decline significantly.
(2350 words)
PREJUDICE: The Ubiquitous social Phenomenon
GLOBAL QUESTIONS
1. What is the MAIN purpose of this article?
a. To discuss the reasons for people’s prejudices
b. To explain the different aspects of prejudice
c. To analyze why prejudice is so common today
d. To show how prejudice affects all of us
2. What is meant by the expression "prejudice is a two-way street" in
paragraph 1?
Fill in the blank spaces:
Not only does the majority practice prejudice, but
______________________________________as well.
3. Scan the article looking for the sentence that best describes prejudice,
stereotypes, and discrimination.
Prejudice ___________________________________________________________
Stereotypes_________________________________________________________
Discrimination_______________________________________________________
4. According to para. 8, stereotyping can be abusive. Does stereotyping
always result in deliberate mistreatment of others?
Circle one answer:
YES / NO
Quote from the text to support your answer.
Par. # ________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
5. According to the section "A Progress Report", how many factors might have
helped to improve the self esteem of women and minorities?
________________________
6. The writers conclude with both negative and positive aspects of prejudice in
modern society.
What is the danger of prejudice today?
___________________________________________________________________
Close Reading Questions PARAGRAPHS 9-17
7. According to the text, a positive stereotype can be abusive as well.
According to paragraph 9, what is the negative thinking of the viewer when
he meets a person who does not match the positive stereotype of his ethnic
group?
Complete the sentence:
In his thinking, the viewer actually____________________________
______________________________________(no more than 5 words)
8. What main idea is shared by paragraphs 12-13? (One word only in each
space)
When a female rather than a male succeeds on a task her success is
attributed to ____________ or _______________________ and not to
____________________.
9. What is the finding of the research done by Swim and Sanna in 1996?
a. Men's intellectual abilities account for their success on different tasks.
b. American society has experienced serious gender attitude changes in the
last thirty years.
c. The past research on gender stereotyping is outdated and irrelevant.
d. Gender stereotyping has remained largely the same for decades.
10 a. In the research of Bond et al.(1988),what was the stereotypical belief
held by the staff at the psychiatric hospital?
________________________________
What were the findings of the research?
___________________________________________________________