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Social Psychology
David Myers
10e
Copyright 2010 McGraw-Hill Companies
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Chapter Nine
• Prejudice: Disliking Others
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What Is the Nature and Power of
Prejudice?
• Defining Prejudice
– Preconceived negative judgment of a group and
its individual members
• Supported by stereotypes
– Beliefs about the personal attributes of a group of people
Stereotypes
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What Is the Nature and Power of
Prejudice?
• Defining Prejudice
– Discrimination
• Unjustified negative behavior toward a group or its
members
– Racism
• Prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behavior
toward people of a given race
– Sexism
• Prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behavior
toward people of a given sex
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What Is the Nature and Power of
Prejudice?
• Prejudice: Subtle and Overt
– Dual attitude system
• Explicit
– Conscious
• Implicit
– Automatic
IAT – Scientific America Frontiers
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What Is the Nature and Power of
Prejudice?
• Racial Prejudice
– Is racial prejudice
disappearing?
Figure 9.1
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What Is the Nature and Power of
Prejudice?
• Racial Prejudice
– Subtle forms of prejudice
• Labor market discrimination
• Patronization
– Avoiding criticisms
– Overpraising accomplishments
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What Is the Nature and Power of
Prejudice?
• Racial Prejudice
– Automatic prejudice
• Involves primitive regions of the brain (amygdala) are
associated with fear
• Critics note that unconscious associations may only
indicate cultural assumptions, perhaps without
prejudice
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What Is the Nature and Power of
Prejudice?
• Gender Prejudice
– Gender stereotypes
• Strong gender stereotypes exist
• Members of the stereotyped group accept the
stereotypes
• Most believe that men and women are different yet
equal
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What Is the Nature and Power of
Prejudice?
• Gender Prejudice
– Sexism: Benevolent and Hostile
• Attitudes toward women have changed rapidly
• Most see women as understanding, kind, and helpful
– Gender Discrimination
• Disappearing in democratic Western countries
• Non-Western countries gender bias is still strong
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What Are the Social Sources of
Prejudice?
• Social Inequalities: Unequal Status and
Prejudice
– Social dominance orientation
• Motivation to have one’s group dominate other social
groups
• Being in a dominant high-status position tends to
promote this orientation and justification
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What Are the Social Sources of
Prejudice?
• Socialization
– Authoritarian personality
• Personality that is disposed to favor obedience to
authority and intolerance of outgroups and those lower
in status
– Ethnocentricity
» Believing in the superiority of one’s own ethnic and
cultural group, and having a corresponding disdain for all
other groups
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What Are the Social Sources of
Prejudice?
• Socialization
– Religion and Prejudice
• In almost every country, leaders invoke religion to
sanctify the present order
• Use of religion to support injustice helps explain a pair
of findings concerning North American Christianity
– Church members express more racial prejudice than
nonmembers
– Those professing traditional or fundamentalist Christian
beliefs express more prejudice than those professing more
progressive beliefs
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What Are the Social Sources of
Prejudice?
• Socialization
– Conformity
• If prejudice is socially accepted, many people will follow
the path of least resistance and conform to the fashion
• If prejudice is not deeply ingrained in personality, then
as fashions change and new norms evolve, prejudice
can diminish
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What Are the Social Sources of
Prejudice?
• Institutional Supports
– Government
– Schools
– Magazines and newspapers
• Face-ism
– Films and television
TV
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What Are the Motivational Sources of
Prejudice?
• Frustration and Aggression: The Scapegoat
Theory
– Displaced aggression
• Hate crimes
– Realistic group conflict theory
• Prejudice arises from competition between groups for
scarce resources
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What Are the Motivational Sources of
Prejudice?
• Social Identity Theory: Feeling Superior to
Others
– The “we” aspect of our self-concept; the part of
our answer to “Who am I?” that comes from our
group memberships
• We categorize
• We identify
• We compare
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What Are the Motivational Sources of
Prejudice?
• Social Identity Theory: Feeling Superior to
Others
– Ingroup bias
• Tendency to favor one’s own group
• Because of our social identifications, we conform to our
group norms
• When our group succeeds, we feel better by identifying
strongly with it
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What Are the Motivational Sources of
Prejudice?
• Social Identity Theory: Feeling Superior to
Others
– Need for status, self-regard, and belonging
• Terror management
– People’s self-protective emotional and cognitive responses
when confronted with reminders of their mortality
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What Are the Motivational Sources of
Prejudice?
• Motivation to Avoid Prejudice
– Motivation to avoid prejudice can lead people to
modify their thoughts an actions
• Self-conscious people will feel guilt and try to inhibit
their prejudicial response
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What Are the Cognitive Sources of
Prejudice?
• Categorization: Classifying People into Groups
– Spontaneous categorization
• Social identity theory implies that those who feel their
social identity keenly will concern themselves with
correctly categorizing people as us or them
• Necessary for prejudice
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What Are the Cognitive Sources of
Prejudice?
• Categorization: Classifying People into Groups
– Perceived Similarities and Differences
• Outgroup homogeneity effect
– Perception of outgroup members as more similar to one
another than are ingroup members
• Own-race bias
– Tendency for people to more accurately recognize faces of
their own race
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What Are the Cognitive Sources of
Prejudice?
• Distinctiveness: Perceiving People Who Stand
Out
– Distinctive people
• Feeds on self-consciousness
• Stigma consciousness
– Person’s expectation of being victimized by prejudice or
discrimination
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What Are the Cognitive Sources of
Prejudice?
• Distinctiveness: Perceiving People Who Stand
Out
– Vivid cases
• Given limited experience with a particular social group,
we recall examples of it and generalize
– Can prime the stereotype
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What Are the Cognitive Sources of
Prejudice?
• Distinctiveness: Perceiving People Who Stand
Out
– Distinctive events
• Stereotypes assume a correlation between group
membership and individuals’ presumed characteristics
• Attentiveness to unusual occurrences can create
illusory correlations
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What Are the Cognitive Sources of
Prejudice?
• Attribution: Is It a Just World?
– Group-serving bias
• Explaining away outgroup members’ positive behaviors;
also attributing negative behaviors to their dispositions
– Just-world phenomenon
• Tendency of people to believe that the world is just and
that people therefore get what they deserve and
deserve what they get
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What Are the Consequences of
Prejudice?
• Self-Perpetuating Stereotypes
– Whenever a member of a group behaves as
expected, we duly note the fact; our prior belief is
confirmed
– When a member of a group behaves
inconsistently with our expectation, we may
interpret or explain away the behavior as due to
special circumstances
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What Are the Consequences of
Prejudice?
• Self-Perpetuating Stereotypes
– Subtyping
• Accommodating individuals who deviate from one’s
stereotype by thinking of them as “exceptions to the
rule”
– Subgrouping
• Accommodating individuals who deviate from one's
stereotype by forming a new stereotype about this
subset of the group
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What Are the Consequences of
Prejudice?
• Discrimination’s Impact: The Self-Fulfilling
Prophecy
– Social beliefs can be self-confirming
– Prejudice affects its targets
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What Are the Consequences of
Prejudice?
• Stereotype Threat
– Disruptive concern,
when facing a negative
stereotype, that one will
be evaluated based on a
negative stereotype
Figure 9.10
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What Are the Consequences of
Prejudice?
• Do Stereotypes Bias Judgment of Individuals?
– Yes, but people often evaluate individuals more
positively than the groups they compose
• Strong Stereotypes Matter
• Stereotypes Bias Interpretations
– Affect how events are interpreted
• We evaluate people more extremely when their
behavior violates our stereotypes
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