Download PREJUDICE:

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
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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
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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
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Prejudice: The Ubiquitous Social Phenomenon / 3
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
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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)
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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. List the three parts of attitudes and their alternate names.
Then fill in the blanks to describe their meanings.
Name of Part
Alternate Name
(ONE WORD)
(ONE WORD)
Explanation
This includes the kind of
_______________________
1.____________________ __________________
and its
(or: ______________) ________________________.
This includes
_______________________
2.____________________ __________________
and
________________________
3.____________________ __________________
This refers to
________________________
3. Fill in the blanks with ONE WORD to summarize the main ideas of paragraphs 3-4:
Although prejudice can be either __________________________ or
______________________, usually it refers to __________________________
feelings.
4. What is the formal definition of a stereotype?
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______________________________________________________________
5. Does stereotyping always result in deliberate mistreatment of others?
Circle one answer:
YES / NO
Quote from the text to support your answer.
Par. # ________
__________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
6. What is the topic of paragraphs 10-14?
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7. Have people’s stereotypes of women changed in the last thirty years?
YES / NO
Quote from the text to support your answer.
Par. # ________
__________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
8. What do the examples and research study in paragraphs 15-17 illustrate?
Fill in the blanks with ONE WORD each.
They show how a ___________________________ may cause people to
______________________________ against others, but
_______________________________ can sometimes change this situation.
9. Are the writers of the article generally optimistic or pessimistic about the future of
prejudice in the United States?
Circle one answer:
OPTIMISTIC / PESSIMISTIC
Which specific facts do they base their attitude on? Give 3 examples.
a. ______________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
b. ______________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
c. ______________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
Close Reading Questions
1. Mr. Cohen hired a Thai worker to do some work in his house. After the man left, Mr.
Cohen noticed that he had left a big mess. He was very angry at the man, and
decided never to hire this Thai worker again.
According to the text, is Mr. Cohen prejudiced against Thai people?
YES / NO
Explain why or why not.
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______________________________________________________________
2. Why do people from the same culture have similar stereotypes?
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3. Why does everyone use the technique of stereotyping?
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4. In paragraph 7, the writer discusses how stereotypes can be positive or negative.
a. When is stereotyping a positive way of dealing with complexity?
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b. When is stereotyping negative?
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5. What idea is illustrated by the example in paragraph 8?
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6. How can a positive stereotype be abusive? (Give an example of this based on the
positive stereotype below.)
Positive Stereotype: All Chinese people are smart.
Abuse: You meet a Chinese person, and _______________________________
________________________________________________________________
7. Why might women be more nurturant than men?
Give two possible explanations.
a. ______________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
b. ______________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
8. Complete the sentence: In paragraph 11, the writers cite research that shows that
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9. a. Aside from stereotypes not reflecting reality, what idea does the research in
paragraphs 12 and 13 show about gender stereotyping?
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
b. What stereotypical ideas about women are reflected in these studies?
________________________________________________________________
10. What idea does the work of Swim and Sanna show?
a. Men's intellectual abilities account for their success on different tasks.
b. American society has gone through serious changes in the last thirty years.
c. The past research on gender stereotyping is outdated and irrelevant.
d. The attitude to women with respect to their successes remained largely the same.
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11. Read about the research study that was done in a psychiatric hospital (paragraphs
16-17). Then fill in the chart below.
The researchers wanted to know if the staff at
Infer: What was the research
the hospital would
question?
_____________________________________
_____________________________________
_____________________________________
Method
Who were the subjects in the study?
The _______________________ and
_____________________ in a psychiatric
hospital.
What was the procedure of the
The researchers looked at
study?
______________________________ for
___________ days.
Results
What did the researchers find?
a. They found that the black patients received
____________________________________
than the white patients even though
____________________________________
____________________________________
____________________________________
and in spite of the fact that
____________________________________
____________________________________
____________________________________
b. The researchers found one positive thing:
____________________________________
____________________________________
____________________________________
Discussion
What was unusual about this case?
The fact that the staff was able to
____________________________________
____________________________________
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