Chapter 10
Prejudice - Unfavourable attitude towards a social group and its members.
Dehumanisation - Stripping people of their dignity and humanity.
Genocide - The ultimate expression of prejudice by exterminating an entire social group.
Three-component attitude model
An attitude consists of cognitive, affective and behavioural components. This threefold
division has an ancient heritage, stressing thought, feeling and action as basic to human
experience.
1 cognitive – beliefs about a group;
2 affective – strong feelings (usually negative) about a group and the qualities it is believed
to possess;
3 conative–intentionstobehaveincertainwaystowardsagroup(theconativecomponent
is an intention to act in certain ways, not the action itself).
Rupert Brown defines prejudice as:
the holding of derogatory social attitudes or cognitive beliefs, the expression of negative
affect, or the display of hostile or discriminatory behaviour towards members of a group on
account of their membership of that group.
Bystander apathy as a function of race of victim
When there were no other potential helpers available, white females offered assistance to a
black or a white confederate who had suffered an emergency. However, when other helpers
were available, they were significantly less inclined to assist the black confederate than the
white confederate: weak bystander apathy in the presence of a white victim was amplified
many times over when the victim was black.
Human beings are remarkably versatile in being able to make almost any social group a target
of prejudice. However, certain groups are the enduring victims of prejudice because they are
formed by social cate- gorizations that are vivid, omnipresent and socially functional, and the
target groups themselves occupy low power positions in society. These groups are those
based on race, ethnicity, sex, age, sexual orientation and physical and mental health.
Sexism - Prejudice and discrimination against people based on their gender.
Research on sex stereotypes has revealed that both men and women believe that men are
competent and independent, and women are warm and expressive.
According to the stereotype content model, competence and warmth/sociability are the two
most fundamental dimensions on which our perceptions of people are organized. ‘The typical
woman is seen as nice but incompetent, the typical man as competent but maybe not so nice.’
These beliefs have substantial cross-cultural generality.
Stereotype
Widely shared and simplified evaluative image of a social group and its members.
Reviews identify four major female subtypes in Western cultures: housewife, sexy woman,
career woman and feminist/athlete/lesbian. The first two embody attributes of warmth and
sociability, the second two attributes of competence. The typical woman is closest to the
housewife or sexy woman subtype. Male subtypes are less clear-cut, but the two main ones
are businessman and ‘macho man’. Here the emphasis is more on competence than warmth.
The typical man falls between the two poles. Generally, both men and women see women as
a more homogeneous group than men
Traditionally, the sex role occupied by men has differed from that occupied by women in
society (men pursue full-time out-of-home jobs, while females are ‘homemakers’)
According to role congruity theory, when people behave in ways that are inconsistent with
role expectations observers react negatively — this research generally focuses on women
attracting negative reactions and a possible backlash when they occupy leadership roles
Social psychological research indicates that there are a small number of systematic differ-
ences between the sexes, but they are not very diagnostic: in other words, knowing
someone’s position on one of these dimensions is not a reliable predictor of that person’s sex
sex stereotypes are more myth than a reflection of reality
One reason why sex stereotypes persist is that role assignment according to gender persists.
Gender - Sex-stereotypical attributes of a person.
Men still have more sociopolitical power than women to define the relative status of different
roles in society. Not surprisingly, women can find it difficult to gain access to higher-status
masculine roles/occupations.
Women can still find it difficult to attain top leadership positions in large organisations, a
phenomenon called the glass ceiling, or they find themselves precariously perched on a glass
cliff because they have been placed in a crisis-leadership role that will attract criticism and is
ultimately doomed to failure.
Glass ceiling
An invisible barrier that prevents women, and minorities, from attaining top leadership
positions.
Glass cliff
A tendency for women rather than men to be appointed to precarious leadership positions
associated with a high probability of failure and criticism.
Women are well represented in middle management, but on the way up, and just within sight
of the top, they hit an invisible ceiling, a glass ceiling. One explanation is that male prejudice
against women with power generates a backlash that constructs the glass ceiling. Again,
either sex can hit a glass ceiling if gender stereotypes are inconsistent with the organisation’s
norms.
Dane Archer and his colleagues coined the term face-ism to describe how depictions of men
often give greater prominence to the head, while depictions of women give greater
prominence to the body.
Ambivalent sexism inventory, which differentiates between hostile and benevolent attitudes to
women on dimensions relating to attractiveness, dependence and identity. Sexists have
benevolent attitudes (heterosexual attraction, protection, gender role complementarity)
towards traditional women (e.g. pink-collar job holders, ‘sexy chicks’, housewives) and
hostile attitudes (heterosexual hostility, domination, competition) towards non-traditional
women (e.g. career women, feminists, athletes, lesbians). The expression of benevolent
sexism is typically evaluated less negatively than hostile sexism because it does not look so
obviously like sexism, so not surprisingly benevolent sexist behaviour is more evident in
public settings and hostile sexist behaviour in private settings
racism
Prejudice and discrimination against people based on their ethnicity or race.
People may still be racist at heart, but in a different way – they may represent and express
racism differently, perhaps more subtly. This new form of racism has been called aversive
racism, modern racism, symbolic racism, regressive racism and ambivalent racism. they all
share the view that people experience a conflict between, on the one hand, deep- seated
emotional antipathy towards racial outgroups, and on the other, modern egalitarian values
that exert pressure to behave in a non-prejudiced manner
Modern or subtle forms of racism reflect how people resolve an underlying antipathy based
on race with their belief in equality between groups – in essence, it is a type of cognitive
dissonance resolution process
The resolution is achieved by avoidance and denial of racism – separate lives, avoidance of
the topic of race, denial of being prejudiced, denial of racial disadvantage and thus opposition
to affirmative action or other measures to address racial disadvantage.
Concealed prejudice can be detected by unobtrusive methods that reveal underlying
stereotypical associations. This idea is the basis of the implicit association test (IAT).
Implicit association test
Reaction-time test to measure attitudes – particularly unpopular attitudes that people might
conceal.
ageism
Prejudice and discrimination against people based on their age. Elderly people are generally
treated as relatively worthless and powerless members of the community. They are denied
many basic human rights, and their special needs go untended.
Stigma
Group attributes that mediate a negative social evaluation of people belonging to the group.
The targets of prejudice and discrimination are members of stigmatised groups; thus they are
stigmatised individuals. The subjective experience of stigma hinges on two factors:
visibility/concealability and controllability.
Visible stigmas, such as race, gender, obesity and age mean that people cannot easily avoid
being the target of stereotypes and discrimination – being a member of a visibly stig- matised
group makes the experience of prejudice inescapable (Steele & Aronson, 1995). Visibly
stigmatised people cannot conceal the stigma to cope with the stereotypes, prejudice and
harassment that the stigma may trigger.
Concealable stigmas, such as homosexuality, some illnesses and some ideologies and reli-
gious affiliations, allow people to avoid the experience of prejudice. Gregory Herek (2007)
refers to this kind of concealment as an internalised stigma. However, the cost of
concealment can be high
Controllable stigmas are those that people believe, rightly or wrongly, are chosen rather than
assigned: for example, obesity, smoking and homosexuality are thought to be control- lable –
people are believed to be responsible for having chosen to be these things. Uncontrollable
stigmas are those that people believe others have little choice in possessing: for example,
race, sex and some illnesses.
Stigma persists for a number of obvious reasons: positive sense of self and social identity of
majority. (we are better than them); legitimization of inequalities (they deserve it); sense of
certainty and controllability (only my worldview is valid); adaptive process- evolutionary
process
Negative consequences: self-worth and well-being, stereotype threat, self-fulfilling
prophesies, dehumanization, violence and henocide
Members of stigmatised groups tend to internalise these evaluations to form an unfavourable
self-image that can depress self-esteem in relevant contexts. Self-esteem - Feelings about and
evaluations of oneself.
For example, research reveals that women generally share men’s negative stereotypes of
women, often evaluate themselves in terms of such stereotypes and, under circumstances
where sex is the salient basis of self- perception, actually report a reduction in self-esteem.
On a day-to-day basis, self-esteem can be assailed by prejudice, ranging from crude racial
epithets and blatant physical attack to slights such as being ignored by a salesperson in a store
or being served last in a bar.
Organisational commitment and job satisfaction as a function of perceived basis of
being hired
A pitfall of tokenism. Women managers who felt they had been hired as a token woman
reported less organisational commitment and less job satisfaction than women who felt they
had been hired because of their ability.
reverse discrimination may boost minority students’ self-confidence. In the long run,
however, some students will develop unrealistic opinions of their abilities and future
prospects, resulting in damage to self-esteem when such hopes collide with reality.
Stereotype threat
Feeling that we will be judged and treated in terms of negative stereotypes of our group, and
that we will inadvertently confirm these stereotypes through our behaviour.
People who are stigmatised are aware that others may judge and treat them stereotypically.
So, on tasks that really matter to them, and particularly when they feel the context is
dominated by a cultural world view that differs from that of their own group, they worry that
through their behaviour they may confirm the stereotypes – that their behaviour will become
a self-fulfilling prophecy. These concerns increase anxiety and negative thoughts, and limit
working memory. They can also impair task performance.
Prejudiced attitudes lead to overt or covert discriminatory behaviour, and in time this can
create disadvantage. In this way, a stereotypical belief can create a material reality that con-
firms the belief: it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Self-fulfilling prophecy
Expectations and assumptions about a person that influence our interaction with that person
and eventually change their behaviour in line with our expectations.
IQ gain among elementary schoolchildren as a function of teachers’ stereotypical
expectations
Pygmalion in the classroom. Elementary schoolchildren showed IQ gains over their first and
second years at school; however, the gains were much greater for the ‘bloomers’ – a
randomly selected group that the teacher was led to believe had greater IQ potential.
Dehumanisation was first explored scientifically by Herbert Kelman (1976). It is a process
through which people are denied membership in a community of interconnected individuals
and are cast outside the ‘moral circle’, to a place where the rights and considerations attached
to being human no longer apply. Paradoxically, dehumanisation and its effects can be
exacerbated when people feel socially connected – more precisely, being satis- factorily
socially connected to some people (one’s ingroup) can allow one to safely dehumanise
outgroup members.
Dehumanisation denies people human uniqueness and human nature.