Module 4 :

STEREOTYPES AND PREJUDICE

STEREOTYPES
Stereotypes are “Generalized beliefs, association of traits and
expectations about social groups and their members.

Stereotypes can be positive ("black men are good at basketball") or

negative ("women are bad drivers").

Stereotypes based on gender, ethnicity, or occupation are common in

many societies.

Gender Stereotypes (typical traits posses by males and females which

distinguish the two genders) and the Glass ceiling effect (barrier that
prevents women, as a group, from reaching top positions in the
workplace).
Differentiate glass ceiling
effect and glass cliff effect
Glass ceiling exists such that women encounter more barriers than men in
their careers, and as a result find it difficult to move into top positions.
Women are especially likely to be affected in the workplace by the “think
manager–think male” bias.

Women are most likely to be appointed to leadership positions when a crisis

has occurred, the position is more precarious, and there is a greater risk of
failure, which has been referred to as the glass cliff effect. When men’s
stereotypic attributes appear to have led the organization downhill, then
women’s presumed stereotypic communal attributes are seen as suitable in
a new leader.
PREJUDICE
◦ A hostile or negative attitude toward a distinguishable group
based on generalizations derived from faulty or incomplete
information
◦ Very difficult to change prejudice through information

DISCRIMINATION
When people act on negative stereotypes, the result is
discrimination ;Negative behaviour towards persons because of their
membership in a particular group
Discrimination can lead to exclusion from jobs, neighbourhoods or
educational opportunities and can result in members of particular
groups receiving lower salaries and benefits.
What do you think when someone says :
‘He’s a Marwari”
“She’s Chinese”
“A woman driver’
“He loves dance and other art forms”
Self-esteem of the Oppressed
Kenneth and Mamie Clark (1947) conducted a series of
experiment to study the psychological effects of segregation
on African-American children. Findings:
 Demonstrated that black children, as young as 3, rejected black
dolls. Felt that white dolls were prettier and generally superior
 The Clarks concluded that “prejudice, discrimination, and
segregation” created a feeling of inferiority among African-
American children and damaged their self-esteem
 Key point in 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation
decision

Goldberg (1968) published research on prejudices against women

 Women rated articles as superior if “written” by a
man (John vs. Joan McKay)
“Trying to educate a bigot is like shining a light into
the pupil of an eye – it constricts.”
- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
 “The human mind must think with the aid of
categories….once formed, categories are the basis for normal
prejudgment. We cannot possibly avoid this process.
Orderly living depends on it.”

- The Nature of Prejudice (Allport, 1954)

Stereotype Threat
Claude Steele a social psychologist in 1990s proposed that in situations
where a negative stereotype can apply to certain groups, members of
these groups can fear being seen “through the lens of diminishing
stereotypes and low expectations” (1999, p. 44). Steele (1997) called
this predicament stereotype threat, for it hangs like “a threat in the
air” when the individual is in the stereotype-relevant situation.
Steele and his colleagues (2002) later broadened the scope of their
analysis to include social identity threats more generally.
According to Steele’s theory, stereotype threat can
hamper achievement in academic domains in two ways. First, reactions
to the “threat in the air” can directly interfere with performance—for
example, by increasing anxiety and triggering distracting thoughts.
Second, if this stereotype threat is chronic in the academic domain, it
can cause individuals to disidentify from that domain—to dismiss the
domain as no longer relevant to their self-esteem and identity.
How stereotypes form: Cognitive Foundations
Regardless of historical, political and socio-cultural differences
stereotypes operate within us.
Social Categorization : The classification of persons into groups on the
basis of common attributes.
In-group and out-group (Groups with which an individual feel or may not
feel a sense of membership, belonging, and identity)
 We use group membership as a source of pride and self worth.
 The Us versus –Them Effect (How we exaggerate the differences
between our ingroup and other outgroups, and this exaggeration of
differences helps to form and reinforce stereotypes)
Intergroup Bias
Our tendency to evaluate one's own membership group (the in-group) or its
members more favorably than a non-membership group (the out-group) or
its members.
How stereotypes form: Cognitive Foundations
Out-group Homogeneity :
• The tendency to assume that there is a greater similarity among
members of out-groups than in-groups.
• Many and subtle differences among “us,” but “they” are all alike
(Linville & Jones, 1980).

Why do people tend to perceive outgroups as homogeneous?

•People tend to have less personal contact and familiarity with
individual members of outgroups.
•People often do not encounter a representative sample of outgroup
members
How stereotypes form: Cognitive Foundations

Why do people tend to perceive outgroups as homogeneous?

Research using brain imaging or cognitive methods has found that as
soon as we categorize an unfamiliar person as a member of our ingroup
or an outgroup, we immediately process information about them
differently:
Experiments by Kurt Hugenberg and Olivier Corneille (2009) on college
students. Participants were exposed to unfamiliar faces of people who
were the same race as the participants. These faces were categorized
as ingroup members (from the same university as the participants) or
outgroup members (from a rival university) depending upon how
holistically they integrated the features of the faces into a global
representation of the overall face.
How stereotypes form: Cognitive Foundations

Why do people tend to perceive outgroups as homogeneous?

Study done by Jay Van Bavel, William Cunningham, and
their colleagues (2008; 2011; 2012)
Participants saw photographs of unfamiliar white and black
faces.
When the faces were said to be members of their ingroup,
participants showed greater neural activity in particular areas
of the brain, the fusiform gyrus and the orbitofrontal cortex.
Greater activation in the orbitofrontal cortex was also
associated with stronger self-reported preference for ingroup
faces.
How do stereotypes distort perceptions?
1) Contrast effect : A tendency to perceive stimuli that differ from
expectations as being even more different than they really are
• We MAGNIFY the difference between what we expect and the actual stimulus.

2) Confirmation Biases and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

•The effect of stereotypes on individuals’ perceptions is a type of confirmation
bias, which involves people’s tendencies to interpret, seek, and create
information that seems to confirm their expectations.
• Jeff Stone and his colleagues (1997) study in which college students listen to
a radio broadcast of a college basketball game.
•Some were led to believe that a particular player was white; others were led
to believe he was black.
•After listening to the game, all of the students were asked to evaluate how the
player had performed in the game.
• Consistent with racial stereotypes, those students who believed the player
was black rated him as having played better and more athletically, whereas
those who thought he was white rated him as having played with more
intelligence and hustle
How do stereotypes distort perceptions?

2) Confirmation Biases and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Stereotypes can create self-fulfilling prophecies when a perceiver’s false expectations

about a person cause the person to behave in ways that confirm those expectations.
A classic experiment by Carl Word and others (1974) involving a situation of great
importance in people’s lives: the job interview.
White participants, without realizing it, sat farther away, made more speech errors, and
held shorter interviews when interviewing black applicants than they did when
interviewing white applicants. This colder interpersonal style, in turn, caused the black
applicants to behave in a nervous and awkward manner.
The whites’ racial stereotypes and prejudice actually hurt the interview performance of the
black candidates. Since the black candidates’ interview performance tended to be
objectively worse than that of the white candidates, it seemed to confirm the interviewers’
negative stereotypes—but this poor performance was caused by the interviewers, not the
interviewees.
How do stereotypes distort perceptions?
(3) Illusory Correlation : An overestimate of the association
between variables that are only slightly or not at all
correlated (Chapman,1967)

It results from two different processes:

a) People tend to overestimate the association between two
relatively unusual/ distinct events. Ex. news about a person
who was recently released from a mental institution (Meiser &
Hewstone, 2006; Risen et al., 2007; Sherman et al., 2009)
b) People tend to overestimate the association between
variables they already expect to go together (Hamilton & Rose,
1980; Susskind, 2003).
Stereotyped groups and stereotypic behaviors. Ex.: Women
are worse drives that’s why they get into car accidenets.
(4)Attributions and Subcategorizations:
People also maintain their stereotypes through how they explain
the behaviors of others.

When people see the stereotyped person acting in ways that

contradict a stereotype, they may be more likely to think about
situational factors in order to explain the surprising behavior
(Karpinski & von Hippel, 1996; Sekaquaptewa et al., 2003;
Sherman et al., 2005).
Ex.: A woman defeating a man in an athletic contest
 (4)Attributions and Subcategorizations :
Stereotypes persist because of limited specific subcategories.
Subcategorization/ Subtyping occurs when atypical examples are
excluded from consideration in judging a category.
Study by Crocker and Weber on Corporate lawyers:
•The subtyping model, in which new stereotypic structures are
developed to accommodate instances not easily assimilated by
existing stereotypes if these new stereotypies structures are
representative of that group.
•Corporate lawyers elicited highly uniform stereotypes. For each
occupation, three stereotypic traits were selected on the basis of
pretesting. Stereotypic traits chosen for the corporate lawyer
included well dressed, industrious, and intelligent
•Sentences describing congruent and incongruent instances of
each trait were rated by two judges which was highly
representative.
(4)Attributions and Subcategorizations :

Why do stereotypes remain the same ?

• People were less likely to revise their stereotypes because they
were atypical cases who were not representative members of
their group.

Thus to overcome negative expectations, people of stereotyped

groups should strive to be atypical or different and to change
stereotypes they should be representative of their groups.
Desforges et al. 1991 : Atypical cases can cause revision of
stereotypes.

The contact hypothesis predicts that cooperative interaction with

members of a disliked group results in increased liking for those
members and generalizes to more positive attitudes toward the group.
The authors sought to provide evidence consistent with the hypothesis
that contact affects attitude in part by eliciting a more positive portrait of
the atypical group member.

Undergraduates participated in a 1-hr dyadic learning session (scripted

cooperative learning, jigsaw cooperative learning, or individual study)
with a confederate portrayed as a former mental patient. Participants
initially expected the confederate to display traits similar to those of a
typical former mental patient. After the sessions, initially prejudiced
participants in the 2 cooperative conditions described the typical mental
patient more positively and adopted more positive attitudes and wider
atitudes of acceptance toward the mental patient as a group.
Desforges et al. 1991 : Atypical cases can cause revision of
stereotypes.

3 step chain of events:

 Through social categorization we expect people to fit certain
moulds.
 After exposure to the person we adjust our impressions and
make the social categories less relevant.
 This mismatch leads us to generalize from person to group.
 Stereotyping : Is it inevitable?
1. Implicit and Automatic
Patricia Devine (1989) automatic processes in stereotyping:
People develop stereotypes through socialization from their
culture.
Stereotypes work subconsciously when it gets automatically
activated whenever we are exposed to members of the
group for which popular stereotypes exist.
 Stereotypes work because they free up our cognitive
resources and help us to “multitask”.
Thus we judge others on the basis of “old” perceptions and
we have more cognitive resources available for other tasks.
Stereotyping : Is it inevitable?
1. Implicit Associations and Automatic
Devine’s theory
 Devine exposed white college students in one study to subliminal
presentations on a computer monitor.
For one group, these presentations consisted of words relevant to
stereotypes about black people, such as Africa, ghetto, welfare, and
basketball.
Subliminally presented information is presented so quickly that perceivers
do not even realize that they have been exposed to it. Thus, these students
were not consciously aware that they had seen these words.
Those who were sublimi-primed with many of these words activated the
African American stereotype and saw their behavior in a more negative,
hostile light. Especially noteworthy is the fact that these effects occurred
even among participants who did not consciously believe in the stereotypes
in question.
Implicit and Automatic
Payne (2001) demonstrated that when participants were
firstly exposed to the faces of Black (vs White) people, they
were faster at identifying guns (Experiment 1), and also
misidentified more tools as guns (Experiment 2). This
research demonstrates that where racial stereotypes are
prolific, such as the United States of America where being
Black has been associated with being more violent, people
may be more likely to form implicit associations between
racial cues and traits that are congruent with the
stereotype.
Implicit and Automatic
Sadler and Devos (2020) demonstrated that the effect of
racial cues (e.g., Black vs White) on perceptual accuracy for
objects (e.g., classifying an object as a weapon or as
harmless) was weaker in U.S. neighbourhoods where ethnic
diversity was higher. These findings indicate that implicit
associations can be dynamic and shaped in response to
one’s more immediate social environment. In fact, such
automatic prejudice effects are particularly difficult to
inhibit following alcohol consumption (Bartholow, Dickter, &
Sestir, 2006).
2. Explicit and Controlled : Factors can help us overcome
stereotypes:

When personal information is available

Perceiver’s cognitive ability to see individual differences.
 Drunk/sober
Motivation
 Not thinking about stereotypes and biases can lead us to “rebound”
and succumb to stereotypes.
We can’t control stereotypes. Stereotyping will be stable as long as the
nature of the intergroup relationship that exists between those groups
is stable (e.g., Eagly, 1987; Oakes et al., 1994; Pettigrew, 1981; Tajfel,
1981).
A study by Dasgupta and Asgari (2004) on “gender stereotypies”
Prejudice

Nature of prejudice

Theories of Prejudice
Prejudice
Prejudice has been traditionally considered the feeling component of
attitudes toward social groups.
It reflects a negative response to another person based solely on that
person’s membership in a particular group—which Gordon Allport, in his
1954 book The Nature of Prejudice, referred to as “antipathy” that is
generalized to the group as a whole.
Those who are high in prejudice toward a particular social group believe
the groups have underlying essences—often some biologically based
feature that distinguishes that group from other groups, which can serve
as justification for their differential treatment (Yzerbyt, Corneille, &
Estrada, 2001).
As a result of consistently categorizing people in terms of their group
membership, one’s feelings about that group are legitimized, which
results in discrimination (Talaska, Fiske, & Chaiken, 2008).
 Prejudice
Even when overall prejudice level
is similar toward different groups
distinct emotions can form the
primary basis of prejudicial
responses. For example, these
respondents’ primary emotional
response toward Native Americans
was pity, but their primary
emotional response toward gay
men was disgust (Cottrell &
Neuberg, 2005)..
Depending on what emotion
underlies prejudice toward a
particular group, the discriminatory
actions that might be expected
could be rather different.
According to this perspective, prejudice reduction efforts may need to tackle the specific
intergroup emotion on which prejudice toward a group is based. For example, to the
extent that fear is reduced when prejudice is based on that emotion, then discrimination
can also be reduced (Miller, Smith, & Mackie, 2004).
The Origins of Prejudice: Contrasting Perspectives
Baron, R.A & Branscombe, N.R (2012). Social Psychology, (13th Ed).
Pearson education.
Pg. 197-203
Individual differences in prejudice

[Link] Personality

Arises as a defensive reaction against over – strict parenting methods.

 Child unable to express hostility against parents.
 Redirects aggression against minority and other lower groups.
 Displaced aggression continues into adulthood.
 However this does not explain individual differences in Prejudice.
 Reducing prejudice

1. On Learning Not to Hate

Social learning view (of prejudice)

The view that prejudice is acquired through direct and vicarious experiences
in much the same manner as other attitudes.
In a sample of fourth and fifth graders, it was found that parental and
children’s racial attitudes were positively related only among children with
relatively high identification with their parents (Sinclair, Dunn, & Lowery,
2005).
Institutions, which can be molded to value diversity or prejudice, can exert
considerable influence on the adults who identify with them.
Guimond (2000) study on Canadian military personnel
[Link] Dominance Orientation

Our societies are governed by implicit ideologies that either

promote or accentuate intergroup status hierarchies.
People vary in the extent to which they either accept or reject
ideas ingrained in society.
People high in social dominance orientation favor intergroup
hierarchies.
Tendency of dominance of some groups over others provide
individual differences in expression of prejudice.
[Link] and Self-Regulation

Discrepancy between attitudes and behaviours motivate people

to change attitudes.
Similarly dissonance in prejudicial attitudes and behaviours can
lead to change in attitude and prejudice.
Detect Discrepancy  Self Regulation  Monitor Prejudicial
Behaviour  Decrease in Prejudice.
Once we decide to become less biased then we work towards this
goal.
Hence this explains individual differences in Prejudice.
 Reducing prejudice

2. Contact Hypothesis :
Contact between members of different social groups ,under
appropriate conditions can lead to reductions in intergroup bias.
Allport : Conditions necessary for contact to be successful at reducing
prejudice.
1. Equal status. The contact should occur in circumstances that give the two groups
equal status.
2. Personal interaction. The contact should involve one-on-one interactions among
individual members of the two groups.
3. Cooperative activities. Members of the two groups should join together in an
effort to achieve superordinate goals.
4. Social norms. The social norms, defined in part by relevant authorities, should
favor intergroup contact.
Additional conditions :
(1) Interaction should be pleasant and rewarding.
(2) There should be sustained closed contact (Frequency, duration
and closed contact)
(3) Extended Contact : Knowledge that people in your group have
friends in out-group. Study by Page-Gould and others (2008)
Latinos/as and whites interact across three friendship-building
meetings

Criticisms :
Fails to specify how effects of contact would generalize beyond
immediate situation to others.
Subtyping can happen
Very complex and requires many conditions.
2. Common In-group Identity Model :

•Contact can lead to recategorization from two groups (Us and them) to one
group.
•After contact new in-group identity is formed with both in-group and out-
group members.
To the extent individuals in different groups view themselves as members of a
single social entity, intergroup bias will be reduced.
•Factors apart from contact can also lead to common in-groups.

This suggests that when people from different groups are able to construe
themselves as members of a common ingroup, their interactions will be less
biased and more productive (Cunningham & Chelladurai, 2004).
Limitations of the model

Motivational
a. Subgroups may not have equal interest in forming a common identity. There
is considerable evidence that different subgroups have different preferences
for the definition and relative importance of sub- and superordinate groups.
b. Whites, Blacks
c. Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Israelis
Threat
d. In theory, establishing common identity does not require the loss of
identification with subgroups .
e. Nonetheless, highly identified people may perceive superordinate
identification as a threat to subordinate identity .
3. Crossed Categorization :

Encouraging people to use many different ways of categorizing

people rather than only traditional ways (Race,gender,etc)
Realize that social categories are fluid and flexible and dynamic.
Many different ways in which a person can be redefined.
Impact of one’s negatively valued identity will reduce.
Brewer (2000)- Reducing prejudice through cross-categorization:
Effects of multiple social identities. In this book Brewer talks
about individuals whose cognitive pictures of their ingroup are
more complex or inclusive are more tolerant and accepting of
outgroup members.
 4. The Benefits of Guilt for Prejudice Reduction

In a set of studies, Powell,

Branscombe, and Schmitt
(2005) found evidence that
feeling collective guilt can
reduce racism.
When perceptions of inequality
as stemming from white
advantage are combined with a
sense of efficacy to bring about
social change, feeling collective
guilt can lead to
antidiscrimination behavior
(Stewart, Latu, Branscombe, &
Denney, 2010).
Discrimination
Intergroup Discrimination : Behavioural Manifestation of
Prejudice.

Racism
Sexism /Sexuality
Ageism
Casteism

Stigmatization : When a person’s social category puts them at a

lower status than a dominant group and ascribe to them negative
characteristics.