Apl06 prejudice and discrimination

Prejudice
 Literally
means
‘prejudgment’
 Unfavourable
attitude
towards a
social group
and its
members

Discrimination
 Harmful ACTIONS directed toward the
persons or groups who are targets of
prejudice

LaPiere(1934)
 Chinese American couple visited 250 hotels,
caravan parks, tourist homes and restaurants.
 Refused service in only one
 Little prejudice?
 After returning home, 128 of the
establishments were asked “Will you accept
members of the Chinese race as guests in
your establishment?”
 92% No, 7% Uncertain, depends on
circumstances, 1%Yes

Typesofprejudice
 Sexism: almost all research on
sexism focuses on prejudice and
discrimination against women.
 “The typical woman is seen as nice
but incompetent, the typical man as
competent but maybe not so nice”
(Fiske, 1998)
 Traditional sexism can sometimes be
difficult to detect now that is now
illegal and unacceptable.
 Not in all countries: Taliban – women
denied the right to an education, in
Nigeria women have been sentenced
to death by stoning for infidelity, and
in many cultures there are
restrictions placed on women's
choices about their bodies and
reproduction.
 Klasen (1994): sex-selective
abortions and infanticide have led to
76 million 'missing women'.

Racism
 Discrimination on the basis of race or
ethnicity
 Genocide is universal: in recent times it has
been carried out in, for example, Germany,
Iraq, Bosnia and Rwanda

NewRacism
 Because explicit and blatant racism is illegal
and thus socially censored, it is now more
difficult to find.
 New racism involves three components:
 Denial – ‘there’s no racism anymore’
 Antagonism to demands – ‘why should the
government apologise?’
 Resentment about special favours – ‘why
should there be affirmative action?’

DetectingNewRacism
 Unobtrusive measures –
 Social distance - how close, psychologically or physically, people are
willing to get to one another.
 Another context in which underlying prejudice can emerge is when
prejudiced behaviour does not obviously look like prejudice.
 Rogers & Prentice-Dunn (1981) had students shock a confederate of the
experimenter.The confederate was either Caucasian or African-
American, and either acted pleasantly toward the subject or insulted
them.The subjects in the experiment were all Caucasians.
 When the confederate insulted the subject prior to the experiment, they
"shocked" African-American confederates at a higher level than
Caucasian confederates.
 When the African-American confederate was not insulting, they were
less aggressive toward them than a white confederate.
 Conclusion was that reverse racism was in effect without insults – they
were over-compensating for prejudicial views. But when under stress
the real views were expressed.

 Prejudice can also surface inadvertently in
people's relatively automatic cognition.
 E.g. IAT.
 The general principle underlying this
procedure for detecting prejudice is
automaticity
 The notion of automaticity is related to the
idea that categories and their stereotypical
attributes are implicitly linked in memory.

Ageism
 Mitchell (2002) identifies four
distinct generational stereotypes
 Traditionalists (1925 and 1945),
are practical; patient, loyal and
hard-working; respectful of
authority; and rule followers.
 Baby boomers (1946 and 1960),
are optimistic; value teamwork
and cooperation; are ambitious;
and are workaholic.
 Generation X (1961 and 1980) are
skeptical, self-reliant risk-takers
who balance work and personal
life.
 Millennials (1981 and the present)
are hopeful; they value
meaningful work, diversity and
change; and are technologically
savvy.

Discriminationagainsthomosexuals
 In general, since the late 1960s
there has been a progressive
liberalisation of attitudes
towards homosexuals.
 However, the AIDS epidemic has,
since the mid-1980s, whipped up
negative attitudes in some
sections of society towards
homosexuals
 In California the existing right for
same-sex couples to marry was
actually overturned in 2008 –in
which 52 per cent of Californians
voted 'yes' on 'Proposition 8',
actively denying homosexuals
the same rights as heterosexuals.

Allport’sScalesofPrejudice
 Scale 1 - Antilocution
 Scale 2 - Avoidance
 Scale 3 - Discrimination
 Scale 4 - Physical attack
 Scale 5 - Extermination

Antilocution
 A majority group freely make jokes about a
minority group.
 Speech is in terms of negative stereotypes and
negative images (hate speech).
 Commonly seen as harmless by the majority, but
it sets the stage for more severe outlets for
prejudice

Avoidance
 People in a minority group are actively
avoided by members of the majority group.
No direct harm may be intended but harm is
done through isolation

Discrimination
 Minority group is
discriminated
against by
denying them
opportunities
and services.
 Putting
prejudice into
action.

PhysicalAttack
 Majority group vandalise minority group’s
property and carry out violent attacks on
individuals or groups.

Extermination
 Majority group seeks extermination of the minority group and
attempts to eliminate the entire group of people.
 Excerpt from the Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of Genocide
 "Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the
following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
 (a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to
bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Formsofdiscrimination
 Three types of behaviour that do not look
obviously like discrimination but nevertheless
may conceal underlying prejudices:
reluctance to help, tokenism and reverse
discrimination.

Reluctancetohelp
 Studies show that reluctance to help is
manifested only in certain conditions:
specifically, when such reluctance can be
attributed to some factor other than prejudice.
 Gaertner and Dovidio's (1977) foundWhite
participants were more reluctant to help a Black
than aWhite confederate faced with an
emergency, but only when they believed that
other potential helpers were present.

Tokenism
 Tokenism refers to a relatively small or trivial
positive act, a token, towards members of a minority
group.
 Invoked to deflect accusations of prejudice and as a
justification for declining to engage in larger and
more meaningful positive acts or for subsequently
engaging in discrimination.
 Criticism of the token employment of minorities by
organisations that then fail to take more
fundamental and important steps towards equal
opportunities.
 Tokenism at this level can have damaging
consequences for the self-esteem of those who are
employed as token minorities

ReverseDiscrimination
 People with residual prejudiced attitudes may
sometimes go out of their way to favour
members of a group against which they are
prejudiced, more than members of other
groups.
 For the researcher, the challenge is to know
when behaviour that goes out of its way to
favour a minority is reverse discrimination or
is actually a genuine attempt to rectify
disadvantage

EffectsofPrejudice
 Stereotype threat
 Self-fulfilling prophecies

Stereotypethreat
 A person has an awareness of judgments from others
and being treated stereotypically on tasks that really
matter to them.Thus they worry that through their
behaviour they may confirm the stereotypes.

Selffulfillingprophecies
 Expectations and assumptions about a person that
influence our interaction with that person and
eventually change their behaviour in line with our
expectations
 The most famous study of self-fulfilling prophecy is
Rosenthal and Jacobson's (1968) classic experiment
on teachers' expectations in the classroom.
 Students were tested on their “potential to
intellectually bloom throughout the year”.
 Teachers were told the names of the 20% of the
students who were predicted to ‘intellectually
bloom’. But it was a deception.The names were
chosen at random.

 Rosenthal & Jacobson concluded that teacher
expectations can act as self-fulfilling
prophesies because students achievements
comes to reflect those expectations.
 The conclusions of this study were
controversial. It has been criticized on
conceptual and methodological grounds.
There have been several attempts to replicate
this study but not all have been successful.

ExplanationsofPrejudiceand
Discrimination
 Mere exposure effect
 Frustration-aggression hypothesis
 Authoritarian personality (Adorno)
 Social dominance
 Belief congruence

Apl06 prejudice and discrimination

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