Explanations for Prejudice

12 Key excerpts on "Explanations for Prejudice"

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  eBook - ePub

  An Introduction to Social Psychology

  • Miles Hewstone, Wolfgang Stroebe, Klaus Jonas, Miles Hewstone, Wolfgang Stroebe, Klaus Jonas(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • BPS Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  try to explain such behaviour.

  In order to give our journey through the field some structure we take an approach that is roughly chronological, starting with classic approaches to prejudice and finishing with more contemporary explanations that do more justice to its diversity. At the same time, and overlapping with this, we structure our treatment in terms of the levels of explanation that have been offered for prejudice. One important dimension distinguishing different approaches concerns the level of analysis, or whether the individual or group should form the central explanatory focus: does prejudice primarily stem from processes within individuals, or from relations between groups?

  We start with the more individual-level explanations (personality-based, cognitive), moving on to more group-based explanations. Personality-based explanations arose in the heyday of psychoanalysis in the 1930s and 1940s, and saw personal needs and motives as primary. Although the psychodynamic theories went out of vogue, the interest in individual differences (and motives) has remained. With the cognitive revolution in the 1970s, explanations emphasized the cognitive mechanisms and functions of social categorization and stereotyping common to all of us that could underlie prejudice (see also Chapter 4). Although these approaches clearly differ, they both share a focus on the individual.

  In contrast, group-level approaches focus on the perceiver, as well as the target, as a member of a group, with group-level needs and interests. Intergroup explanations have benefited from the legacy of both the personality and cognitive traditions, and incorporate both motivational and cognitive processes. The group level of analysis makes the way we conceptualize prejudice more complex, but also more amenable to its diverse forms and the different contexts in which it can arise. The complex social relations between groups provide the opportunity for diverse comparisons and perceptions, which extend the negative (and positive) reactions to target groups in a number of different emotional directions (e.g., people can respond to members of different outgroups with feelings of fear, anger or even admiration) resulting in quite different feelings of prejudice and different discriminatory responses (e.g., avoidance, confrontation, paternalism). A key element that remains, in line with the modern definition, is that prejudice often serves the perceiver’s interests in some way, and this is a recurring theme at all levels of explanation that indeed helps to explain

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  Understanding Prejudice, Racism, and Social Conflict

  • Martha Augoustinos, Katherine Jane Reynolds, Martha Augoustinos, Katherine Jane Reynolds(Authors)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Thirdly, we provide a brief overview of prejudice research within psychology, identifying four broad and distinct levels of explanation into which psychological theories can be classified: the individual, the cognitive, the intergroup, and the socio-cultural. Similarly, we have organized the parts of this book to correspond to these different explanatory levels. Lastly, we describe the contents of each chapter in this book, detailing the central arguments and theoretical orientation of each. Prejudice A plethora of terms within social psychology have been used to describe the concept of prejudice including: discrimination, ethnocentrism, ingroup favouritism, ingroup bias, outgroup derogation, social antagonism, stereotyping, and social distance. Many of the definitions of prejudice that have been popular at various times in social psychology are consistent with different theoretical approaches. Typically though, prejudice or related terms refer to negative attitudes or behaviours towards a person because of his or her membership of a particular group. However, use of such terms also conveys, more or less explicitly, a value dimension that such treatment is bad and unjustified (Ashmore and DelBoca, 1981; Duckitt, 1992). For example, prejudice was defined as being, ‘without sufficient warrant’ (Allport, 1954: 7), ‘a failure of rationality’ (Harding et al., 1969: 6), and ‘irrational, unjust, or intolerant’ (Milner, 1975: 9). Consistent with this view, prejudice traditionally has been understood as: (a) a negative orientation towards members of particular groups, (b) bad and unjustified, (c) irrational and erroneous, and (d) rigid. Irrational, because prejudice is not seen to be tied to the social reality of the perceiver. Erroneous, because such views are the outcome of cognitive distortions due to, amongst other things: information processing limitations, the impact of mood effects, and dysfunctional personalities (e.g., authoritarianism).

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  Understanding Vulnerability

  A Nursing and Healthcare Approach

  • Vanessa Heaslip, Julie Ryden, Vanessa Heaslip, Julie Ryden(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Box 5.5 in Chapter 5). While these and other possible reasons may appear very distinct, many of these explanations can relate to the concept of control.

  So far in this chapter, we have explored how cognitive and social psychology offer us many explanations of how and why we discriminate against each other. A set of theories and research which have contributed enormously to our understanding of the human ­propensity to treat each other badly is the psychology of prejudice.

  Box 7.9 Activity

  Consider the following questions and answer them based on your current knowledge, ­experience, and beliefs.

  • Are we bound to be prejudiced in some way, whatever we do?
  • Can prejudice be a good thing?
  • Are some individuals more likely to be prejudiced than others?
  • Can we become more or less prejudiced depending on the situation we find ourselves in?
  • Can we ‘catch’ prejudice, become ‘infected’ with it?

  We will come back to them after you have considered the psychological evidence.

  Prejudice: Psychological perspectives

  Understanding how prejudice comes about is extremely helpful in explaining why people are discriminated against and oppressed but also offers an evidence base of how to combat prejudice and thus reduce vulnerability. Before we continue to consider the evidence base, we shall start by exploring your perspectives in the activity in Box 7.9 .

  How has prejudice been defined and explained by psychology?

  Attribution theory is a well-established explanation of how we steer ourselves through complex social interactions generally, and false attributions in everyday life are often fleeting and have little impact on people’s lives. However, we have seen the harm that can be done when our attributions are wrong, and negative, in the more intense world of health and social care, as they can lead to prejudice.

  Psychologists have also studied prejudice as a separate entity. The motivation for most of the early findings sprang from horror at the atrocities of the Holocaust in World War II and a growing movement to end the oppression of African Americans in the USA in the same period. As a result, although the foundations of social psychology had already been laid, the 1940s and 1950s saw a huge addition to this body of knowledge. The framework for our current understanding of prejudice was created during this period, and the most notable psychologist in that enterprise was Gordon Allport. His 1954 treatise The Nature of Prejudice

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  Social Psychology

  • Richard Gross, Rob McIlveen(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Table 10.3: Possible combinations of partners participants could choose to work with. ‘S’ means the same race and ‘O’ means another race; (+) indicates the same belief and (–) different belief to participant. Figures in the right-hand column show actual choices made by the participants. Adapted from Rokeach (1968, pp. 69–71)

  In summary, individual levels of explanation put forward by social psychologists to explain prejudice and discrimination all suffer quite severe shortcomings, as we have seen. Nevertheless, explanations that focus on the individual remain of interest in research terms and are intuitively appealing to people. Why is this? It may be that this can be explained in part by reference to the attribution approach in Chapter 5 , for example, the correspondence bias (Section 5.4.1 ) is where people have a strong tendency to attribute behaviour to dispositions. This bias results in a focus on individual aspects such as personality, beliefs, frustration–aggressive behaviour, which are precisely the types of explanation we have been considering.

  10.4   Realistic group conflict

  Group membership itself may be an important explanation for prejudice and discrimination. So far we have largely ignored the effects and consequences of belong to a group and how people treat members of their own group compared with members of other groups to which they do not belong or identify with. Social psychologists have looked at this from two perspectives; first, where two or more groups are in competition for resources, and, second, how group membership per se affects a person’s attitudes and behaviour. In this section we consider the former perspective and in Section 10.5 the effects of social categorisation in the absence of competition for resources.

  In a series of highly influential and pioneering experiments Sherif (1966) investigated intergroup conflict and co-operation in groups of 11–12 year old boys attending summer school camp in America. The field experiments lasted three weeks and were characterised by three stages each lasting a week:

  Stage 1:

  The boys were put in one of two conditions for the first week. In condition (a) the boys spent a week together where they were involved in various informal activities. In condition (b) the boys spent a week in one of the groups in which they were to be placed in Stage 2, but the two groups were unaware of each other’s existence.

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  Prejudice

  Its Social Psychology

  • Rupert Brown(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  and vice versa .

  This is the position I have taken in this book. By accident of training I am a social psychologist, and it is this perspective that I attempt to develop in the following chapters. But I hope that, by the time the final page is reached, it will be clear that social psychology, whilst it contains the potential to contribute significantly both to the dissection and to the dissolution of prejudice, can never do more than explain a part – and perhaps only a small part – of the phenomenon as a whole.

  Summary

  1 Prejudice is often defined as a faulty or unjustified negative judgement held about members of a group. However, such definitions run into conceptual difficulties because of problems in ascertaining whether social judgements are at variance with reality. Instead, prejudice is here defined simply as an attitude, emotion or behaviour towards members of a group which directly or indirectly implies some negativity towards that group.

  2 Because prejudice involves judgements of some groups made by others, and because it can be shown to be affected by the objective relationships between these groups, prejudice is appropriately regarded as a phenomenon originating in group processes. However, such a perspective is not incompatible with a social psychological analysis that is primarily concerned with individual perceptions, evaluations and actions. Such an analysis sees individuals acting as group members, as part of a coherent pattern of group dynamics.

  3 A social psychological analysis is but one in a number of valid scientific perspectives on prejudice. Each discipline can usefully pursue its own research problems more or less independently of the others, although ultimately these diverse analyses will have to be compatible with each other.

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  Education in Divided Societies

  • T. Gallagher(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  3 Psychological Perspectives on Prejudice Introduction An enduring feature of ethnic conflict lies in the speed with which unimaginable fury can sometimes be raised. It is as if there is a deep well of emotional forces just waiting to be unleashed under propi- tious circumstances. Whether this is an overly simplistic picture or not, it is perhaps why some people look to psychology for part of the explanation for ethnic conflict. This chapter will examine some of the general themes that emerge from psychological work on pre- judice by focusing on a number of key moments in research and theorising. The first part of the chapter will examine the way in which psychologists examined people’s methods for perceiving and making sense of the world, including their consideration of some of the cognitive processes involved in perception, such as categorisa- tion and stereotyping. The next main section of the chapter will examine two of the main theories of prejudice that have developed within social psychology, based on research in the US in the 1950s, and in Europe in the 1980s. In the final part of the chapter we will examine some of the themes to emerge from a later body of work where some psychologists have focused on the role of language in the social construction of reality. To close the chapter we will briefly point to some of the implications that arise from the discussion as a whole. The reason for examining these themes from social psycho- logy is the potential insight they provide to the inter-relationships between people, particularly those which seem to foment prejudice and discrimination. All too often these are characteristics of divided societies. 22 Perception An important theme in psychological work on the way people perceive the world is to recognise that we do not simply receive stimuli in a passive and uninvolved way. Rather, people actively try to understand and make sense of the world.

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  Stereotyping and Prejudice

  • Charles Stangor, Christian S. Crandall(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  In many cases, addressing the situations that yield prejudiced behavior may be a more effective means for understanding and reducing social inequality than further efforts to detect and mitigate covert prejudicial attitudes. Social psychology has long conceptualized prejudice as a property of individuals. In the early and middle part of the 20 th century, most American psychologists considered prejudice a defect of personality fueled by beliefs about the biological inferiority of racial minorities and manifested in blatant and overt expressions of racial animus (e.g., Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950; Bogardus, 1928; Katz & Braly, 1935). Ironically, this view coincided with the laws and structures of Jim Crow America, where situations systematically disadvantaged racial minorities. Over the past 50 years, the United States has seen a dramatic reduction in self-reports of explicit prejudice (Schuman, Steeh, Bobo, & Krysan, 1997; Hochschild, 1981, 1995). As the endorsement of prejudice and racial stereotypes began to decline, social and cognitive psychologists started to suggest that prejudice was, in fact, a normal feature of human social cognition and thus potentially present in all people (Allport, 1954). Indeed, social identity researchers demonstrated that intergroup biases emerged even in minimal group contexts—where group membership was randomly assigned and essentially meaningless (e.g., Tajfel, 1970; Tajfel, Billig, Bundy, & Flament, 1971). As self-reports of explicit prejudice declined further, social psychologists aiming to explain enduring racial disparities suggested that people’s negative racial attitudes had not disappeared but had, instead, taken a more subtle and nuanced form (Duckitt, 1992; Pettigrew & Meertens, 1995). For instance, modern racism theorists have suggested that certain conservative political views often serve as cover for prejudiced attitudes (McConahay, 1986; Sears, 1988)

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  Error Without Trial

  Psychological Research on Antisemitism

  • Werner Bergmann(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  This contrasts with psychoanalysis, which emphasizes affective components of prejudice such as fear, insecurity, and aggression. 3) The behavioral dimension includes the behavioral tendencies of a person toward a particular object, such as acceptance, readiness to help, withdrawal, aggression, or emphasis on status differences. All such tenden-cies can be displayed either negatively or positively. Empirical research has concentrated primarily on social distance, prob-ably because Bogardus' social distance scale provided an early measuring instrument. 42 In addition to this consideration of definitions and the structure of theory, the explanation given by attitude psychologists for the rise of prejudice must be noted shortly before turning to studies of antisemitic prejudice. Like psychoanalytic-psychodynamic theories, attitude theories are individual-level explanations of prejudice 43 and must be distin-guished from sociological theories, whose point of departure is society as a whole. Within individual-level theories, one can differentiate between two types of theory: those theories which explain prejudice using person-ality characteristics (intrapersonal factors) and those which take interper-sonal relationships as their starting point. 44 Both the theories of cognitive integration, 45 which are oriented toward the inner psyche, and the learning-behavior theories, which take an interpersonal approach, 46 can be found in attitude theory. Theories of Cognitive Integration For the cognition-oriented psychology of social perception, prejudice is the result of processing social stimuli. 47 Although cognition theories are pp. 240-250, p. 240. J. H. Mann, The Effect of Interracial Contact on Sociometric Choices and Perceptions, Journal of Social Psychology, 50, 1959, pp. 143-152. 4 2 In agreement with McGuire, op. cit., we assume that this scale measures behavioral tendency rather than affective components.

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  Social Cognition

  • Donald C. Pennington(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In this chapter we shall consider how prejudice and intergroup conflict may arise from stereotypes (pages 95–9), intergroup relationships and group membership (pages 101–9). We will also consider the relative deprivation theory account of prejudice. Two other approaches, based on individual psychology, will also be considered —the authoritarian personality, and frustration aggression. The chapter concludes by looking at a number of strategies which may reduce prejudice, discrimination and intergroup conflict. First, we will define terms and consider some examples of prejudice and discrimination.

  Prejudice may be defined as:

  an unjustified negative (or positive) attitude toward an individual based solely on that individual’s membership in a group

  (Worchel et al ., 1988)

  This definition is helpful since it characterises prejudice as unjustified and highlights the fact that an individual is only the target of prejudiced attitudes because he or she is perceived to be a member of a group. It is the group as a whole that the prejudicial attitudes are focused on. Note also that whilst most prejudice is concerned with negative attitudes one can be prejudiced in a positive way—for example, unjustifiably favouring an individual just because he or she is perceived to belong to a group we hold in high regard.

  Discrimination refers to the actual behaviours, rather than attitudes, and may be defined as:

  Negative (or sometimes positive) actions taken towards members of a particular group because of their membership in the group. (Feldman, 1998)

  Discrimination then, is the actual behaviour an individual or group of people engage in as a result of holding stereotypical and prejudiced attitudes. Whilst we normally expect discrimination to reflect and follow on from attitudes a person holds, it may often be the case that a person is prejudiced but makes no overt display of this through what they do or say. In both the examples given at the start of this chapter, extreme forms of discrimination have occurred. However, soldiers in the Serbian army may not as individuals hold prejudiced attitudes, but simply be obeying orders. Hence, discrimination can occur where an individual does not hold consistent attitudes—peer pressure and wanting to please other people as well as obeying orders may be seen in this way.

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  Improving Intergroup Relations

  Building on the Legacy of Thomas F. Pettigrew

  • Ulrich Wagner, Linda R. Tropp, Gillian Finchilescu, Colin Tredoux, Ulrich Wagner, Linda R. Tropp, Gillian Finchilescu, Colin Tredoux(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  This work involved applying basic principles of social psychology— principles such as the interactions of cognitive beliefs and affective reactions to social groups—to understanding the ways people think about social and economic inequality, the place of different groups in the hierarchical system, and their preferences for candidates, political parties, and governmental policies. Role of Emotions in Prejudice and Intergroup Behavior Although I have done much research in other areas, especially in social cognition (e.g., Smith, 1998; Smith & DeCoster, 2000), my recent work that most directly reflects the influences of Thomas F. Pettigrew has been the investigation (in collaboration with Diane Mackie) of the role of emotions in prejudice and intergroup behavior. Historical Background Surprising as it may seem, this topic was neglected for about a generation. At midcentury the Authoritarian Personality researchers (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950) took a psychodynamic approach to the study of prejudice. In their model, prejudice reflected deep-seated inner personality conflicts within prejudiced individuals, which predisposed them to follow strong leaders and to reject and mistreat outgroups and deviants. Pre-judice was seen as strongly affectively driven. However, the overall approach, based in Freudian theory, received severe criticism and declined in popularity through the 1950s. The views of prejudice and intergroup behavior that sprang up in the 1960s and 1970s, in contrast, emphasized cognitive factors. Social cognition researchers focused on negative beliefs about outgroups (stereotypes), studying how they were learned and changed and the ways in which they drove prejudice and discriminatory behavior. Social identity researchers traced prejudice and discrimination to the Rediscovering the Emotional Aspects of Prejudice 43 desire to see one’s own group as superior to others (Tajfel, 1978).

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  Social Psychology

  • Kenneth S. Bordens, Irwin A. Horowitz(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  modern racism . Adherents of the notion of modern racism suggest that opposing civil rights legislation or voting for a candidate who opposes affirmative action are manifestations of modern racism.

  Critics of modern racism point out that equating opposition to political ideas with racism is illogical and that the concept of modern racism has not been clearly defined or measured. Additionally, the correlation between modern racism and old-fashioned racism is high. Thus, modern and old-fashioned racism may be indistinguishable.
• What are the cognitive roots of prejudice?
  Cognitive social psychologists have focused on stereotypes and intergroup perceptions when attempting to understand prejudice. As humans, we have a strong predisposition to categorize people into groups. We do this even when we have only the most minimal basis on which to make categorizations. We classify ourselves and those we perceive to be like us in the in-group, and others whom we perceive to be different from us, we classify in the out-group. As a result of this categorization, we tend to display an in-group bias: favoring members of the in-group over members of the out-group.
  Henri Tajfel proposed his social identity theory to help explain in-group bias . According to this theory, individuals are motivated to maintain a positive self-concept, part of which comes from membership in groups. Identification with the in-group confers us with a social identity. Categorizing dissimilar others as members of the out-group is another aspect of the social identity process. When we feel threatened, in-group bias increases, thereby enhancing our self-concept. Self-categorization theory suggests that self-esteem is most likely to be enhanced when members of the in-group distinguish themselves from other groups in positive ways.
  The in-group bias may also have biological roots. We have a strong wariness of the unfamiliar, called xenophobia, which sociobiologists think is a natural part of our genetic heritage. It may have helped us survive as a species. It is biologically adaptive, for example, for a child to be wary of potentially dangerous strangers. The in-group bias may serve a similar purpose. Throughout history there are examples of various groups increasing solidarity in response to hostility from the dominant group to ensure group survival. Prejudice, then, may be seen as an unfortunate byproduct of natural biologically based behavior patterns.