SP: Stereotypes, Prejudice, & Discrimination

Sample Exam Questions

1. Can stereotype threat explain why low status minorities often underperform in academic tests? 2. How do people attain stereotypes? 3. Some authors argue that stereotypes are automatically activated each time we encounter a group member. Discuss

Associative network structure

Some prominent models of stereotyping also assume the operation of an associative network structure. From this perspective, stereotypes consist of a central node representing a particular social group (e.g., elderly people) that is linked to various concepts that are assumed to characterise group members (e.g., slow, forgetful). When a member of the relevant category is encountered, activation can spread along the links from the central identity node to the associated stereotypical concepts. After these concepts enter working memory, they can influence subsequent impressions and reactions. One especially influential example is a study by Devine (1989).

What are the consequences? automatic

Stereotypes affect behavior in automatic fashion. Fazio et al. (1995) Subliminal black and white faces followed by positive (summer, love) and negative (rats, disease) words. White participants responded faster for negative words after black face Implicit affect measure Predicted behavior towards a black experimenter

Stereotype may incorporate...

Stereotypes may incorporate physical appearance, interests and activities. Often, stereotypes are accompanied with positive or negative connotations which may lead to subtle discrimination and prejudice and can be very powerful when such negative evaluations of certain stereotyped members permeate one's thoughts and actions. These stereotypes are can be attained from two major sources - exposure to media and culture and from personal experiences and observations.

Obtaining stereotypes: social norms

Therefore, when stereotypes are engrained in the social norms of a culture, people naturally learn them when growing up. When some stereotypes of groups are so strong within a family that prejudice and discrimination does not incur negative consequences and perhaps even encouraged, the child will most likely grow to accept such stereotypes as the truth. Crandall and Eshleman (2003) suggested that people's real opinions of groups were driven by perceptions of social norms and how acceptable prejudice against a certain group is. Such strong stereotypes, especially those formed early on and consistently reinforced throughout ones' life, can prove to be difficult to alter even against hard evidence of otherwise.

Obtaining stereotypes: vicariously

Thompson, Judd and Park (2000) noted that when people learn about a group vicariously, the impressions they form about the group is more stereotypic compared to those who learned about the group firsthand. These impressions also tend to be stronger than firsthand impressions once they are formed, since they remain highly stereotypic after direct encounters with the group later on.

Obtaining stereotypes: everyday conservations

Lycon and Kashima (2003) also noted that traits that are more communicable or popularly discussed are more likely to become part of the stereotype with experimental data showing that everyday conversations can have considerable influences on how people stereotype social groups.

What are stereotypes?

-Categorization in the form of stereotyping helps to move beyond available information -Often helpful, but not always correct

Initial period

-Experiences, Culture / communication, Media, Biases -Unconscious vs. Conscious processes: Associative learning vs. explicit rules -Biases: Illusory correlation (Hamilton & Gifford) Stronger associations between groups and behaviors if groups are relatively small. More likely to remember men in suit stealing a bike (salience high). So stereotypes for minority groups may be stronger! Basis of social stereotypes can be formed upon the first encounter of an individual within a group. Interactions within this initial period can often generate exaggerated stereotypes. A stereotype that is believed to be applied to every member of the group is inaccurate (Eagly, Karau and Makhijani, 1995). These encounters, especially with previously unfamiliar groups, usually have powerful effects as these may form the first impressions of the said stereotype.

What are stereotypes? Devine, 1989

-Primed participants with words related to black people (e.g., negroes, black, lazy, basketball, Africa, blues, but not aggressive) -Participants read information about a person behaving somewhat hostile -How aggressive is the person perceived to be? According to the dissociation model, White persons varying in prejudice toward Black people should differ on cognitive tasks involving controlled processing but not on tasks involving automatic processing. Devine (1989) concluded that controlled processing rather than automatic processing differentiates the highly prejudiced from their less prejudiced White counterparts. Moreover, White people with egalitarian ideals employ controlled processing to try to behave and think in an unprejudiced manner toward Black people. Both high- and low- prejudiced White Americans have the same stereotypic knowledge of Black people and are presumably both susceptible to having this stereotypic knowledge that is presumably elicited automatically beneath their awareness. However, stereotypic and prejudicial responses can be overridden by intentional and flexible controlled processing.

Conclusion

-Stereotypes are mentally represented and can be automatically activated -Formed in explicit and implicit ways -Affect behavior that is hard to control -Suppressing often unsuccessful -Chronic egalitarian goals seem to work

What are the consequences? automatic

-Stereotypes guide interpretation of (ambiguous) situations and behaviour -Guide attribution of behaviour -Influence behaviour in interpersonal and intergroup interactions: Police, border control (danger / no danger), Gender stereotypes, Courtroom , Etc. etc. -Amidou Diallo, shot with 41 police bullets Februari 1999. -Keith Payne (2001): Stereotype activation affects weapon perception, gun or wallet? -The police officer's dilemma (Correll, Park, Judd, and Wittenbrink, 2002) Judge as fast as possible whether someone is carying a weapon. Armed => shoot and Unarmed=> don't shoot -Stereotype threat (Steele and Aronson, 1995): Acting in line with the stereotype you think other people hold of you. Lots of explanations, but actual mechanism unclear (arousal, fear, attention, etc.) What to do about it: Avoid diagnostic situations and don't make category salient. Stereotype threat is a phenomenon that individuals may experience either when they feel they may personally conform to a negative stereotype about their group of affiliation, or when they are involved in a situation that might lead to affirming a negative stereotype in the eyes of others. Any individual can be vulnerable to stereotype threat under selective circumstances, as any group can be a potential target of a single or multiple stereotypes. In general though, stereotype threat seems to be most prominent in traditionally stigmatised group that face under-representation, lifelong stereotype vulnerability, or explicit pressure to pass or fail at certain tasks. This being the case, minority groups and women seem to be most vulnerable to stereotype threat.

Stereotypes

A stereotype is a set of simplistic but not necessarily accurate generalization about a group which aids people in speedy processing and categorization of a group to in order to generate knowledge about the group and to treat them accordingly. Lipmann (1922) described this process as a series of "simplified mental images of what groups look like and what they do". -Allport (1954): "an exaggerated belief associated with a category"

Wegner's model of mental control

According to Wegner's model of mental control, control is effectively achieved as long as the perceiver is able to persist in an effortful search for distracter thoughts to replace the unwanted (stereotypic) thoughts. However, while this search-and-replace process occurs, an ironic monitoring process supposedly searches consciousness for evidence of the stereotypic thoughts, which causes these thoughts to be repeated primed, and thus increases their accessibility. Therefore, if the functioning of the operating process is undermined (e.g., due to cognitive load) or if the conscious intention to avoid the unwanted thought is relaxed, stereotypic thoughts may rebound.

Stereotype Change

Although some change in the content of stereotypes (e.g., toward Blacks, the Japanese, women) has been noted over the years, it is notoriously difficult to effect such changes through interventions. Indeed, the rigidity of stereotypes has been an important determinant of the interest in studying them. Stereotype change is generally expected to occur either through direct encounters with individuals from the stereotyped group which disconfirm existing beliefs or through changes in the perceiver such that possessing or using stereotypes is no longer perceived as useful or desirable. Of course many processes work against this type of change. Individuals may actively avoid contact with disliked group members, and, as discussed above, expectancy confirmation processes tend to maintain stereotypes intact.

Suppressing stereotypes

How to overrule stereotypes? Dovidio et al: Explicit - verbal and Implicit - nonverbal. Stereotypes mainly influence nonverbal behavior, because harder to control -Suppressing even helpful? Suppression may rebound Wegner, Schneider, Carter and White (1987) Don't think of a white bear! Result: more white bear thoughts Same for stereotypes -Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne and Jetten (1994) "Describe a day in the life of this skinhead" Half of the participants: "Don't think of the stereotype!" After suppression: describe a second picture.

Well-established stereotypes

However Henderson-King and Nisbett (1996) found that encounters with individuals can actually extend to affect entire well-established stereotypes. When participants in the experiment observed either a White or Black confederate acting in a rude and hostile manner towards the experiments, the participant's overall impression of White or Black group members seemed to alter - when the same participants were asked to interview either a different group of White or Black students for a job position, they ended the interview much faster when they have seen the corresponding race behave negatively, regardless of their stereotypes of the group prior to the experiment.

Obtaining stereotypes: Observations

In addition to personal experiences, stereotypes can be obtained from ones' observations, usually from their parents and peers. Bandura(1972)'s social learning theory claim that while people can learn about behavior directly from being rewarded or punished for their actions, they may also learn vicariously from observing the consequences of other people's behaviours. As a result, an individual is most likely to attain stereotypes from the people closest to them - parents and peers - and retain behaviours that have positive outcomes and discontinue behavior that proved to result in punishments. Parents' words and actions often reflect that of social norms - ways that are generally accepted methods of thinking, feeling, or behaving that people in a group agree on and endorse as right and proper (Thibaut and Kelley, 1959).

Well-established stereotypes: individual group member

In addition, Rudman and Lee (2002) found that exposure to Black celebrity rap artists generally made students generate negative stereotypes towards the Black community; however their opinions generally became more positive when prompted of well-liked Black celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey. These, in summary, suggests that impressions formed through an individual group member can permeate to form people's overall stereotypes of a group.

Devine, 1989

In her experiment, concepts that are part of the African American stereotype were activated (via a subliminal priming procedure). It is important that none of these concepts dealt with the concept of hostility. However, because hostility is assumed to be part of the cultural stereotype of African Americans, Devine assumed that activating other parts of the stereotype would also result in the activation of the concept of hostility, through the spread of activation. In line with this assumption, it was found that priming the African American stereotype resulted in elevated perceptions of hostility on the part of a subsequently encountered, ambiguous target. This finding fits with the assumption that after a sufficient level of activation reached the hostility node (by traversing the links connecting it to the rest of the associative network), this concept entered working memory and influenced subsequent impressions. Devine argued that these associations are part of culturally ingrained belief systems, and even when people do not consciously endorse the relevant belief (e.g., even when they do not believe that African Americans are hostile), they are still prone to being influenced by the culturally learned association.

The Effects of Stereotyping: social judgement

In short, unless perceivers are both motivated and capable of making individuated judgments, stereotypes are likely to be the default form of social judgment. When perceivers are accountable for their perceptions or are motivated to make an accurate assessment of the other to accomplish important goals, stereotypes are less likely to be used as a basis of judgment. Low prejudice perceivers may in some cases actively inhibit the use of their stereotypes in judgments of others, particularly when concerns about social equality are activated.

Suppressing stereotypes: Moskowitz et al. (1999)

Moskowitz et al. (1999): Can egalitarian goals prevent stereotype activation? Measurement of chronic goal (the strength of the goal?) Measuring stereotype activation: pronounce traits that followed pictures of people after 200 ms (too short for conscious control) Photos: Men and women in black and white Traits: sexy, sensitive, irrational, v.s. colorful, lonely, flexible Chronic goals seem to work! Chronic in terms of goal strength or chronically activated? Moskowitz et al: priming egalitarian goals works for people without a chronic goal. So chronically activated? Although stereotypic associations are present in memory, their activation can be controlled by the simultaneous activation of chronic egalitarian goals. In a study, stereotype inhibition occurred for chronics (person who are highly committed to egalitarianism) at an SOA that precluded conscious suppression of stereotypes.

Stereotype formation: distinctiveness

Of particular interest for stereotype formation is the case of stimulus distinctiveness due to infrequency of occurrence. In the phenomenon of ILLUSORY CORRELATION the combination of two kinds of infrequency, membership in a minority group and performance of undesirable behaviors, becomes particularly distinctive and leads to the overestimation of the number of times minority group members engage in undesirable behaviors. This overestimation is called illusory correlation because the association between group membership and behavior desirability is perceived, but not real (Hamilton and Trolier, 1986). As a result the minority group is perceived in unfavourable terms, a typical manifestation of prejudice. Such distinctiveness-based illusory correlations may not always be formed, however. They may be overridden when they run counter to other motives or to countervailing stereotypic expectancies. Stereotypes may also be formed in some cases as a result of perceptual SALIENCE. Targets that are highly salient are more likely to be stereotyped in comparison to less salient targets. This may be why stereotypes about race and sex (which are immediately perceptually visible) are more strongly developed than are stereotypes about less visible social categories. Salience effects contribute to the perceptions of ILLUSORY CORRELATION (S) in which negative behaviors performed by minority groups become salient and have a disproportionate impact on judgment.

Stereotype maintenance

Once developed, stereotypes are maintained through expectancy effects that lead people to encode and process information in a manner that preferentially supports existing beliefs. Stereotypes lead people to seek out information that supports their stereotypes rather than information that disconfirms their beliefs. Existing expectations may also result in preferential attention to stereotype-consistent information. Information that supports existing stereotypes about social groups is better incorporated into the group representation, and thus better remembered (Stangor and Lange, 1993). Stereotypes may also be maintained because behaviours that conflict with existing stereotypical beliefs are attributed to external causes whereas those that support existing beliefs are attributed to internal causes. Holding negative stereotypes about a group may also lead individuals to avoid situations in which those stereotypes might be disconfirmed. In addition to cognitive processes that tend to perpetuate existing stereotypes (Hamilton, 1981), because stereotypes serve important functions for the individual, they are subject to consistency effects, such as proposed by COGNITIVE DISSONANCE THEORY. Individuals form group stereotypes to help them accomplish important goals and are reluctant to abandon them. The many cognitive and motivational processes that underlie stereotype development and maintenance make them highly resistant to change.

Banish of unwanted thoughts or feelings

Research on the control of automatic prejudice has focused on the efficacy of deliberate attempts to banish unwanted thoughts or feelings from the mind. Specifically in an attempt to avoid unwanted bias, people may attempt to suppress prejudiced thoughts and replace the with more desirable distracter thoughts. Although such a strategy may seem reasonable, research suggests that attempts to suppress stereotypic thoughts often result in a rebound effect which the unwanted thoughts become hyper accessible subsequent to suppression. Thus suppressing stereotypic thoughts may lead to their unwittingly exerting influence on latter thoughts and action. Such paradoxical outcomes have been explained in terms of Wegner's model of mental control.

The Effects of Stereotyping: self-fulfilling prophecy

Stereotypes also bias information processing about ingroup and outgroup members and facilitate the creation of a SELFFULFILLING PROPHECY such that stereotypical beliefs may lead people to act in ways that actually elicit the expected stereotypical behavior from others. When stereotypes about groups are negative these influences of stereotypes upon judgments will have deleterious effects upon intergroup behaviour and attitudes. That many of these processes occur entirely out of the awareness of the individual making the responses may exacerbate the harmful effects of stereotypes.

The Effects of Stereotyping: capacity-conserving

Stereotypes are not always used as a basis of judgment. In accord with their functional value in simplifying the social environment, stereotypes are capacity-conserving devices that are more likely to be employed in cognitively demanding situations. Stereotypes that promote group differentiation and thus which are highly diagnostic about personality are used more routinely than are stereotypes that do not promote this function. Stereotypes are more likely to be activated in situations that are perceived as "inter-group" than in "intra-group" situations, at least in part in the service of promoting positive in-group identity. When perceivers are in extreme affective or emotional states their information-processing capacity is reduced and they are more likely to rely upon their stereotypes. A target individual is more likely to be stereotyped to the extent that he or she is a prototypical or "typical" example of a group member.

Ways of attaining stereotypes

Stereotypes are often attained through initial interactions with a group, with distinctive behaviours leaving a lasting impression which may form a strong but exaggerated version of a stereotype. When direct firsthand encounter with a group is not available, stereotypes may be attained through parents, peers and media. These stereotypes are based on social norms engrained in culture and may be passed on through vocabulary and language used in the community. Stereotypes appear to be easily attained and harder to alter despite the high likelihood for inaccuracy.

Obtaining stereotypes: parent's language

Stereotypes can also be passed on through the vocabulary and language used by one's parents and peers. As an example, the word "doctor" would be used when people are referring to a male doctor; whereas some find the need to use "female" or "woman" doctor suggesting a non-traditional role for females. The common expressions can also be used to convey stereotypes about ethnic groups and nationalities - with words such as "black" to describe African-Americans in Caucasian countries and "white" pertaining to Caucasians in Asian countries.

Stereotype formation: outgroup

Stereotypes tend to develop more strongly about outgroups than about ingroups, due to the fact that interactions with outgroup members are frequently at an intergroup (rather than an individual) level. Thus stereotypes about outgroups are generally more negative and more extreme than those about ingroups. One result is the OUTGROUP HOMOGENEITY effect in which outgroup members are perceived as being more similar to each other in comparison to ingroup members.

Stereotype errors

Such rushed formation process of stereotypes is prone to errors. An example of biases in processing of stereotypes is the illusory correlation. This is a result of a perceived association between two characteristics that are not actually related - Hamilton and Sherman (1989) found that when something seldom occurs, the event becomes distinctive so people pay attention to it. These distinctive behaviours tend to have a great impact on the impressions formed and becomes incorporated into the person's perception of the groups' stereotypes. Therefore it must be understood that while stereotypes may sometimes be accurate and efficient ways of retrieving information on a particular group, they can also be built on a foundation of misperceptions.

Obtaining stereotypes: media

The media is another huge source of stereotypes saturated with stereotypic images that are widely distributed and popularly discussed. Jost and Hmilton (2005) explained that groups portrayed in the media are usually reflective of stereotypes which are already engrained deep into a culture and acts to reinforce the already established image.

The Effects of Stereotyping

The process of stereotyping has wide impact upon responses to others. Stereotyping influences how information about others is interpreted such that ambiguous behaviors are perceptually distorted in the direction of existing stereotypical beliefs. When relevant information is unknown about an individual, the stereotype may be used to "fill in" the picture. When clearly stereotype-inconsistent behaviors are encountered, they are likely to be attributionally discounted and attributed to external factors rather than having an influence upon impression formation.

Obtaining stereotypes: media effect on the self

These stereotypes do affect viewers' view of themselves - media contents increase viewers' acceptance of their own stereotypes. Both children and adult perceptions of gender and racial stereotypes can be found to correlate to the amount of media they are exposed to. Geis et al (1980) showed a group of college women a television commercial with actors in either traditional or reversed gender roles. Participants who viewed the traditional non-reversed version, with the woman playing an alluring but subordinate role, showed lower self-confidence, independence and fewer career goals.

Obtaining stereotypes: media stereotype examples

Typical examples from the media suggests that blacks are usually presented as crime suspects while the whites are portrayed as crime victims; elderly people are depicted as frail, unattractive and useless and Asian Americans typically appear in commercials in business settings in contrast to home or family settings consistent with the "work ethic" stereotype.