Social Psychology - Stereotypes

Discrimination

Negative behaviors directed at people based primarily on their group membership

Spencer et. al (Gender)

No gender difference = stereotype deactivated Control = stereotype activated Men and women randomly assigned conditions, perform equally well when stereotype is deactivated and men outperform in control significantly. In the control, threat is there which inhibits performance.

Stereotypes

Generalized beliefs about the personal attributes of a group of people that may or may not be accurate and might be positive or negative

Performance monitoring

You are worrying about performance so you are not as focused on the task

Realistic Group Conflict Theory

prejudice arises when groups compete for scarce resources

Conformity

prevailing attitude at that time. Not necessarily prejudice but sometimes it's more of an influence to fit in. Normative influence.

Steele and Aronson

African-American and European-American students. Make racial stereotype 'salient.' In threat condition, whites significantly outperformed blacks because of stereotype threat. In control, they were very similar.

Stereotyping tends to be enhanced by ?

Anger or anxiety - short is readily available Positive moods - easier to convince through peripheral route

Stereotype Threat Theory

Awareness of stereotype is enough to impact performance. Domain identification - identification can be more damaging. Test difficulty - has to be challenging enough. Evaluation of ability - relative feel that performance matters/being tested.

Discrimination vs. prejudice

Behavior vs. attitude

Sources of prejudice

Cognitive, social, emotional

Distinctiveness

Distinctive people - capture our attention and thus are easier to blame if something bad happens. May also feel uncomfortable and add to prejudice Vivid cases - we use these as mental shortcuts (availability heuristic) to judge other people and groups. We are using things salient in our mind. Distinctive events - Two events that are occurring together so we associate them together

Aronson et al

Do you have to be minority? Threat < No threat You do not have to be minority to be affected by stereotype threat. Threat - looked at fake articles that showed why Asians outperform white people. Non-threat - no mention of Asians and whites. Threat not activated. Male in threat performed worse than male in no-threat. No Asians in this study!

Explicit prejudice

Easy to identify; laws that restrict people from doing certain things

Why does stereotype threat affect performance?

Emotional and cognitive factors - evaluation apprehension, anxiety, self efficacy, self handicapping, reduced cognitive resources.

Implicit prejudice

Harder to recognize; negative attitudes that people aren't aware of

Why do we use stereotypes?

Heuristics - we can put people into groups/characteristics o easily understand what is happening. Efficient. Shortcut - Cognitive process to simplify how we understand.

Attributions

How we explain behavior. When something bad happens, we make dispositional inference; we assign meaning to events and develop prejudgment about people

Efforts to suppress negative thoughts and emotions

Huge cognitive effort to suppress, not good

Measuring Implicit Attitudes

IAT - unconscious biases by analyzing response latencies

Why do we care about stereotype threat research?

If we can show that it's not innate inability, it's about situational constraints and skills, we can see performance rise if we remove those constraints

Motivation

Maintain superiority

Study depicting prevalence of sexist prejudices in work force in natural sciences.

Male candidates for science job position were graded as more competent, more appropriate, and would have higher starting salary rate. Females got graded much more likeable. Interesting to note: Women w/ PhD were equally likely to discriminate

Seeking mental efficiency

Males report more physical aggressiveness than females. We are sharpening the differences between the groups. We tend to think differences are larger

Institutional supports

Media, schools, government can foster discrimination and prejudice.

Health and well-being Consequences

Physical - high blood pressure and low birth weight for babies Psychological - depression and anxiety

Bodenhausen (attribution)

Randomly assigned college students into two groups. Mock jury deciding if defendant was guilty. With same information, just names different, people voted Hispanic to be more guilty as opposed to typical white name.

Why might African-American students drop out of college at a much higher rate than Caucasians? (70% vs 42%)

Socioeconomic disadvantage, segregation, enduring discrimination. Insufficient explanation because stereotype threat is still evident

Prejudice

Some kind of negative prejudgment about groups and its members. Comprised of affect, behavioral tendencies, and cognition

Performance Consequences

Stereotype threat - affects performance

Just world phenomenon

the tendency of people to believe that the world is just and that people therefore get what they deserve and deserve what they get

Ordinary cognitive processes

Stereotypes are the way we organize information about the social world. We can't get rid of stereotyping because they occur automatically. If someone doesn't fit a stereotype, instead of deleting, we categorize as subtype (exception).

Schmader (stress arousal)

Stress arousal - impairs processing of prefrontal cortex - could affect performance. Being stressed impacts your ability to perform.

Social inequalities

Unequal status breeds prejudice. People of higher status want to maintain superiority. Religion - extrinsic: for social relationships, intrinsic: for actual beliefs

Categorization

We organize object/people into groups. We make sense of information of the environment. Ingroup bias - favoring our own group. Outgroup homogeneity effect - perception that out-group members are more similar to one another than in group members are.

Shih et al

What about people's multiple identities? Remind Asian-American women of their Asian identity, gender identity, or nothing. Math performance best when Asian identity was made, worst when gender identity was made, and average for control.

Scapegoat theory

displaced aggression - seek out someone to blame

Stereotype threat

the risk/fear of confirming a negative stereotype about a group to which you belong