5.3: Reducing Stereotypes, Prejudice, and discrimination

According to the contact hypothesis, four conditions are ideal for contact to succeed.

1: Equal status 2: Personal interaction 3: Cooperative activities 4: Social norms favoring intergroup contact

Factors that may reduce cognitive resources needed for successful control

Age, Low blood sugar (more research needed), Being intoxicated, Being physically tired or sleepy, Being affected by strong emotion or arousal

Exerting Self-Control

Attempting to suppress stereotyping or control prejudiced actions can take mental effort

However, the contact hypothesis did not hold true after

Brown v Board

Is the original contact hypothesis wrong?

No. Although desegregation did not immediately produce the desired changes, it's important to realize that the ideal conditions for successful intergroup contact did not exist in the public schools that desegregated.

Allport's contact hypothesis

Under certain conditions, direct contact between hostile groups will reduce prejudice.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954)

What would be the effect of this large-scale social experiment? Hostile

A theme running through many of the successful interventions against stereotype threat effects is that the individuals feel

a sense of trust and safety in the situation.

self-regulation of prejudiced responses model proposed by Margo Monteith and others (

internally motivated individuals in particular may learn to control their prejudices more effectively over time.

Recent field experiments at an American high school with a sample of people from Rwanda show the

positive effects peers and the media can have in promoting anti-prejudice norms.

contact hypothesis,

which states that under certain conditions, direct contact between members of rival groups will reduce intergroup prejudice

It is worth noting that at least in some contexts, individuals from minority groups or groups that have less power in a society tend to not feel as positively as majority group members do about recategorizing their groups into one common ingroup.

Individuals from minority groups or groups that have less power in society may feel overwhelmed and experience a sense of lost identity; may benefit more from dual-identity categorizations

The Jigsaw Classroom

1: A cooperative learning method used to reduce racial prejudice through interaction in group efforts. 2: Model of how to use interpersonal contact to promote greater tolerance of diversity. 3: Eliminates competition in natural classroom

Combating Stereotype Threat Effects

1: Describing the task as not indicative of individuals' intellectual capabilities 2: Informing individuals that their group typically does not perform worse than other groups on the task 3: Giving individuals reason to attribute their anxiety while taking a test to irrelevant factors 4: Getting individuals to think of intelligence as not a fixed trait but instead as something that is malleable and can be improved 5: Exposing individuals to a member of their group who is said to be an expert in the domain in question

In addition to people's ability to control prejudice, another issue is what motivates people to do so. Researchers have distinguished between two kinds of motivation to control prejudiced responses and behaviors.

1: One kind is externally driven—not wanting to appear to others to be prejudiced. 2: A second type is internally driven—not wanting to be prejudiced, regardless of whether or not others would find out 3: Internally motivated individuals are likely to be more successful at controlling stereotyping and prejudice, even on implicit measures, but even they are vulnerable to the strong power of automatic stereotyping and implicit biases.

Research suggests several changes to how people think that can reduce stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination such as

1: Thinking of examples that counter stereotypes, 2: taking the perspective of others, 3: learning that race is more ambiguous and socially determined than genetic, 4: having a multicultural rather than colorblind approach to intergroup relation

These researchers propose that contact reduces prejudice by

1: enhancing knowledge about the outgroup; 2: reducing anxiety about intergroup contact; and 3: increasing empathy and perspective taking.

The Common Ingroup Identity Model developed by Samuel Gaertner and John Dovidio (2010; 2012) proposes that

1: if members of different groups recategorize themselves as members of a more inclusive superordinate group, intergroup attitudes and relations can improve. 2: Recognizing shared categorization allows creation of a common ingroup identity

According to the self-regulation of prejudiced responses model model,

1: people who are truly motivated to be fair and unprejudiced are often confronted with the sad reality that they have failed to live up to that goal. 2: These realizations lead to unpleasant emotions such as guilt. 3: As individuals experience such feelings of guilt repeatedly, they begin to develop expertise at recognizing the situations and stimuli that tend to trigger these failures, and therefore they can exert more control over them. In so doing, they begin to interrupt what had been automatic stereotype activation

How the jigsaw classroom works?

1:I n newly desegregated public schools in Texas and California, they assigned fifth graders to small racially and academically mixed groups. 2: The material to be learned within each group was divided into subtopics, much the way a jigsaw puzzle is broken into pieces. 3: Each student was responsible for learning one piece of the puzzle, after which all members took turns teaching their material to one another. 4: In this system, everyone—regardless of race, ability, or self-confidence—needs everyone else if the group as a whole is to succeed.

The jigsaw method produced impressive results (Aronson, 2004, 2011).

Compared with children in traditional classes, those in jigsaw classrooms grew to like each other more, liked school more, were less prejudiced, and had higher self-esteem. What's more, academic test scores improved for minority students and remained the same for white students.

Intergroup Friendships

Friendships across groups is one of the best ways to experience many optimal contact conditions

Why would extended contact cause this to happen?

Several causes are involved, such as reducing ignorance and anxiety about outgroup members and providing individuals with positive examples of outgroup members

In addition to causing distrust, one of the most powerful ways in which stereotype threat undermines students is that it reduces their sense of belonging.

They read that it is quite typical of most students—regardless of their gender, race, or ethnicity—to go through periods of social stress and uncertainty during their freshman year, and that these struggles tend to go away soon after their first year. Walton and Cohen found that giving this information to African American students during their first semester at school raised their grade-point averages significantly higher relative to other African American students who were not given this information.

Changes in the kinds of info perpetuated in one's culture can alter

how one perceives social groups.

Even people who do not have a friend from an outgroup can benefit from having ingroup friends who do. A number of studies have found evidence for what is known as the extended contact effect, or the indirect contact effect

knowing that an ingroup friend has a good and close relationship with a member of an outgroup can produce positive intergroup benefits in ways similar to direct contact.

More generally, intergroup contact that emphasizes shared goals and fates can effectively reduce prejudice and discrimination— (shared identity)

specifically by changing how group members categorize each other