quiz #3

Ethnocentrism

glorifying one's own group while vilifying other groups

Gay and Proud study

hat that said either "gay and proud" or "texan and proud" and participants went to job interviews formal discrimination: gay people were treated a bit more poorly (conscious) informal discrimination: gays were interacted with less, less word count, more negativity

Discrimination

• unfair treatment of individuals based on their membership in a particular group • Biased treatment OR unearned advantages based on group membership • Can be verbal or behavioral • occurs on various levels in society from the individual to cultural: interpersonal, organizational, institutional, cultural

Basic Social Categories

- Gender - Race - Age • Used to draw conclusions about a person's traits, social roles, and physical characteristics • Important in initial interactions

Nonconscious attitudes

people's immediate evaluative reactions they may not be aware of, or that may conflict with their consciously endorsed attitudes

attitude objects

people, things, places, abstract concepts

Induced (forced) compliance

subtly compelling people to behave in a manner that is inconsistent with their beliefs, attitudes, or values, in order to elicit dissonance, and therefore a change in their original views

reduce socially desirable responding

- Keeping responses anonymous - Using unobtrusive measures: behavioral measures that don't have anything to do with prejudice - Using physiological measures: measure brain and body - Using implicit cognition measures: assess degree to which concepts are associated with one another, work w/o participants knowing it's being measured

Implicit Association Test (IAT)

- Uses Response Competition: • Two responses compete against one another: a habitual response and an opposing response • The stronger the habitual response, the longer it takes to suppress it and make the opposing response

Learning Approach

Attitudes form when people encounter information that can be positively or negatively evaluated

dissonance change

Behavior inconsistent with prior attitudes does indeed generate arousal and the effort to dispel that arousal motivates the types of attitude change found in dissonance experiments

Operant conditioning

Behaviors we freely perform become more or less frequent, depending on whether they are followed by a reward (positive reinforcement) or punishment.

Mere Exposure

Being exposed to something enough times leads to positive attitudes (repeated exposure)

Controllability of behavior

Characteristics of the behavior: - Nonverbal behaviors much harder to control; negative views might "leak out" • Characteristics of the Participants: - Diminished executive function can lead to greater prejudice -> discrimination connection (sitting near or far from black person experiment)

ABCs of intergroup bias

Cognition = Stereotypes: - Generalized beliefs and knowledge about a group of people • Affect = Prejudice: - Hostility or negativity affect/emotions toward a group of people • Behavior = Discrimination: - Hostile behavior toward someone based on their group membership

Introspecting

Coming up with the (wrong) reasons for an attitude you hold can mislead you about what your attitude actually is. When this happens, the attitude you report doesn't end up predicting your behavior very well

Limitations of Self-Report Measures

Context sensitive - Preceding questions - Priming - Scale - Question wording People may not be aware of their true attitudes • Some people are unwilling to accurately express their true attitudes - Racial prejudice - Personal issues

Perceptual Consequences

Does chronically expecting prejudice alter perception of emotions in outgroup members?

Economic Perspective

Economic perspective on stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination works in the sense that it fits nicely with what we see around us as the successes and failures of intergroup relationships

How are we able to harm others?

• Humans have an aversion to harming others (Crockett, et al., 2014) • Exhibit physiological stress response when forced to harm others (Cushman, et al., 2012) • How do people overcome harm aversion to afflict harm upon outgroup members? DEHUMANIZE THEM

Induced Compliance and Extinguishing Undesired Behavior

Kids were told not to play with their second favorite toy bc either the experimenter would be annoyed or very mad Those with mild punishment favored it less favorably bc of dissonance Those with severe punishment still wanted to play with it

Racial prejudice

More attention to race; use stereotypes to resolve ambiguity

Stereotype Control - Motivation Component

Motivation to Control Prejudice: Internal and External • Comprehension Goals: We like to be accurate, but are also stingy with our cognitive resources • Self-Enhancement Goals: Use of stereotypes can bolster self esteem; Affirming self-esteem can obviate use of stereotypes

Resource threat

Not enough to go around? Shore up those group boundaries!

Stereotype Control

Once a stereotype is activated, it is likely to be applied, but....we can inhibit application if sufficient motivation and ability

attitudes competing with other determinants

One potent determinant that can weaken the relationship btwn attitudes and behavior is that person's understanding of the prevailing norms of appropriate behavior (ex: establishment owners may have wanted to refuse service to chinese couple but didn't bc they didn't want to cause a scene)

Self-Affirmation and Dissonance

People can ward off dissonance not only by dealing directly with the specific threat itself, but also indirectly by taking stock of their other qualities and core values

Factors that Affect Categorization

Prototypicality social context goals/motives individual differences: racial prejudice, political ideology, resource threat

Performance Consequences

Stereotype threat: The apprehension experienced by members of stigmatized groups that they might behave in a manner that confirms an existing cultural stereotype

Implicit measure of prejudice

can be derived by comparing a person's average reaction time to real and made-up words preceded by faces of members of the target category

General attitudes

do a better job of predicting how a person behaves "in general" across a number of different instances

specific attitudes

do a better job of predicting specific behaviors

robbers cave

eagles vs rattlers, competition between both groups, brought together to stop competition but they were still mean to each other, worked together with a superordinate goal, limited resources: the prize

Different types of attitudes predict different behaviors

explicit (I'd rather not live near black people) -> controllable (nonverbal and verbal behaviors) implicit -> uncontrollable (body posture, body language)

Cognition

- knowledge and beliefs about the object and associated memories and images - beliefs and thoughts about the attitude object

Why do we study Attitudes?

-Attitudes allow us to predict behavior By knowing your attitude I can predict*: - The movies you will like - The products you will buy - The person you will vote for in the election - Whether you will engage in unsafe health habits *to some extent

Social Identity Theory

-The idea that a person's self-concept and self-esteem derive not only from personal identity and accomplishments, but also from the status and accomplishments of the various groups to which the person belongs -Basic need (motivation) to achieve and maintain positive and distinct social identity -Leads to prejudice because we are more likely to see groups we belong to positively; and others negatively

attitude functions

-Utilitarian function - Knowledge function - Value-Expression function - Social-Adjustment function - Ego-defensive function

Prejudice

-a negative attitude or affective response toward a group and its individual members -A hostile/negative evaluation of a person, based solely on their membership in a given group

Behaviors

-attitudes alert us to rewarding objects we should approach and to costly or punishing objects we should avoid -observations of how one behaves toward the attitude object

attitude

-evaluation of an object in a positive or negative fashion that includes three components: affect (emotion), cognition, and behavior -single most indispensable concept -A positive, negative, or mixed evaluation of an "attitude object"

Affect

-every object triggers some degree of positive or negative emotion -emotions, moods, and feelings toward the attitude object

strength

-how strong or weak is your attitude (1 to 3 on scale) -stronger attitudes tend to guide behavior more than weak ones

Social Categorization

1. Place people into social groups 2. Develop beliefs about group 3. Guide future interactions

When Does Inconsistency Produce Dissonance?

A particular inconsistency will arouse dissonance if it implicates our core sense of self The way we hold other people responsible for their actions is the same we way we hold ourselves responsible

Classical Conditioning

A stimulus that elicits an emotional response is accompanied by a neutral stimulus that does not until eventually the neutral stimulus elicits the emotional response by itself

Political ideology

Ambiguity is distressing, use norms to result ambiguity

LaPiere's study

followed a chinese couple around the US, visited 250 establishments, only one wouldn't serve them despite 90% of them saying they wouldn't serve orientals, attitudes did not predict behavior

Embodied Nature of Cognition and Emotion

In figuring out what we think, feel, or believe, we draw on whatever cues we have including what our bodies are doing

Motivational Perspective

Intergroup hostility can develop merely because another group exists (no need for competition)

Valence

Is your overall evaluation positive or negative? (-3 to 3 on scale)

Specificity principle

To predict behavior from attitudes, match the level of specificity between the attitude and the behavior

Cognitive Consequences

What are the cognitive costs of racial bias for Whites & Blacks? - Blatant different from subtle (ambiguous)? Stroop task: what you read is what you interpret first

white privilege

Whites seldom consider how their race affects their daily life • Whites, when learning about privilege, sometimes feel under attack: - Learning about privilege can lead to less racist beliefs - But it can also backfire and make people more biased

Decisions and Dissonance

You rationalize in order to be consistent (ex: horse bettors, fair chance before betting, great chance after betting)

Superordinate goals

a goal that transcends the interests of any one group and can be achieved more readily by two or more groups working together

Likert scale

a numerical scale used to assess attitudes; includes a set of possible answers with labeled anchors on each extreme. 1 strongly disagree to 7 strongly agree

Implicit association test

a technique for revealing nonconscious attitudes toward different stimuli, particularly groups of people

Realistic group conflict theory

a theory that group conflict, prejudice, and discrimination are likely to arise over competition between groups for limited resources

Dissonance reduction processes

activated when behavior is inconsistent with preexisting attitudes that are clear cut and of some importance

three components of attitude

affect, cognition, behaviors

Minimal group paradigm

an experimental paradigm in which researchers create groups based on arbitrary and seemingly meaningless criteria and then examine how the members of these "minimal groups" are inclined to behave toward one another

Implicit attitude measures

an indirect measure of attitudes that does not involve a self-report, when there is a reason to believe cannot truly report their true feelings. Two types: affective priming and implicit association test (IAT)

Cognitive component

attitude we express; affective component - may determine our behavior or vice versa

Ambivalent sexism analysis

benevolent sexism (chivalrous) and hostile sexism (against non traditional women) exist side by side. Those who hold ambivalent attitudes tend to act positively toward members of outgroups only if they fulfilled their idealized image of what such people should be like

Measure accessibility of attitude

how quickly it comes to mind

Physiological indicators

increased heart rate and sweaty palms associated with fear

Self perception processes

invoked when behavior conflicts with attitudes that are relatively vague or of little import, we use whatever cues we have available to us to figure out what we think and how we feel, including knowledge of the surrounding context and how we've acted

Sweet lemons rationalization

it's really not so bad

Modern racism

prejudice directed at racial groups that exists alongside the rejection of explicitly racial beliefs (ex: rejection of blacks are inferior, but whites are still suspicious around them)

"Automatic" Behavior That Bypasses Conscious Attitudes

reflect on our attitudes and then decide how to behave

Measure centrality of attitude

researchers measure a variety of attitudes within a domain and calculate how strongly each one is linked to the others (ex: if a specific topic such as abortion is very important to you, it should highly correlate with your attitude about certain other issues)

vegetarian attitude

sadness and guilt about hurting animals - affect belief all creatures are equal - cognitive never eat or buy meat - behavior

Nonverbal measures

smiling behavior, degree of physical closeness, as indices or signals of positive attitudes toward others

prejudice

social identity theory realistic group conflict theory relative deprivation theory

Response latency

the amount of time it takes to respond to a stimulus, such as an attitude question (ex: how long it took for people to answer which candidate would do a better job at being president and who actually won)

Stereotypes

the belief that certain attributes are characteristic of members of a particular group (Can be positive or negative, true or false, "kernel of truth," It is a way of categorizing people)

object appraisal

the fundamental function of attitudes

Cognitive consistency theories

the impact of behavior on attitudes reflects the powerful tendency we have to justify or rationalize our behavior and to minimize any inconsistencies between our attitudes and actions

Cognitive perspective

the origin of stereotyping to the same cognitive processes that enable people to categorize items such as furniture into chairs, couches, and tables

Priming

the presentation of information designed to activate a concept (such as a stereotype) and hence make it accessible. A prime is the stimulus presented to activate the concept in question

Motivational perspective of stereotypes

the psychological needs that lead to intergroup conflict

Economic perspective of stereotypes

the roots of much intergroup hostility in competing interests that can set groups apart from one another

Effort justification

the tendency to reduce dissonance by justifying the time, effort, or money devoted to something that turned out to be unpleasant or disappointing

System justification theory

the theory that people are motivated to see the existing sociopolitical system as desirable, fair, and legitimate (the world is fair, combined with an abundance of evidence of injustice, can generate ideological dissonance)

Terror management theory

the theory that people deal with the potentially crippling anxiety associated with the knowledge of the inevitability of death by striving for symbolic immortality through preserving valued cultural worldviews and believing they have lived up to their standards

testing for arousal Self-perception

there is no arousal, people coolly infer what their attitudes must be in light of their behavior and the context in which it occurred

Denial of death

to maintain that it's only the physical body and this particular earthly existence that will come to an end. Things they care about such as children and grandchildren will continue to live

properties of attitudes

valence and strength

learning approach, mere exposure, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, genetic predisposition

where do attitudes come from

Implicit Cognition Measures

• Assess the degree to which concepts are associated with one another • Work without participants' awareness of what is being measured • Advantage: low likelihood of social desirability response bias • Limitation: can only show that one concept is more positively evaluated than another

Moral credentials

• Complying with norm to avoid prejudice leads to ironic effect of increasing later likelihood of acting in a prejudiced way

Why don't attitudes predict behavior?

• Conflict with other determinants • General vs. Specificity mismatch • Automatic behaviors • Flawed introspection about attitudes • Flawed measurement of attitudes

Health Consequences

• Measures of physiological stress and immune response sensitive to both - Public esteem: Perception that society views ones' own group negatively (perceived stigma) - Private esteem: One's personal view of their own group • Perceived prejudice: Chronic (vs. accute) is more detrimental for health outcomes (Pascoe & Smart-Richman, 2009) - Repeated stressors harm immune system, cardiovascular system, and mental health

Consequences of Prejudice

• Perceptual consequences • Cognitive consequences • Performance consequences • Health consequences • Ways of coping

Methods of reducing prejudice

• Perspective taking • Contact • Recategorization

Self-perception theory

• the theory that people come to know their own attitudes by looking at their behavior and the context in which it occurred, and inferring what their attitudes must be • Know our attitudes by examining our behavior - Often best for weak, ambiguous attitudes

Group Privilege

• Unearned favored state conferred simply because of one's race, gender, social class, or sexual orientation • Privilege for one group = loss for other groups: Zero-sum competition over scarce resources

types of discrimination

• intentional: blatant - posting a sign, treating others differently covert - trying to hide your discrimination • unintentional • microaggressions • "Formal" - hiring, access, resources (generally illegal for gender, race, age, sexual orientation*) • "Interpersonal" - Not always illegal - includes expressions of helping behavior, friendliness, hostility, rudeness, interaction length, and other nonverbal behaviors

Cognitive dissonance theory

• the theory that inconsistencies among a person's thoughts, sentiments, and actions cause an aversive emotional state (dissonance) that leads efforts to restore consistency • Inconsistency between two cognitions gives rise to negative arousal