Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination

What is the "psychological recipe" for implicit bias?

1) We form schemas and store info categorically 2) We have beliefs associated with these schemas (i.e. stereotypes) 3) We have attitudes associated with these beliefs (i.e. prejudices) 4) Those attitudes can be automatic and non-conscious (IAT study shows consistent throughout all age groups )

How do we combat of implicit bias?

Experimental Interventions like intergroup contact, superordinate identities, counter-stereotype exposure, awareness of implicit bias/cognitive errors (impact of bias on behavior) these trainings shown to not work well b/c there's so much focus on trying to change individual minds, but it's better to address the social context (enviro) to which people interact ... need big structural changes!

More examples of implicit bias in society:

IAT showed employers are less likely to invite obese people for a job interview.... impacted performance from sexist double standard for WiSTEM... and psychological distress from stigma around LGBTQ+

group-serving bias (ultimate attribution error)

People make trait attributions in ways that benefit their ingroups, just as they make trait attributions that benefit themselves

common ingroup identity

The attempt to reduce prejudice by creating a superordinate categorization. interdependence and cooperation → common ingroup identity → favorable intergroup attitudes. (The idea that interdependent cooperation in groups reduces negative beliefs about outgroup members because it leads people to see the others as part of the ingroup (by creating a common identity White and Black interviewers asked White students attending a football game to help them by completing a questionnaire. The data were analyzed both by whether the request was to a White (ingroup) or Black (outgroup) student and also by whether the individual whose help was sought wore the same hat that they did or a different hat. Results supported the common ingroup identity model. Helping was much greater for outgroup members when hats were the same.).

contact hypothesis

The idea that intergroup contact will reduce prejudice -need equal status, intergroup cooperation, common goals, and support by social and institutional authorities (e.g. if children from different ethnic groups play together in school, their attitudes toward each other should improve...Brown v. 1954 Board of Education )

Social categorization

The natural cognitive process (heuristic) by which we place individuals into social groups. We spontaneously categorize each other on the basis of many group memberships, including race, academic status (student versus teacher), social roles, etc. Serve as a functional way of dealing with the world by helping us fulfill our self-interest while reducing our time/effort. But it has many negative outcomes, including overgeneralization and stereotyping of different social groups (Which groups we use in social categorization can change over time and in different situations. You're more likely to categorize yourself as a member of your college/university when your football team just won an important game, or at your graduation ceremony, than you would on a normal evening out with your family.)

black sheep effect

The strong devaluation of ingroup members who threaten the positive image and identity of the ingroup... when ingroup favoritism does not occur (e.g. annoying student or bad teammate will be looked down on by others in school or on their team, often more than the same behavior from an outgroup member would be)

Implicit bias/prejudice

a non-conscious attitude or affective reaction towards a group and its members (e.g. I explicitly like Italians as much as anyone else, but because I have an automatic negative association with Italians that I am unaware of, I don't hire this Italian)

Authoritarianism

a personality dimension that characterizes people who prefer things to be simple rather than complex and who tend to hold traditional and conventional values Another personality dimension that relates to the desires to protect and enhance the self and the ingroup and thus also relates to greater ingroup favoritism, and in some cases prejudice toward outgroups

Interdependence

a state in which the group members depend on each other for successful performance of the group goals...a factor that increases the motivation to learn about others

Prejudice

an attitude or affective reaction toward a certain group and its members / an unjustifiable negative attitude toward an outgroup or toward the members of that outgroup (e.g. Italians are more temperamental, and I don't like that)

Discrimination

behavior towards members of a group based on their membership in that group / unjustified negative behaviors toward members of outgroups based on their group membership. (e.g. Italians are more temperamental, I don't like that, I'm not hiring this Italian)

Stereotyping

belief that certain attributes are characteristic of members of particular groups, and projecting belief about category/group to individual members of that category/group (e.g. I believe that Italians are more temperamental than the Spanish)

Explicit bias

discrimination towards outgroup... declines with age according to study on self-reported prejudice (e.g. Italians are more temperamental, I don't like that, I'm not hiring this Italian)

How does implicit bias impact discrimination?

experimental research developed based on how implicit race bias influences the presence of threats -> shooter paradigm studies - showed people were quicker to identify guns after priming black faces (i.e. stronger association to see a threat), and made more errors in identifying neutral objects as guns after priming black faces under time pressure current example = police officers perceiving black people as more threatening than whites and being quicker to shoot unarmed minorities

Jigsaw classroom

giving students superordinate goals motivates mixed race cooperation which, in turn, reduces racial conflict an approach to learning in which students from different racial or ethnic groups work together, in an interdependent way, to master material.

superordinate goals

goals that can be best achieved through groups working together benefit or recategorization, superordinate goals that help us see others as part of the same category as we are provide a common ingroup identity and are successful at improving intergroup attitudes (e.g. Robbers Cave Experiment - 11 year boys at summer camp divided into 2 groups at camped at opposite ends of the site - "the Rattlers" and "the Eagles". Each group developed its own social norms and group structure and became quite cohesive, with a strong positive social identity. Then they united the boys and arranged competitive games, like tug-of-war, which created ingroup favoritism, prejudice, and discrimination like stealing, food fights, and name-calling. the situations were designed to get them to problem solve and creating interdepedence through goals that were both very important to them and yet that required the cooperative efforts and resources of both the Eagles and the Rattlers to attain...led to more positive intergroup attitudes)

minimal group paradigm

groups are based on arbitrary and trivial features, yet participants still show significant ingroup favoritism (e.g. splitting up by birth month)

Economic perspective

groups form stereotypes and discriminate against other groups because they are in competition for scarce resources (e.g. "Robber's cave" experiment, Lord of the Flies)

Benevolent Racism/Sexism

holding attitudes that people think are favorable towards a group, but that have the effect of reinforcing general stereotypes

How does implicit bias impact education?

implicit bias in the classroom study (2016) showed how pre-k teachers disproportionately looked at black kids vs white kids while looking for bad behavior when doing an eye-tracking test study on emails from white vs minority students (based on stereotypical names) and professors - showed discriminatory gap in rates of their email response: highest for white males in stem classes and highest for females in fine arts classes

Social dominance orientation (SDO)

is a personality dimension that refers to the tendency to see and to accept inequality among different groups (people who score high on measures of SDO believe that there are and should be status differences among social groups, and they do not see these as wrong. High SDO individuals agree with statements such as "Some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups,")

How does implicit bias develop?

learned by observing and internalizing explicit biases in others/the media throughout childhood we start with a neutral outlook, but then learn these positive and negative attitudes over time (i.e. mere-exposure effect = the more you see/are familiar with something, the more positive attitude you have towards it)

Motivational perspective

people readily adopt us/them perspective and prefer "us" to "them" even in absence of competition (e.g. study on why people voted for Trump - due to a perceived status threat to their economic / demographic group, Robbers Cave - led the campers to perceive both the ingroup and the outgroup as one large group ("we") rather than as two separate groups ("us" and "them"). As differentiation between the ingroup and the outgroup decreases, so should ingroup favoritism, prejudice, and conflict).

Stereotype threat

performance decrements that are caused by the knowledge of cultural stereotypes (e.g. women performing poorly in math b/c of sexist stereotypes)

Modern racism

prejudice against racial groups that exists alongside rejection of explicitly racist beliefs (i.e. explicit attitudes can change, but implicit attitudes can remain in terms of prejudice against racial groups...non-conscious)

Cognitive perspective

stereotyping is an efficient way for our brains to store, process and categorize information; this cognitive efficiency comes at the cost of the occasional error in categorization

How does implicit bias impact medicine?

study among physicians in residencies who took the IAT, testing if their implicit/explicit attitude impacts their treatment recommendation of white vs black patients --> showed implicit preference for whites as more cooperative than blacks, which predicted treatments

How does implicit bias impact victim-blaming?

study showed implicit attitudes towards males vs. females predicts the responsibility that we assign towards them in cases of conflicts implicit sexism predicts higher likelihood of "victim-caused" sentence completions - measured how often people completed sentences by using he/she pronouns and what type of +/- associations they held (e.g. bob killed amy because he is an aggressive moral monster - he is at fault VS bob killed amy because she was pissing bob off - she is at fault)

Outgroup homogeneity effect

tendency to see members of outgroups as much more similar to one another than members of ingroups (e.g. "they're all the same, we're so unique"...occurs in part because we don't have as much contact with outgroup members as we do with ingroup members, and the quality of interaction with outgroup members is often more superficial.)

extended-contact hypothesis

the idea that prejudice can be reduced for people who have friends who are friends with members of the outgroup

stereotype

the positive or negative beliefs that we hold about the characteristics of social group (e.g. "French people are romantic")

ingroup favoritism

the tendency to respond more positively to people from our ingroups than we do to people from outgroups (Certain cases where this does not occur despite general tendency, like when the members of the ingroup are clearly inferior to other groups on an important dimension... Members of low-status groups show less ingroup favoritism than do members of high-status groups and may even display outgroup favoritism, in which they admit that the other groups are better than they are some people more likely to show this b/c of tendency to rely on group memberships to create positive social identity, as seen nby the collective self-esteem scale)

Under what conditions is the influence of implicit bias strongest?

uncertainty / ambiguity (e.g. more likely to help white victims vs. black victims when others are around in emergency intervention study; job apps)

Social identity theory

we derive self-esteem from the status and accomplishments of the various groups to which we belong (results in ingroup favoritism - the motivation to boost status of ingroup)