Prejudice: Causes and Cures

Prejudice: Causes and Cures
Chapter 13

Overview Definition of prejudice, stereotype and discrimination?
What causes prejudice? How can prejudice be reduced? Contact hypothesis

Prejudice: The Ubiquitous Social Phenomenon
Prejudice is ubiquitous: In one form or another, it affects us all. For one thing, prejudice is a two-way street; it often flows from the minority group to the majority group as well as in the other direction. And any group can be a target of prejudice. Consider one of the most superordinate groups to which you belong—your nationality. Americans are not universally loved, respected, and admired; at one time or another, we Americans have been the target of prejudice in just about every corner of the world. In the 1960s and 1970s, North Vietnamese Communists referred to Americans as the “running dogs of capitalist imperialism.” In the twenty-first century, the majority of people living in the Middle East think of America as a ruthless, power-hungry, amoral nation, referring to us as “the great Satan.” In our own hemisphere, many of our neighbors to the south consider us overfed economic and military bullies.

Many aspects of your identity can cause you to be labeled and discriminated against: nationality racial and ethnic identity gender sexual orientation religion appearance physical state weight disabilities diseases hair color professions hobbies

Many aspects of your identity can cause you to be labeled and discriminated against. Consider the stereotypes of the “ditzy blonde,” “dumb jock,” or “computer nerd.” Some people have negative attitudes about blue-collar workers; others, about Fortune 500 CEOs. The point is that none of us emerges completely unscathed by prejudice; it is a problem common to all humankind.

In addition to being widespread, prejudice is dangerous. Simple dislike of a group can be relentless and can escalate to extreme hatred, to thinking of its members as less than human, and to torture, murder, and even genocide. Even when murder or genocide is not the culmination of prejudiced beliefs, the targets of prejudice will suffer in less dramatic ways. One frequent consequence of being the target of relentless prejudice is a diminution of one’s self-esteem. As discussed in chapter 6, self-esteem is a vital aspect of a person’s life. Who we think we are is a key determinant of how we behave and who we become. A person with low self-esteem will, by definition, conclude that he or she is unworthy of a good education, a decent job, an exciting romantic partner, and so on. Thus a person with low self-esteem is more likely to be unhappy and unsuccessful than a person with well-grounded high self-esteem. In a democracy, such a person is also less likely to take advantage of available opportunities.

Prejudice and Self-Esteem
Seeds of low self-esteem are sown early. Clark and Clark (1947) demonstrated that African American children as young as three already thought it was not particularly desirable to be black. Children were offered a choice between playing with a white doll and playing with a black doll. The great majority of them rejected the black doll, feeling that the white doll was prettier and generally superior. Taking this evidence into consideration, the Supreme Court ruled that separating black children from white children on the basis of race alone “generates a feeling of inferiority." Arguing before the Supreme Court in 1954, Thurgood Marshall cited this experiment as evidence that psychologically, segregation did irreparable harm to the self-esteem of African American children. “generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. Separate educational facilities are therefore inherently unequal” (Justice Earl Warren, speaking for the majority in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954)

Experiments with the African American children

Prejudice and Self-Esteem
Goldberg (1968) women in this culture had learned to consider themselves intellectually inferior to men. In his experiment, Goldberg asked female college students to read scholarly articles and to evaluate them in terms of their competence and writing style. For some students, specific articles were signed by male authors (e.g., “John T. McKay”), while for others, the same articles were signed by female authors (e.g., “Joan T. McKay”). The female students rated the articles much higher if they were attributed to a male author than if the same articles were attributed to a female author. In other words, these women had learned their place; they regarded the output of other women as inferior to that of men, just as the African American youngsters learned to regard black dolls as inferior to white dolls. This is the legacy of a prejudiced society.

A Progress Report Significant changes have happened since those studies: The number of blatant acts of overt prejudice and discrimination has decreased sharply. Affirmative action opened the door to greater opportunities for women and minorities. The media have increased our exposure to women and minorities doing important work in positions of power and influence.

A Progress Report These changes are reflected in the gradual increase in self-esteem of people in these groups. Most recent research has failed to replicate the results of those earlier experiments. African American children have gradually become more content with black dolls than they were in the late 1930s. People no longer discriminate against a piece of writing simply because it is attributed to a woman. (Gopaul-McNicol, 1987; Porter, 1971; Porter & Washington, 1979, 1989) (Swim, 1994; Swim, Borgida, Maruyama, & Myers, 1989). Similarly, recent research suggests that there might not be any major differences in global self-esteem between blacks and whites or between men and women (Aronson, Quinn, & Spencer, 1998; Crocker & Major, 1989; Steele, 1992, 1997).

A Progress Report While this progress is real, it would be a mistake to conclude that prejudice has ceased to be a serious problem in the United States. Prejudice exists in countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways. For the most part, in America, prejudice has gone underground and become less overt. (Pettigrew, 1985, 1989)

Prejudice Defined Prejudice is an attitude.
Attitudes are made up of three components: affective or emotional component, representing both the type of emotion linked with the attitude (e.g., anger, warmth) and the extremity of the attitude (e.g., mild uneasiness, outright hostility), cognitive component, involving the beliefs or thoughts (cognitions) that make up the attitude, behavioral component, relating to one’s actions—people don’t simply hold attitudes; they usually act on them as well.

Prejudice Defined Prejudice
A hostile or negative attitude toward people in a distinguishable group, based solely on their membership in that group. Prejudice refers to the general attitude structure and its affective (emotional) component. While prejudice can involve either positive or negative affect, social psychologists (and people in general) use the word prejudice primarily when referring to negative attitudes about others. For example, when we say that someone is prejudiced against blacks, we mean that he or she is primed to behave coolly or with hostility toward blacks and that he or she feels that all blacks are pretty much the same. Thus the characteristics this individual assigns to blacks are negative and applied to the group as a whole. The individual traits or behaviors of the individual target of prejudice will either go unnoticed or be dismissed.

Stereotypes: The Cognitive Component
The distinguished journalist Walter Lippmann (1922), who was the first to introduce the term stereotype, described the distinction between the world out there and stereotypes—“the little pictures we carry around inside our heads.” Within a given culture, these pictures tend to be remarkably similar. For example, we would be surprised if your image of the high school cheerleader was anything but bouncy, peppy, pretty, nonintellectual, and (of course!) female. We would also be surprised if the Jewish doctor or the New York cab driver in your head was female—or if the black musician was playing classical music.

A generalization about a group of people in which identical characteristics are assigned to virtually all members of the group, regardless of actual variation among the members. Once formed, stereotypes are resistant to change on the basis of new information.

Stereotyping is a cognitive process, not an emotional one. Stereotyping does not necessarily lead to intentional acts of abuse. Often stereotyping is merely a technique we use to simplify how we look at the world—and we all do it to some extent. For example, Gordon Allport (1954) described stereotyping as “the law of least effort.” According to Allport, the world is just too complicated for us to have a highly differentiated attitude about everything. Instead, we maximize our cognitive time and energy by developing elegant, accurate attitudes about some topics while relying on simple, sketchy beliefs for others.

Stereotypes, Attribution, and Gender
Compared to men, women do tend to manifest behaviors that can best be described as more socially sensitive, friendlier, and more concerned with the welfare of others, while men tend to behave in ways that are more dominant, controlling, and independent. Some data indicate that the stereotype tends to underestimate the actual gender differences. While overlap exists between men and women on these characteristics, the differences are too consistent to be dismissed as unimportant. (Eagly, 1994; Eagly & Wood, 1991; Swim, 1994) (Swim, 1994) Eagly (1995, 1996)

Needless to say, the phenomenon of gender stereotyping often does not reflect reality and can cut deeply. When a man is successful on a given task, observers of both sexes attribute his success to ability. If a woman is successful at that same task, observers attribute her success to hard work. In one experiment, for example, when confronted with a highly successful female physician, male undergraduates perceived her as being less competent and having had an easier path toward success than a successful male physician (Feldman-Summers & Kiesler, 1974). Female undergraduates saw things differently: Although they saw the male physician and the female physician as being equally competent, they saw the male as having had an easier time of it. Both males and females attributed higher motivation to the female physician. It should be noted that attributing a high degree of motivation to a woman can be one way of implying that she has less skill than her male counterpart (i.e., “She’s not very smart, but she tries hard”).

Even as children, girls have a tendency to downplay their own ability. While fourth-grade boys attribute their own successful outcomes on a difficult intellectual task to their ability, girls tend to derogate their own successful performance. While boys learn to protect their egos by attributing their own failures to bad luck, girls take more blame for failures. In a subsequent study, the tendency girls have to downplay their own ability appeared most prevalent in (Nichols, 1975). Traditionally male domains like math (Stipek & Gralinski, 1991): Specifically, junior high school girls attributed their success on a math exam to luck, while boys attributed their success to ability. Girls also showed less feelings of pride than boys following success on a math exam.

These beliefs can be influenced by the attitudes of our society in general and parents. Mothers who hold the strongest gender-stereotypical beliefs also believe their own daughters have relatively low math ability and that their sons have relatively high math ability. Mothers who don't hold stereotypical beliefs do not see their daughters as less able in math than their sons. Janis Jacobs and Jacquelynne Eccles (1992) explored the influence of mothers’ gender-stereotypical beliefs on the way these same mothers perceived the abilities of their 11- and 12-year-old sons and daughters. How did the mothers’ beliefs affect the beliefs of their children? The daughters of women with strong gender stereotypes believed that they had poor math ability; the opposite was true as well: Mothers who did not hold strong gender stereotypes had daughters without this self-defeating mind-set. This is an interesting variation on the self-fulfilling prophecy discussed in Chapters 3 and 4: Here, if your mother doesn’t expect you to do well, chances are you will not do as well as you otherwise might.

Discrimination: The Behavioral Component
An unjustified negative or harmful action toward the members of a group simply because of their membership in that group. If you are a fourth-grade math teacher with the stereotypical belief that little girls are hopeless at math, you might be less likely to spend as much time in the classroom coaching a girl than coaching a boy. If you are a police officer and you have the stereotypical belief that African Americans are more violent than whites, this might affect your behavior toward a specific black man you are trying to arrest.

Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved.
Adapted from Bond, diCandia & McKennon, 1988. Researchers compared the treatment of patients in a psychiatric hospital run by an all-white professional staff (Bond, Di Candia, & McKinnon, 1988). The results of the study are illustrated in this figure. The researchers examined the two most common methods used by staff members to handle patients’ violent behavior: secluding the individual in a timeout room and restraining the individual in a straitjacket and administering tranquilizing drugs. An examination of hospital records over eighty-five days revealed that the harsher method—physical and chemical restraint—was used with black patients nearly four times as often as with white patients. This was the case despite the virtual lack of differences in the number of violent incidents committed by the black and the white patients. Moreover, this discriminatory treatment occurred even though the black patients, on being admitted to the hospital, had been diagnosed as slightly less violent than the white patients. This study did uncover an important positive finding: After several weeks, reality managed to overcome the effects of the existing stereotype. The staff eventually noticed that the black and the white patients did not differ in their degree of violent behavior, and they began to treat black and white patients equally. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Discrimination against Homosexuals
Several studies have shown homosexuals face much discrimination and antipathy in day-to-day lives. Unlike women, ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities, homosexuals are not protected by national laws banning discrimination in the workplace. (Fernald, 1995; Franklin, 2000; Herek, 1991)

Discrimination against Homosexuals
Researchers have found that compared to the way they interacted with “non-homosexuals,” employers interacting with job applicants they have been led to think are homosexual: were less verbally positive spent less time interviewing them used fewer words while chatting with them made less eye contact with them In other words, it was clear from their behavior that the potential employers were either uncomfortable or more distant with people they believed to be homosexual.

Group exercise Think about an example to a: prejudice stereotype
discrimination

What Causes Prejudice?

The Way We Think: Social Cognition
Our first explanation for what causes prejudice is that it is the inevitable byproduct of the way we process and organize information. Our tendency to categorize and group information, to form schemas and use them to interpret new or unusual information, to rely on potentially inaccurate heuristics (shortcuts in mental reasoning), and to depend on what are often faulty memory processes—all of these aspects of social cognition can lead us to form negative stereotypes and to apply them in a discriminatory way.

Social Categorization: Us versus Them
The first step in prejudice is the creation of groups—putting some people into one group based on certain characteristics and others into another group based on their different characteristics. This kind of categorization is the underlying theme of human social cognition. Thus social categorization is both useful and necessary; however, this simple cognitive process has profound implications. (Brewer & Brown, 1998; Rosch & Lloyd, 1978; Taylor, 1981; Wilder, 1986) For example, we make sense out of the physical world by grouping animals and plants into taxonomies based on their physical characteristics; similarly, we make sense out of our social world by grouping people according to other characteristics, including gender, nationality, ethnicity, and so on. When we encounter people with these characteristics, we rely on our perceptions of what people with similar characteristics have been like in the past to help us determine how to react to someone else with the same characteristics (Andersen & Klatzky, 1987).

Social Categorization: Us versus Them
For example, in Jane Elliot’s third-grade classroom, children grouped according to eye color began to act differently based on that social categorization. Blue-eyed children, the superior group, stuck together and actively promoted and used their higher status and power in the classroom. They formed an in-group, defined as the group with which an individual identifies. The blue-eyed kids saw the brown-eyed ones as outsiders—different and inferior. To the blue-eyed children, the brown-eyed kids were the out-group, the group with which the individual does not identify.

In-Group Bias In-Group Bias
Positive feelings and special treatment for people we have defined as being part of our in-group and negative feelings and unfair treatment for others simply because we have defined them as being in the out-group.

The major underlying motive is self-esteem:
In-Group Bias The major underlying motive is self-esteem: Individuals seek to enhance their self-esteem by identifying with specific social groups. Self-esteem will be enhanced only if the individual sees these groups as superior to other groups. Thus for members of the Ku Klux Klan, it is not enough to believe that the races should be kept separate; they must convince themselves of the supremacy of the white race in order to feel good about themselves.

In-Group Bias To get at the pure, unvarnished mechanisms behind this phenomenon, researchers have created entities that they refer to as minimal groups. In these experiments, complete strangers are formed into groups using the most trivial criteria imaginable. For example, in one experiment, participants watched a coin toss that randomly assigned them to either group X or group W. (Tajfel, 1982a; Tajfel & Billig, 1974; Tajfel & Turner, 1979) Participants in another experiment were first asked to express their opinions about artists they had never heard of and were then randomly assigned to a group that appreciated either the “Klee style” or the “Kandinsky style,” ostensibly due to their picture preferences.

In-Group Bias The striking thing about this research is that despite the fact that the participants were strangers before the experiment and didn’t interact during it, they behaved as if those who shared the same meaningless label were their dear friends or close kin. They liked the members of their own group better. They rated the members of their in-group as more likely to have pleasant personalities and to have done better work than out-group members. Most striking, participants allocated more rewards to those who shared their label. (Brewer, 1979; Hogg & Abrams, 1988; Mullen, Brown, & Smith, 1992; Wilder, 1981)

Out-Group Homogeneity
The belief that “they” are all alike. In-group members tend to perceive out-group members as being more similar (homogeneous) than they really are—and more homogenous than the in-group members. (Linville, Fischer, & Salovey, 1989; Quattrone, 1986) Does your college have a traditional rival, whether in athletics or academics? If so, as an in-group member, you probably value your institution more highly than this rival (thereby raising and protecting your self-esteem), and you probably perceive students at this rival school to be more similar to each other (e.g., as a given type) than you perceive students at your own college to be.

If you know something about one out-group member, you are more likely to feel you know something about all of them. Adapted from Quattrone & Jones, 1980. Consider a study of students in two rival universities: Princeton and Rutgers (Quattrone & Jones, 1980). The rivalry between these colleges is based on athletics, academics, and even class-consciousness (Princeton is private and Rutgers is public). Male research participants at the two schools watched videotaped scenes in which three different young men were asked to make a decision—for example, in one videotape, an experimenter asked a man whether he wanted to listen to rock music or classical music while he participated in an experiment on auditory perception. The participants were told that the man was either a Princeton or a Rutgers student, so for some of them the student in the videotape was an in-group member and for others an out-group member. Participants had to predict what the man in the videotape would choose. After they saw the man make his choice (e.g., rock or classical music), they were asked to predict what percentage of male students at that institution would make the same choice. Did the predictions vary due to the in- or out-group status of the target men? As you can see in this figure, the results support the out-group homogeneity hypothesis: When the target person was an out-group member, the participants believed his choice was more predictive of what his peers would choose than when he was an in-group member (a student at their own school). Similar results have been found in a wide variety of experiments in the United States, Europe, and Australia (Duck, Hogg, & Terry, 1995; Hartstone & Augoustinos, 1995; Judd & Park, 1988; Ostrom & Sedikides, 1992; Park & Rothbart, 1982). Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

The Failure of Logic Even people who are usually sensible become relatively immune to rational, logical arguments when it comes to their prejudice. Why is this so? It is primarily the emotional aspect of attitudes that makes a prejudiced person so hard to agree with. Logical arguments are not effective in countering emotions.

The Failure of Logic Even people who are usually sensible become relatively immune to rational, logical arguments when it comes to their prejudice. Why is this so? As discussed in earlier chapters, an attitude tends to organize the way we process relevant information about the targets of that attitude. This presents difficulties for the person trying to reduce a friend’s prejudice. None of us is a 100% reliable accountant when it comes to processing social information we care about. The human mind simply does not tally events objectively. Accordingly, individuals who hold specific opinions (or schemas) about certain groups will process information about those groups differently from the way they process information about other groups.

Rehearsed (or recalled) more often, and
The Failure of Logic Specifically, information consistent with their notions about these target groups will be: Given more attention Rehearsed (or recalled) more often, and Therefore remembered better than information that contradicts these notions. (Bodenhausen, 1988; Dovidio, Evans, & Tyler, 1986; O’Sullivan & Durso, 1984; Wyer, 1988) These are the familiar effects of schematic processing that we discussed in Chapter 4. Applying these effects to the topic of prejudice, we can see that whenever a member of a group behaves as we expect, the behavior confirms and even strengthens our stereotype. Thus stereotypes become relatively impervious to change; after all, proof that they are accurate is always out there—when our beliefs guide us to see it.

The Persistence of Stereotypes
Stereotypes reflect cultural beliefs. Even if we don’t believe these stereotypes, we can easily recognize them as common beliefs held by others. For instance, in a series of studies conducted at Princeton University over a span of 36 years (1933–1969), students were asked to assign traits to members of various ethnic and national groups (Gilbert, 1951; Karlins, Coffman, & Walters, 1969; Katz & Braly, 1933). The participants could do so easily, and to a large extent they agreed with each other. They knew the stereotypes, even for groups about whom they had little real knowledge, such as Turks. Table 13.1 shows some of the results of these studies. Note how negative the early stereotypes were in 1933 and how they became somewhat less negative over time. What is particularly interesting about these studies is that participants in 1951 began to voice discomfort with the task (discomfort that didn’t exist in 1933). By 1969, many participants not only felt discomfort but seemed reluctant to admit that these stereotypes even existed because they did not believe the stereotypes themselves (Karlins et al., 1969). A quarter of a century later, Patricia Devine and Andrew Elliot (1995) showed that the stereotypes were not really fading at all; virtually all the participants were fully aware of the negative stereotypes of African Americans, whether they believed them personally or not.

The Activation of Stereotypes
Attempting to find out, researchers had two confederates, one African American and one white, stage a debate about nuclear energy for groups of participants (Greenberg & Pyszczynski, 1985). For half the groups, the African American debater presented far better arguments and clearly won the debate; for the other half, the white debater performed far better and won the debate. The participants were asked to rate both debaters’ skill. However, just before subjects were to do this, the critical experimental manipulation occurred. A confederate planted in the group did one of three things: (1) He made a highly racist remark about the African American debater—“There’s no way that nigger won the debate”; (2) he made a nonracist remark about the African American debater—“There’s no way the pro [or con] debater won the debate”; or (3) he made no comment at all. The researchers reasoned that if those participants who heard the racist comment were able to disregard it completely, they would not rate the African American debater any differently from the way participants in the other conditions, who had not heard such a comment, rated him. Was that the case? This figure clearly shows that the answer is no. The data compared the ratings of skill given to the African American and white debaters when they were each in the losing role. As you can see, the participants rated the African American and white debaters as equally skillful when no comment was made; similarly, when a nonracist, nonstereotypical comment was made about the African American debater, he was rated as being just as skillful as the white debater. However, after the racist comment evoked racial stereotypes, participants rated the African American debater significantly lower than participants in the other groups did. Why? The derogatory comment activated other negative stereotypes about African Americans so that those who heard it rated the same performance by the debater as less skilled than those who had not heard the racist remark. Adapted from Greenberg & Pysczynski, 1985. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Automatic and Controlled Processing of Stereotypes
An automatic process is one over which we have no control. Stereotypes are automatically triggered under certain conditions—they just pop into one’s mind. Since the process is automatic, you can’t control it or stop it from occurring. However, for people who are not deeply prejudiced, their control processes can suppress or override these stereotypes. How does this activation process work? Patricia Devine and her colleagues argue that members of society share an archive of accessible stereotypes, even if they do not believe them. Devine differentiates between the automatic processing of information and the controlled processing of information (Devine, 1989a; Devine, Plant, Amodio, Harmon-Jones, and Vance, 2002; Zuwerink, Montieth, Devine, & Cook, 1996).

The Justification-Suppression Model of Prejudice
According to Crandall and Eschleman’s (2003) model, most people struggle between their urge to express prejudice and need to maintain positive self-concept (as a non-bigot). However, it requires energy to suppress prejudiced impulses. Because people are programmed to avoid the constant expenditure of energy, we seek information that can convince us there is a valid justification for holding a negative attitude toward a particular out-group. Once we find a valid justification for disliking this group, we can act against them and still feel as though we are not bigots—thus avoiding cognitive dissonance. As Crandall & Eshleman put it, “Justification undoes suppression, it provides cover, and it protects a sense of egalitarianism and a non-prejudiced self-image” (2003, p: 425). For example, suppose you dislike homosexuals—and are inclined to deny them the same rights that heterosexuals enjoy. But you are suppressing those feelings and actions because you want to preserve your self-image as a fair-minded, non-bigoted person. How might you avoid the expenditure of all that energy suppressing your impulse? As a justification for the expression of anti-homosexual thoughts and feelings, many people have used the Bible. Through the lens of a particular reading of the Bible, an anti-gay stance can be defended as fighting for “family values” rather than against gays and lesbians. This could help you preserve your self-image as a fair-minded person despite supporting actions that you might otherwise consider to be unfair (see Myers & Scanzoni, 2006).

The Illusory Correlation
When we expect two things to be related, we fool ourselves into believing that they are actually unrelated. (Fiedler, 2000; Garcia-Marques & Hamilton, 1996; Shavitt, Sanbonmatsu, Smittipatana, & Posavac, 1999)

Can We Change Stereotypical Beliefs?
Researchers have found that when people are presented with an example or two that seems to refute their existing stereotype, most do not change their general belief. Indeed, in one experiment, some people presented with disconfirming evidence actually strengthened stereotypical belief because the disconfirming evidence challenged them to come up with additional reasons for holding on to that belief. (Kunda & Oleson, 1997)

How We Assign Meaning: Attributional Biases

Dispositional versus Situational Explanations
One reason stereotypes are so insidious and persistent is the human tendency to make dispositional attributions. Relying too heavily on dispositional attributions often leads us to make attributional mistakes. Dispositional attributions—that is, to leap to the conclusion that a person’s behavior is due to some aspect of his or her personality rather than to some aspect of the situation. Although attributing people’s behavior to their dispositions is often accurate, human behavior is also shaped by situational forces. Given that this process operates on an individual level, you can only imagine the problems and complications that arise when we overzealously act out the fundamental attribution error for a whole group of people—an out-group.

Ultimate Attribution Error Our tendency to make dispositional attributions about an individual’s negative behavior to an entire group of people. Many Americans have a stereotype about African American and Hispanic men that involves aggression and the potential for violence—a very powerful dispositional attribution. In one study, college students, playing the role of jurors in a mock trial, were more likely to find a defendant guilty of a given crime simply if his name was Carlos Ramirez rather than Robert Johnson (Bodenhausen, 1988). Thus any situational information or extenuating circumstances that might have explained the defendant’s actions were ignored when the powerful dispositional attribution was stereotypically triggered—in this case, by the Hispanic name.

Researchers had college students read fictionalized files on prisoners to make a parole decision. Sometimes the crime matched the common stereotype of the offender—for example, when a Hispanic male, committed assault and battery, or when an upper-class Anglo-American committed embezzlement. When prisoners’ crimes were consistent with participants’ stereotypes, the students’ recommendations for parole were harsher. Most students ignored additional information that was relevant to a parole decision but inconsistent with the stereotype, such as evidence of good behavior in prison. (Bodenhausen & Wyer, 1985) These results indicate that when people conform to our stereotype, we tend to blind ourselves to clues about why they might have behaved as they did. Instead, we assume that something about their character or disposition, and not their situation or life circumstances, caused their behavior. In other words, when the fundamental attribution error rears its ugly head, we make dispositional attributions (based on our stereotypical beliefs about an ethnic or racial group) and not situational ones.

Stereotype Threat When African American students find themselves in highly evaluative educational situations, most tend to experience apprehension about confirming the existing negative cultural stereotype of “intellectual inferiority.” There is a statistical difference in academic test performance among various cultural groups in this country. In general, although there is considerable overlap, Asian Americans as a group perform slightly better than Anglo Americans, who in turn perform better than African Americans. Why does this occur? There may be any number of explanations—economic, cultural, historical, political. One important reason recently discovered has to do with anxiety produced by negative stereotypes. In a striking series of experiments, Claude Steele, Joshua Aronson, and their colleagues have demonstrated that at least one major contributing factor is clearly situational and is based on a phenomenon they call stereotype threat (Aronson et al., 1998, 1999; Steele, 1997; Steele & Aronson, 1995a, 1995b).

Stereotype Threat Stone and his colleagues (1999) found that when a game of miniature golf was framed as a measure of “sport strategic intelligence” black athletes performed worse at it than whites. But when the game was framed as a measure of “natural athletic ability” the pattern reversed, and the black athletes outperformed the whites.

Stereotype Threat The common stereotype has it that men are better at math than women are. When women in one experiment were led to believe that a particular test was designed to show differences in math abilities between men and women, they did not perform as well as men. In another condition, when women were told that the same test had nothing to do with male-female differences, they performed as well as men. The phenomenon even shows itself among white males if you put them in a similarly threatening situation. Joshua Aronson and his colleagues (1999) demonstrated that white males perform less well on a math exam when they thought they would be compared with Asian males—a group that they considered to have superior math ability. Furthermore, Brown and Pinel (2002), have shown that the more conscious individuals are of the stereotype, the greater is the effect on their performance.

How can the effects of stereotype threat be reversed?
An understanding of stereotype threat can be very useful for improving performance on tests and other. Merely reminding participants they were “selective northeastern liberal arts college” students eliminated the gender gap on a spatial ability test. Matthew McGlone and Joshua Aronson (2006) The “I’m-a-good-student” mindset effectively countered the women-aren’t-good-at-math stereotype, leading to significantly better spatial performance for the female test takers. Similar results were found for advanced calculus students at the university level (Good, Aronson & Harder, 2006), and with middle school students on actual standardized tests (Good, Aronson & Inzlicht, 2003). Research shows the performance-enhancing benefit of other counter-stereotype mindsets as well, such as exposure to successful role models from the stereotyped group (Marx & Roman, 2002; McIntyre, Paulson, & Lord, 2003), being reminded that abilities are improvable rather than fixed (Aronson, Fried, & Good, 2002; Good, Aronson & Inzlicht, 2003)—and even the mindset that anxiety on standardized tests is normal for members of stereotyped groups (Aronson & Williams, 2006; Johns, Schmader, & Martens, 2005).

Expectations and Distortions
When a member of an out-group behaves as we expect, it confirms and even strengthens our stereotype. And when an out-group member behaves in an unexpected, nonstereotypical fashion? Attribution theory provides the answer: we can simply engage in some attributional fancy footwork and emerge with our dispositional stereotype intact. Principally, we can make situational attributions about the exception—for example, that the person really is as we believe, but it just isn’t apparent in this situation. This phenomenon was beautifully captured in the laboratory (Ickes, Patterson, Rajecki, & Tanford, 1982). College men were scheduled, in pairs, to participate in the experiment. In one condition, the experimenter casually informed one participant that his partner was extremely unfriendly; in the other condition, the experimenter told one participant that his partner was extremely friendly. In both conditions, the participants went out of their way to be nice to their partner, and their partner returned their friendliness—that is, he behaved warmly and smiled a lot, as college men tend to do when they are treated nicely. The difference was that the participants who expected their partner to be unfriendly interpreted his friendly behavior as phony—as a temporary, fake response to their own nice behavior. They were convinced that underneath it all, he really was an unfriendly person. Accordingly, when the observed behavior—friendliness—was unexpected and contrary to their dispositional attribution, participants attributed it to the situation: “He’s just pretending to be friendly.” The dispositional attribution emerged unscathed.

Blaming the Victim When empathy is absent, it can be hard to avoid blaming the victim for his or her plight. Ironically, this tendency to blame victims for their victimization is typically motivated by a desire to see the world as a fair and just place, one where people get what they deserve and deserve what they get. Most people, when confronted with evidence of an unfair outcome that is otherwise difficult to explain, find a way to blame the victim (Crandall, D'Anello, Sakalli, Lazarus, Wieczorkowska, & Feather, 2001; Lerner, 1980, 1991; Lerner & Grant, 1990). For example, in one experiment, two people worked equally hard on the same task and, by the flip of a coin, one received a sizable reward and the other received nothing. After the fact, observers tended to reconstruct what happened and convince themselves that the unlucky person must have worked less hard. Similarly, negative attitudes toward the poor and the homeless—including blaming them for their own plight—are more prevalent among individuals who display a strong belief in a just world (Furnham & Gunter, 1984).

Self-fulfilling Prophecies
On a societal level, the insidiousness of the self-fulfilling prophecy goes far. Suppose that there is a general belief that a particular group is irredeemably stupid, uneducable, and fit only for menial jobs. Why waste educational resources on them? Hence they are given inadequate schooling. Thirty years later, what do you find? An entire group that with few exceptions is fit only for menial jobs. “See? I was right all the while,” says the bigot. “How fortunate that we didn’t waste our precious educational resources on such people!” The self-fulfilling prophecy strikes again.

Prejudice and Economic Competition: Realistic Conflict Theory
Realistic conflict theory holds that limited resources lead to conflict among groups and result in prejudice and discrimination. Thus prejudiced attitudes tend to increase when times are tense and conflict exists over mutually exclusive goals. Sherif’s Rober Cave experiment with the children (J. W. Jackson, 1993; Sherif, 1966; White, 1977) For example, prejudice has existed between Anglos and Mexican American migrant workers over a limited number of jobs, between Arabs and Israelis over disputed territory, and between northerners and southerners over the abolition of slavery.

Economic and Political Competition
When times are tough and resources are scarce: In-group members will feel more threatened by the out-group. Incidents of prejudice, discrimination, and violence toward out-group members will increase. In a classic experiment, Muzafer Sherif and his colleagues (1961) tested group conflict theory using the natural environment of a Boy Scout camp. The participants in the camp were normal, well-adjusted 12-year-old boys who were randomly assigned to one of two groups, the Eagles or the Rattlers. Each group stayed in its own cabin; the cabins were located quite a distance apart to reduce contact between the two groups. The youngsters were placed in situations designed to increase the cohesiveness of their own group. This was done by arranging enjoyable activities such as hiking and swimming and by having the campers work with their group on various building projects, preparing group meals, and so on. After feelings of cohesiveness developed within each group, the researchers set up a series of competitive activities in which the two groups were pitted against each other—for example, in games like football, baseball, and tug-of-war, where prizes were awarded to the winning team. These competitive games aroused feelings of conflict and tension between the two groups. In addition, the investigators created other situations to further intensify the conflict. For example, a camp party was arranged, but each group was told it started at a different time, thereby ensuring that the Eagles would arrive well before the Rattlers. The refreshments at the party consisted of two different kinds of food: Half the food was fresh, appealing, and appetizing, while the other half was squashed, ugly, and unappetizing. As you’d expect, the early-arriving Eagles ate well, and the latecoming Rattlers were not happy with what they found. They began to curse at the exploitive group. Because the Eagles believed they deserved what they got (first come, first served), they resented the name-calling and responded in kind. Name-calling escalated into food-throwing, and within a short time, punches were thrown and a full-scale riot ensued. Following this incident, the investigators tried to reverse the hostility they had promoted. Competitive games were eliminated, and a great deal of nonconflictual social contact was initiated. Once hostility had been aroused, however, simply eliminating the competition did not eliminate the hostility. Indeed, hostility continued to escalate, even when the two groups were engaged in such benign activities as watching movies together. Eventually, the investigators did manage to reduce the hostility between the two groups; exactly how will be discussed at the end of this chapter.

The Role of the Scapegoat
Research on scapegoating shows that individuals, when frustrated or unhappy, tend to displace aggression onto groups that are disliked, are visible, and are relatively powerless. The form the aggression takes depends on what is allowed or approved by the in-group in question. Since the 1940s and 1950s, lynchings of African Americans and pogroms against Jews have diminished dramatically because these are now deemed illegal by the dominant culture. But not all progress is linear. In the past decade, we have seen many eastern European countries emerge from the shadow of the former Soviet Union. But the new freedoms in the region have been accompanied by increased feelings of nationalism (“us versus them”) that have in turn intensified feelings of rancor and prejudice against out-groups. In the Baltic States and the Balkans, the rise in nationalistic feelings has led to the outbreak of hostility and even war among Serbs, Muslims, and Croats, Azerbaijanis and Armenians, and other groups. And there is evidence that anti-Semitism is on the rise again in eastern Europe (Poppe, 2001; Singer, 1990). SCAPEGOAT THEORY (ALLPORT, 1954; GEMMILL, 1989; MILLER & BUGELSKI, 1948)

The Way We Conform: Normative Rules

When Prejudice Is Institutionalized
Simply by living in a society where stereotypical information abounds and where discriminatory behavior is the norm, the vast majority of us will unwittingly develop prejudiced attitudes and discriminatory behavior to some extent. We call this institutional discrimination or, more specifically, as institutionalized racism and institutionalized sexism.

When Prejudice Is Institutionalized
Normative Conformity The strong tendency to go along with the group in order to fulfill the group’s expectations and gain acceptance. For example, Ernest Campbell and Thomas Pettigrew (1959) studied the ministers of Little Rock, Arkansas, after the 1954 Supreme Court decision struck down school segregation. Most ministers favored integration and equality for all American citizens, but they kept these views to themselves. They were afraid to support desegregation from their pulpits because they knew that their white congregations were violently opposed to it. Going against the prevailing norm would have meant losing church members and contributions, and under such normative pressure, even ministers found it difficult to do the right thing.

“Modern” Prejudice As the norm swings toward tolerance, many people simply become more careful—outwardly acting unprejudiced yet inwardly maintaining stereotyped views. People have learned to hide prejudice in order to avoid being labeled as racist, but when the situation becomes “safe,” their prejudice will be revealed. (Dovidio & Gaertner, 1996; McConahay,1986) For example, while it is true that few Americans say they are generally opposed to school desegregation, it is interesting that most white parents oppose busing their own children to achieve racial balance. When questioned, these parents insist that their opposition has nothing to do with prejudice; they simply don’t want their kids to waste a lot of time on a bus. But as John McConahay (1981) has shown, most white parents are quite tranquil about busing when their kids are simply being bused from one white school to another; most show vigorous opposition only when the busing is interracial.

Subtle and Blatant Prejudice Elsewhere
Examples of blatant prejudice abound in newspaper headlines: Ethic cleansing in Bosnia. Violent conflict between Arabs and Jews in Middle East. Mass murder between warring tribes in Rwanda. Bother blatant and “modern” subtle racism in France, Great Britain, etc. (Pettigrew, 1998; Pettigrew & Meertens, 1995; Pettigrew et al., 1998)

Subtle Sexism Hostile sexists hold stereotypical views of women that suggest that women are inferior to men (e.g., that they are less intelligent, less competent, and so on). Benevolent sexists hold stereotypically positive views of women. Peter Glick and Susan Fiske (2001) Stereotypically positive feelings about a group (as is true of benevolent sexists) can be damaging to the target because it is limiting. But benevolent sexism goes a bit further. According to Glick and Fiske, underneath it all, benevolent sexists (like hostile sexists) assume that women are the weaker sex. Benevolent sexists tend to idealize women romantically, may admire them as wonderful cooks and mothers, and want to protect them when they do not need protection. Thus in the final analysis, both hostile sexism and benevolent sexism—for different reasons—serve to justify relegating women to traditional stereotyped roles in society.

How Can Prejudice Be Reduced?
Because stereotypes and prejudice are based on false information, for many years social observers believed that education was the answer: All we needed to do was expose people to the truth and their prejudices would disappear. But this has proved a naive hope (Lazarsfeld, 1940). After reading this chapter to this point, you can see why this might be the case. Because of the underlying emotional aspects of prejudice, as well as some of the cognitive ruts we get into (e.g., attributional biases, biased expectations, and illusory correlations), stereotypes based on misinformation are difficult to modify simply by providing people with the facts. But there is hope. As you may have experienced, repeated contact with members of an out-group can modify stereotypes and prejudice. But mere contact is not enough; it must be a special kind of contact. What exactly does this mean?

The Contact Hypothesis
Mere contact between groups is not sufficient to reduce prejudice. In fact, it can create opportunities for conflict that may increase it. Prejudice will decrease when two conditions are met: Both groups are of equal status. Both share a common goal. In his careful analysis of the research examining the impact of desegregation, Walter Stephan (1978, 1985) was unable to find a single study demonstrating a significant increase in self-esteem among African American children, and 25% of the studies showed a significant decrease in their self-esteem following desegregation. In addition, prejudice was not reduced. Stephan (1978) found that in 53% of the studies, prejudice actually increased; in 34% of the studies, no change in prejudice occurred. And if one had taken an aerial photograph of the schoolyards of most desegregated schools, one would have found that there was very little true integration: White kids tended to cluster with white kids, black kids tended to cluster with black kids, Hispanic kids tended to cluster with Hispanic kids, and so on (Aronson, 1978; Aronson & Gonzalez, 1988; Aronson & Thibodeau, 1992; Schofield, 1986). Clearly, in this instance, mere contact did not work as we had hoped.

When Contact Reduces Prejudice: Six Conditions
Sherif and colleagues (1961) found: Once hostility and distrust were established, simply removing a conflict and the competition did not restore harmony. In fact, bringing two competing groups together in neutral situations actually increased their hostility and distrust. (Amir, 1969, 1976) Mutual Interdependence The need to depend on each other to accomplish a goal that is important to each group.

Sherif placed two groups of boys in situations where they experienced conflict. For example, the investigators set up an emergency situation by damaging the water supply system. The only way the system could be repaired was if all the Rattlers and Eagles cooperated immediately. On another occasion, the camp truck broke down while the boys were on a camping trip. To get the truck going again, it was necessary to pull it up a rather steep hill. This could be accomplished only if all the youngsters pulled together, regardless of whether they were Eagles or Rattlers. Eventually, these sorts of situations brought about a diminution of hostile feelings and negative stereotyping among the campers. In fact, after these cooperative situations were introduced, the number of boys who said their closest friend was in the other group increased dramatically. Adapted from Sherif, Harvey, White, Hood & Sherif, 1961. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

When Contact Reduces Prejudice: Six Conditions
Mutual interdependence Common goal Equal status Friendly, informal setting Knowing multiple out-group members Social norms of equality Mutual interdependence: When each party’s success depends on the other party’s success. Common goal: A superordinate goal will take higher priority than other concerns and potentially unite people despite other conflicts. Equal status: At the boys’ camp (Sherif et al., 1961) and in the public housing project (Deutsch & Collins, 1951), the group members were very much the same in terms of status and power. No one was the boss, and no one was the less powerful employee. When status is unequal, interactions can easily follow stereotypical patterns. The whole point of contact is to allow people to learn that their stereotypes are inaccurate; contact and interaction should lead to disconfirmation of negative, stereotyped beliefs. If status is unequal between the groups, their interactions will be shaped by that status difference—the bosses will act like stereotypical bosses, the employees like stereotypical subordinates—and no one will learn new, disconfirming information about the other group (Pettigrew, 1969; Wilder, 1984). Fourth, contact must occur in a friendly, informal setting where in-group members can interact with out-group members on a one-to-one basis (Brewer & Miller, 1984; Cook, 1984; Wilder, 1986). Simply placing two groups in contact in a room where they can remain segregated will do little to promote their understanding or knowledge of each other. Fifth, through friendly, informal interactions with multiple members of the out-group, an individual will learn that his or her beliefs about the out-group are wrong. It is crucial for the individual to believe that the out-group members he or she comes to know are typical of their group; otherwise, the stereotype can be maintained by labeling one out-group member as the exception (Wilder, 1984). For example, a study of male police officers assigned female partners in Washington, D.C., found that although the men were satisfied with their female partner’s performance, they still opposed hiring women police officers. Their stereotypes about women’s ability to do police work hadn’t changed; in fact, they matched those of male officers with male partners (Milton, 1971). Why? They perceived their partner as an exception. Sixth and last, contact is most likely to lead to reduced prejudice when social norms that promote and support equality among groups are operating in the situation (Amir, 1969; Wilder, 1984). Social norms are powerful; here they can be harnessed to motivate people to reach out to members of the out-group. For example, if the boss or the professor creates and reinforces a norm o

Group exercise Imagine that you are among a group of psychologists who wants to find a solution for reducing stereotyped views of workers, who are from different ethnic groups, towards each other in a work place. What kind of an intervention would you design? Why? The Jigsaw Classrom Example

Prejudice: Causes and Cures

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