AP Psychology

Module 77 – Prejudice and Discrimination

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

We have sampled how we think about and influence one another. Now we come to social psychology’s third focus - how we relate to one another. What causes us to harm or to help or to fall in love? How can we move a destructive conflict toward a just peace? We will ponder the bad and the good: from prejudice and aggression to attraction, altruism, and peacemaking.

Prejudice

FOCUS QUESTION: What is prejudice? What are its social and emotional roots?

Prejudice means “prejudgment.” It is an unjustifiable and usually negative attitude toward a group - often a different cultural, ethnic, or gender group. Like all attitudes, prejudice is a three-part mixture of

Ethnocentrism - assuming the superiority of one’s ethnic group - is one example of prejudice. To believe that a person of another ethnicity is somehow inferior or threatening, to feel dislike for that person, and to be hesitant to hire or date that person is to be prejudiced. Prejudice is a negative attitude. Discrimination is a negative behavior.

How Prejudiced Are People?

To assess prejudice, we can observe what people say and what they do. Americans’ expressed gender and racial attitudes have changed dramatically in the last half-century. The one-third of Americans who in 1937 told Gallup pollsters that they would vote for a qualified woman whom their party nominated for president soared to 89 percent in 2007 (Gallup Brain, 2008; Jones & Moore, 2003) . Nearly everyone now agrees that women and men should receive the same pay for the same job, and that children of all races should attend the same schools.

Support for all forms of racial contact, including interracial dating (FIGURE 77.1), has also dramatically increased. Among 18- to 29-year old Americans, 9 in 10 now say they would be fine with a family member marrying someone of a different race (Pew, 2010).

Yet as overt prejudice wanes, subtle prejudice lingers. Despite increased verbal support for interracial marriage, many people admit that in socially intimate settings (dating, dancing, marrying) they would feel uncomfortable with someone of another race. And many people who say they would feel upset with someone making racist slurs actually, when hearing such racism, respond indifferently (Kawakami et al., 2009). In Western Europe, where many “guest workers” and refugees settled at the end of the twentieth century, “modern prejudice” - rejecting immigrant minorities as job applicants for supposedly nonracial reasons - has been replacing blatant prejudice Gackson et al., 2001; Lester, 2004; Pettigrew, 1998, 2006). A slew of recent experiments illustrates that prejudice can be not only subtle but also automatic and unconscious (see Close-up: Automatic Prejudice on the next page).

Nevertheless, overt prejudice persists in many places. Just ask Italy’s AC Milan soccer star Kevin-Prince Boateng (pictured at the beginning of this module), of Ghanaian descent, who strode off the field in protest after being subjected to racial taunts from spectators. And in the aftermath of the 9111 terrorist attacks and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, 4 in 10 Americans acknowledged “some feelings of prejudice against Muslims,” and about half of non-Muslims in Western Europe and the United States perceived Muslims as “violent” (Saad, 2006; Wike & Grim, 2007). With Americans feeling threatened by Arabs, and as opposition to Islamic mosques and immigration flared in 2010, one national observer noted that “Muslims are one of the last minorities in the United States that it is still possible to demean openly” (Kristof, 2010; Lyons et al., 2010). Muslims reciprocated the negativity, with most in Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, and Britain seeing Westerners as “greedy” and “immoral.”

In most places in the world, gays and lesbians cannot comfortably acknowledge who they are and whom they love. Gender prejudice and discrimination persist, too. Despite gender equality in intelligence scores, people have tended to perceive their fathers as more intelligent than their mothers (Furnham & Rawles, 1995). In Saudi Arabia, women are not allowed to drive. In Western countries, we pay more to those (usually men) who care for our streets than to those (usually women) who care for our children. Worldwide, women are more likely to live in poverty (Lipps, 1999), and two-thirds of illiterate adults are women (CIA, 2010).

Unwanted female infants are no longer left out on a hillside to die of exposure, as was the practice in ancient Greece. Yet natural female mortality and the normal male-to-female newborn ratio (105-to-l00) hardly explain the world’s estimated 163 million (say that number slowly) “missing women” (Hvistendahl, 2011). In many places, sons are valued more than daughters. With testing that enables sex-selective abortions, several Asian countries have experienced a shortfall in female births (FIGURE 77.3). Although China has declared that sex-selective abortions - gender genocide - are now a criminal offense, the country’s newborn sex ratio is still 118 boys for every 100 girls (Hvistendahl, 2009,2010,2011), and 95 percent of the children in Chinese orphanages are girls (Webley, 2009). With males under age 20 exceeding females by 32 million, many Chinese bachelors will be unable to find mates (Zhu et al., 2009).

In the United States, a striking sex-ratio bias appears among Chinese, Korean, and Asian Indian parents with a third child. Sons outnumber daughters by 50 percent after two previous girl births. Given a previous boy birth, or given Caucasian parents, there is no sex-ratio bias (Almond & Edlund, 2008).

Studies have shown, however, that most people feel more positively about women in general than they do about men (Eagly, 1994; Haddock & Zanna, 1994). Worldwide, people see women as having some traits (such as nurturance, sensitivity, and less aggressiveness) that most people prefer (Glick et al., 2004; Swim, 1994). That may explain why women tend to like women more than men like men (Rudman & Goodwin, 2004). And perhaps that is also why people prefer slightly feminized computer-generated faces - men’s and women’s - to slightly masculinized faces. Researcher David Perrett and his colleagues (1998) have speculated that a slightly feminized male face connotes kindness, cooperativeness, and other traits of a good father. When the British Broadcasting Corporation invited 18,000 women to guess which of the men in FIGURE 77.4 was most likely to place a personal ad seeking a “special lady to love and cherish forever,” which one do you think they picked?

Close-up: Automatic Prejudice

As we have seen throughout this book, the human mind processes thoughts, memories, and attitudes on two different tracks. Sometimes that processing is explicit - on the radar screen of our awareness. To an even greater extent, it is implicit - below the radar, leaving us unaware of how our attitudes are influencing our behavior. Modern studies indicate that prejudice is often implicit, an automatic attitude that is an unthinking knee-jerk response. Consider these findings:

Implicit Racial Associations Using Implicit Association Tests, researchers have demonstrated that even people who deny harboring racial prejudice may carry negative associations (Greenwald et al., 1998, 2009). (By 2011, nearly 5 million people had taken the Implicit Association Test, as you can at www.implicit.harvard.edu.) For example, 9 in 10 White respondents took longer to identify pleasant words (such as peace and paradise) as “good” when presented with Black-sounding names (such as Latisha and Darnell rather than White-sounding names (such as Katie and Ian). Moreover, people who more quickly associate good things with White names or faces also are the quickest to perceive anger and apparent threat in Black faces (Hugenberg &Bodenhausen, 2003).

Although the test is useful for studying automatic prejudice, critics caution against using it to assess or label individuals (Blanton et al., 2006, 2007, 2009). Defenders counter that implicit biases predict behaviors that range from simple acts of friendliness to the evaluation of work quality (Greenwald et al., 2009). In the 2008 U.S. presidential election, implicit as well as explicit prejudice predicted voters’ support for candidate Barack Obama, whose election in turn served to reduce implicit prejudice (Bernstein et al., 2010; Payne et al., 2010).

Unconscious Patronization When White university women evaluated a flawed essay said to be written by a Black fellow student, they gave markedly higher ratings and never expressed the harsh criticisms they assigned to flawed essays supposedly written by White students (Harber, 1998). Did the evaluators calibrate their evaluations to their racial stereotypes, leading to less exacting standards and a patronizing attitude? In real-world evaluations, such low expectations and the resulting “inflated praise and insufficient criticism” could hinder minority student achievement, the researcher noted. (To preclude such bias, many teachers read essays while “blind” to their authors.)

Race-Influenced Perceptions Our expectations influence our perceptions. In 1999, Amadou Diallo was accosted as he approached his apartment house doorway by police officers looking for a rapist. When he pulled out his wallet, the officers, perceiving a gun, riddled his body with 19 bullets from 41 shots. Curious about this killing of an unarmed man, two research teams reenacted the situation (Correll et al., 2002, 2007; Greenwald et al., 2003). They asked viewers to press buttons quickly to “shoot” or not shoot men who suddenly appeared on screen. Some of the on-screen men held a gun. Others held a harmless object, such as a flash light or bottle. People (both Blacks and Whites, in one study) more often shot Black men holding the harmless objects. Priming people with a flashed Black rather than White face also makes them more likely to misperceive a flashed tool as a gun (FIGURE 77.2).

Reflexive Bodily Responses Even people who consciously express little prejudice may give off telltale signals as their body responds selectively to another’s race. Neuroscientists can detect these signals when people look at White and Black faces. The viewers’ implicit prejudice may show up in facial-muscle responses and in the activation of their emotion-processing amygdala (Cunningham et al., 2004; Eberhardt, 2005; Stanley et al., 2008).

If your own gut check reveals you sometimes have feelings you would rather not have about other people, remember this: It is what we do with our feelings that matters. By monitoring our feelings and actions, and by replacing old habits with new ones based on new friendships, we can work to free ourselves from prejudice.

Social Roots of Prejudice

Why does prejudice arise? Social inequalities and divisions are partly responsible.

SOCIAL INEQUALITIES

When some people have money, power, and prestige and others do not, the “haves” usually develop attitudes that justify things as they are. The just-world phenomenon reflects an idea we commonly teach our children - that good is rewarded and evil is punished. From this it is but a short leap to assume that those who succeed must be good and those who suffer must be bad. Such reasoning enables the rich to see both their own wealth and the poor’s misfortune as justly deserved.

Are women naturally unassertive and sensitive? This common perception suggests that women are well-suited for the caretaking tasks they have traditionally performed (Hoffman & Hurst, 1990). In an extreme case, slave “owners” perceived slaves as innately lazy, ignorant, and irresponsible - as having the very traits that justified enslaving them. Stereotypes rationalize inequalities.

Victims of discrimination may react with either self-blame or anger (Allport, 1954). Either reaction can feed prejudice through the classic blame-the-victim dynamic. Do the circumstances of poverty breed a higher crime rate? If so, that higher crime rate can be used to justify discrimination against those who live in poverty.

US AND THEM: INGROUP AND OUTGROUP

We have inherited our Stone Age ancestors’ need to belong, to live and love in groups. There was safety in solidarity (those who didn’t band together left fewer descendants). Whether hunting, defending, or attacking, 10 hands were better than 2. Dividing the world into “us” and “them” entails racism and war, but it also provides the benefits of communal solidarity. Thus we cheer for our groups, kill for them, die for them. Indeed, we define who we are partly in terms of our groups. Through our social identities we associate ourselves with certain groups and contrast ourselves with others (Hogg, 1996, 2006; Turner, 1987, 2007). When Ian identifies himself as a man, an Aussie, a University of Sydney student, a Catholic, and a MacGregor, he knows who he is, and so do we.

Evolution prepared us, when encountering strangers, to make instant judgments: friend or foe? Those from our group, those who look like us, and also those who sound like us - with accents like our own - we instantly tend to like, from childhood onward (Gluszek & Dovidio, 2010; Kinzler et al., 2009). Mentally drawing a circle defines “us,” the ingroup. But the social definition of who you are also states who you are not. People outside that circle are “them,” the outgroup. An ingroup bias - a favoring of our own group - soon follows. Even arbitrarily creating us-them groups by tossing a coin creates this bias. In experiments, people have favored their own group when dividing any rewards (Tajfel, 1982; Wilder, 1981).

The urge to distinguish enemies from friends predisposes prejudice against strangers (Whitley, 1999). To Greeks of the classical era, all non-Greeks were “barbarians.” In our own era, most students believe their school is better than all other schools in town. Perhaps you can recall being most conscious of your school identity when competing with an archrival school. Many high school students form cliques - jocks, garners, stoners, theater types, LGBT supporters - and disparage those outside their own group. Even chimpanzees have been seen to wipe clean the spot where they were touched by a chimpanzee from another group (Goodall, 1986). They also display ingroup empathy, by yawning more after seeing ingroup (rather than outgroup) members yawn (Campbell & de Waal, 2011).

Ingroup bias explains the cognitive power of partisanship (Cooper, 2010; Douthat, 2010). In the United States in the late 1980s, most Democrats believed inflation had risen under Republican president Ronald Reagan (it had dropped). In 2010, most Republicans believed that taxes had increased under Democrat president Barack Obama (for most, they had decreased).

Emotional Roots of Prejudice

Prejudice springs not only from the divisions of society but also from the passions of the heart. Scapegoat theory notes that when things go wrong, finding someone to blame can provide a target for anger. Following 9/11, some outraged people lashed out at innocent Arab-Americans. Others called for eliminating Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader whom Americans had been grudgingly tolerating. “Fear and anger create aggression, and aggression against citizens of different ethnicity or race creates racism and, in turn, new forms of terrorism,” noted Philip Zimbardo (2001). A decade after 9/11, anti-Muslim animosities still flared, with mosque burnings and efforts to block an Islamic community center near New York City’s Ground Zero.

Evidence for the scapegoat theory of prejudice comes from high prejudice levels among economically frustrated people, and from experiments in which a temporary frustration intensifies prejudice. Students who experience failure or are made to feel insecure often restore their self-esteem by disparaging a rival school or another person (Cialdini & Richardson, 1980; Crocker et al., 1987). To boost our own sense of status, it helps to have others to denigrate. That is why a rival’s misfortune sometimes provides a twinge of pleasure. By contrast, those made to feel loved and supported become more open to and accepting of others who differ (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2001).

Negative emotions nourish prejudice. When facing death, fearing threats, or experiencing frustration, people cling more tightly to their ingroup and their friends. As the terror of death heightens patriotism, it also produces loathing and aggression toward “them” - those who threaten our world (Pyszczynski et al., 2002, 2008). The few individuals who lack fear and its associated amygdala activity - such as children with the genetic disorder Williams syndrome - also display a notable lack of racial stereotypes and prejudice (Santos et al., 2010).

Cognitive Roots of Prejudice

FOCUS QUESTION: What are the cognitive roots of prejudice?

Prejudice springs from a culture’s divisions, the heart’s passions, and also from the mind’s natural workings. Stereotyped beliefs are a by-product of how we cognitively simplify the world.

FORMING CATEGORIES

One way we simplify our world is to categorize. A chemist categorizes molecules as organic and inorganic. A football coach categorizes offensive players as quarterbacks, running backs, and wide receivers. Therapists categorize psychological disorders. Human beings categorize people by race, with mixed-race people often assigned to their minority identity. Despite his mixed-race background and being raised by a White mother and White grandparents, Barack Obama has been perceived by White Americans as Black. Researchers believe this happens because, after learning the features of a familiar racial group, the observer’s selective attention is drawn to the distinctive features of the less-familiar minority. Jamin Halberstadt and his colleagues (2011) illustrated this learned-association effect by showing New Zealanders blended Chinese-Caucasian faces. Compared with participants of Chinese descent, European-descent New Zealanders more readily classified ambiguous faces as Chinese (see FIGURE 77.5).

In categorizing people into groups, however, we often stereotype them. We recognize how greatly we differ from other individuals in our groups. But we overestimate the homogeneity of other groups (we perceive outgroup homogeneity).”They” - the members of some other group - seem to look and act alike, while “we” are more diverse (Bothwell et al., 1989). To those in one ethnic group, members of another often seem more alike than they really are in attitudes, personality, and appearance. Our greater recognition for faces of our own race - called the other race effect (also called the cross-race effect or own-race bias) - emerges during infancy, between 3 and 9 months of age (Gross, 2009; Kelly et al., 2007).

With effort and with experience, people get better at recognizing individual faces from another group (Hugenberg et al., 2010). People of European descent, for example, more accurately identify individual African faces if they have watched a great deal of basketball on television, exposing them to many African-heritage faces (Li et al., 1996). And the longer Chinese people have resided in a Western country, the less they exhibit the other-race effect (Hancock & Rhodes, 2008) .

REMEMBERING VIVID CASES

As we saw in Module 35’s discussion of the availability heuristic, we often judge the frequency of events by instances that readily come to mind. In a classic experiment, researchers showed two groups of University of Oregon students lists containing information about 50 men (Rothbart et al., 1978). The first group’s list included 10 men arrested for nonviolent crimes, such as forgery. The second group’s list included 10 men arrested for violent crimes, such as assault. Later, both groups were asked how many men on their list had committed any sort of crime. The second group overestimated the number. Vivid (violent) cases are more readily available to our memory and feed our stereotypes (FIGURE 77.6).

BELIEVING THE WORLD IS JUST

As we noted earlier, people often justify their prejudices by blaming victims. If the world is just, “people must get what they deserve.” As one German civilian is said to have remarked when visiting the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly after World War II, “What terrible criminals these prisoners must have been to receive such treatment.”

Hindsight bias is also at work here (Carli & Leonard, 1989) . Have you ever heard people say that rape victims, abused spouses, or people with AIDS got what they deserved? In some countries, such as Pakistan, women who have been raped have sometimes been sentenced to severe punishment for having violated a law against adultery (Mydans, 2002). In one experiment illustrating the blame-the-victim phenomenon, people were given a detailed account of a date that ended with the woman being raped Ganoff-Bulman et al., 1985). They perceived the woman’s behavior as at least partly to blame, and in hindsight, they thought, “She should have known better.” (Blaming the victim also serves to reassure people that it couldn’t happen to them.) Others, given the same account with the rape ending deleted, did not perceive the woman’s behavior as inviting rape.

People also have a basic tendency to justify their culture’s social systems Gost et al., 2009; Kay et at 2009). We’re inclined to see the way things are as the way they ought to be. This natural conservatism makes it difficult to legislate major social changes, such as health care or climate-change policies. Once such policies are in place, our “system justification” tends to preserve them.

Before You Move On

ASK YOURSELF: What are some examples of ingroup bias in your community?

TEST YOURSELF: What is the difference between prejudice and discrimination?