Understanding Prejudice: The ABCs of Attitudes and Their Impact on Society

1. Outline Ch 13 Prejudice • What is it ? • Behavioral Attitude • Affective Attitude • Cognitive Attitude • What causes prejudice? • Learning

2. Hate groups in US

3. Groups that fight hate

4. Ch 13: Prejudice • Prejudice: a hostile or negative attitude toward a distinguishable group , based solely on their membership in that group. • ABCs • Cognitive – stereotype

5. Cognitive Attitude: Stereotype

6. Cognitive Attitude • Cognitive – stereotype- a generalization about a group of people in which virtually all members share the same trait • Law of least effort/Cognitive miser • Illusory Correlation: expect links and thus see links that are not there • “Blondes are more fun” • Positive and negative components • the “positive” actually have negative ramifications • Denies individuality • Can further justify discrimination • E.g. “Blondes are not serious” • E.g. Sexism

7. Example of Neg and “Pos” • Hostile Sexism Items: • "Most women fail to appreciate all that men do for them." • "Women seek to gain power by getting control over men." • "Most women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist." • Benevolent Sexism Items (women in countries high in hostile sexism, are especially likely to endorse these items): • "Women should be cherished and protected by men." • "Many women have a quality of purity that few men possess." • "A good woman ought to be set on a pedestal by her man." • http://www.understandingprejudice.org/asi/faq.htm • Both views are demeaning to women, for used to justify why women should not have power

8. Affective

9. Affective

10. Affective Attitude • Affective component: emotions • Difficult to change • When explicit attitudes change, emotions often part of unconscious implicit attitudes

11. Behavioral

12. Behavioral

13. Behavioral Attitude • Behavioral – discrimination (negative or harmful action) • Most explicit forms illegal • Still happens • Subtle patterns revealed in large scale analysis (war on drugs) • Microaggressions – daily slights • Modern Racism: outwardly being unprejudiced, but inwardly maintaining prejudice

14. Most people don’t want to admit their prejudices, so unobtrusive measures are necessary. • Bogus pipeline • Participants believed a “lie detector” could detect true attitudes. • More likely to express racist attitudes • Implicit Attitudes Test (IAT) • Measures speed of positive and negative reactions to target groups

15. Figure 13.2The Unleashing of Prejudice Against African Americans(Adapted from Rogers & Prentice-Dunn, 1981)

16. Two step model of the cognitive processing of stereotypes • Automatic: No control • Stereotypes may be automatically triggered • Controlled: Have control • Ignore or refute stereotype that was automatically activated • If lack ability or motivation, then stereotype exerts an influence

17. In class 7 • Please rank order (from most to least) what factors you think contribute to prejudice? • Learning • Desire to Categorize/Simplify • Need to feel superior to others • Norms • Economic factors

18. What causes it? • Brown eyed/blue eyed video