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What assumptions would come to mind if you met someone with an Irish accent? Would you assume they like to drink or that they swear a lot? Prejudices have a huge impact on how we judge and treat other people. In many cases, they can even be deadly, as the disproportionate persecution of African Americans by the US police shows. That’s why we need to understand the causes of prejudice and what we can do about them.
First, let’s establish what we mean by prejudice in psychology.
Prejudice is defined as a negative attitude toward a group and its members, often involving unfair beliefs (stereotypes) and negative feelings.
Prejudice often develops before we first interact with the group, leading to discriminatory behaviour. Prejudice involves cognitive, behavioural, and affective components.
Components of prejudice - StudySmarter
Allport (1954), who pioneered the literature on ethnic prejudice, defined it as:
An antipathy based on faulty and inflexible generalisation directed towards a group. It may be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group as a whole, or toward an individual because he is a member of that group."1
Discrimination is the behavioural component of prejudice. However, if you have a negative attitude toward a group, it does not necessarily mean that you will act on it. Prejudice does not always manifest itself in the form of explicit behaviour. But even when they do not, they affect your judgement and feelings about others.
Discrimination, Canva
In the United States, strong feelings of threat and prejudice against Latino immigrants, often expressed in the media, led to the construction of a wall on the border with Mexico. In addition, a 2018 survey found that four in ten Hispanics in the US reported experiencing discrimination in the past year (National Survey of Latinos, 2018).
In the United Kingdom, religious prejudice against Muslims persists. A 2018 survey found that 70% of Muslims experienced prejudice based on their faith in the past year. Britons themselves also openly expressed prejudice against Muslims in the survey (Abrams, 2018).
Prejudice develops as a result of cognitive, situational and personality factors. This section will compare and contrast psychological explanations for prejudice and discrimination.
According to the Realistic Conflict Theory, competition causes prejudice. When two or more groups compete for limited resources (an in-group to which the person belongs and the competing out-group), prejudice against the out-group results. The competing group is considered inferior, and the groups become aggressive toward each other. In contrast, prejudice and hostility decrease when groups work together to achieve common goals.
Robbers Cave experiments, Sherif (1954; 1958; 1961): After two groups of boys participated in a series of contests in which they competed for a reward, they had to characterise both groups – the group to which they belonged and the competing group. The boys were more likely to describe their group in positive terms and the other group in negative terms.
These results indicate that competition was associated with negative attitudes toward the out-group. However, the researchers did not measure the participants’ attitudes before the competitions, so we cannot say that the competition caused prejudice.
Social categorisation and stereotypes help us simplify the complex world around us. Our mind is a cognitive miser, trying to process information as quickly as possible and with as little effort as possible. That’s why stereotypes are so attractive to our cognition. However, mental shortcuts like stereotypes can also lead to incorrect and socially harmful judgments.
Social categorisation is the process by which we automatically classify people as either belonging to our group and being ‘one of us’ (members of the in-group) or as being part of another group, ‘one of them’ (members of the out-group).
We automatically categorise ourselves and other people as members of social groups. According to the Social Identity Theory, it is the sense of belonging to a group, also called social identity, that leads to prejudice. From our social identity, we derive a sense of self-esteem. Therefore, to protect our sense of self-esteem, we tend to judge our groups more favourably and attribute negative characteristics to outside groups.
The minimal group paradigm (Tajfel et al., 1971): Arbitrary group membership alone is sufficient to cause discrimination against the out-group. Participants were shown artwork by two made-up artists and were assigned to a group based on their preference for one of the two artists. They knew no other information about the members of their group or the members of the other groups, only that they were or were not in their group.Participants had to give points to either the group they belonged to or the group that preferred another artist. They assigned points in a way that maximised the difference between the two groups, even if this meant that their group received fewer points than if the difference had been smaller. They favoured their group even when no information about them was known. The fact that members belonged to their group was enough to create a sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’.
How can we compare and contrast cognitive explanations of prejudice? Both the Realistic Conflict Theory (RCT) and Social Identity Theory (SIT) recognise that prejudice is associated with cognitive biases such as ethnocentrism – the sense that one’s group is superior to others.
RCT assumes that competition for limited resources causes hostile attitudes. The out-group is considered a rival, which leads to hostility. The limitation of RCT is that it does not explain how prejudice arises when groups do not compete or why it is so prevalent. In contrast to RCT, SIT suggests that group membership alone can cause prejudice even with no competition.
SIT proposes that prejudice is automatic and that cognitive biases associated with social categorisation are the cause. We perceive others as either part of ‘us’ or ‘them’, and on the basis of this distinction, we are likely to discriminate to protect our self-esteem even when there is nothing to gain. However, SIT simplifies human behaviour and ignores other factors such as history with the group and cultural aspects of the meaning of individualism (individualistic societies vs. collectivistic societies).
Personality is a central aspect of what a person is. Therefore, we must consider the influence personality has on how someone perceives another and the likelihood of prejudice and discriminatory behaviour.
There is evidence that certain personality types are more likely to be prejudiced. Several theories have been developed to explain empirical studies of individual differences in prejudice.
Adorno (1950) suggested that children who experience conditional love and strict parenting may develop authoritarian personalities. An authoritarian personality is associated with loyalty to one’s group and authority and a negative attitude toward the out-group. Adorno theorised that people with authoritarian personalities are more likely to have and act out prejudices because they direct their anger toward inferior social groups from childhood.
Prejudice, Canva
Bob Altemeyer (1988) built on the work of Adorno and introduced the idea of right-wing authoritarianism. He proposed that people exhibit high levels of right-wing authoritarianism when they internalise at a young age the idea that the world is a dangerous place. They perceive foreign groups as more threatening and are more prone to prejudice.
Felicia Pratto (1994) proposed a personality dimension characterised by a preference for hierarchy and power imbalance. Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) is thought to develop after experiences of competing for scarce resources. Individuals with a high SDO tend to seek superiority over others and perceive the world as a ‘competitive jungle’.
Cohrs et al. (2012) demonstrated that personality types high in right-wing authoritarianism but not SDO correlated with high levels of negative attitudes towards out-groups. However, just because prejudice appears to be associated with certain personality traits does not necessarily mean that personality determines prejudice. Personality, like attitudes, can change throughout a lifetime.
The situation and cultural factors have some influence on prejudice.
Prejudice can increase when the out-group is portrayed as a threat or competition to ‘us’. How the world is portrayed in the media or by those around us can make us more susceptible to prejudice.In the Akrami et al. (2009) study, individuals who had just been presented with a threatening scenario about their country’s economic future scored higher on a racial prejudice scale than the control group who had not been presented with the scenario.
Consider again the Robbers cave study: does it matter whether the competition or threat is real or perceived as such when it comes to the formation of prejudice?
Integrated threat theory
Stephen and Stephen’s integrated threat theory states that prejudice is an evolutionary response to the sense of threat (which can be real or symbolic) that we experience from other groups. For example, the narrative that homosexuals threaten the traditional family model has led to more prejudice and discrimination against this group, especially in religious circles.
There is some evidence that collectivist cultures are less prone to prejudice than individualist cultures that value competition. However, we might also find an alternative explanation that prejudice is simply not as often explicitly expressed in collectivist cultures.
Milfont et al. (2011) found that in Spain (a collectivist country), more individualistic people express greater prejudice toward minorities, in this case, Gipsies. Collectivists seemed to express more positive views of the minority and were more likely to inhibit prejudice.
We automatically categorise people as either ‘us’ or ‘them’. Social categorisation and the belief that the group we belong to is superior causes prejudice. Competition or perceiving the other group as a threat can also worsen prejudice.
Cognitive explanations state that prejudice is caused by cognitive biases related to social categorisation and social identity. Prejudice develops when we attribute positive characteristics to groups we belong to and negative characteristics to out-groups to protect our self-esteem.
Examples of cognitive explanations of prejudice include Social Identity Theory and Realistic Conflict Theory.
The three theories of prejudice include Realistic Conflict Theory, Social Identity Theory and the Social Dominance Orientation personality dimension.
Realistic Conflict Theory proposes competition over scarce resources causes prejudice. Social Identity Theory suggests that social categorisation causes prejudice, while Social Dominance Orientation explains prejudice in terms of personality differences.
Prejudice can be caused by automatic cognitive biases related to social categorisation, personality traits, situational factors like competition or social norms within a culture.
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