Perceiving groups - summary of chapter 5 of Social Psychology by Smith, E, R (fourth edition)

Sociale psychologie
Chapter 5
Perceiving groups

Introduction

Discrimination: positive or negative behavior directed toward a social group and its members.

Prejudice: a positive or negative evaluation of a social group and its members.

Stereotype: a mental representation or impression of a social group that people form by associating particular characteristics and emotions with the group.
Can be changed.

Targets of prejudice: social groups

Any group that shares a socially meaningful common characteristic can be a target for prejudice. Different cultures emphasize different types of groups, but race, religion, gender, age, social status, and cultural background are important dividing lines in many societies.

Social group: two or more people who share some common characteristic that is socially meaningful for themselves or for others.
Socially meaningful.

Social categorization: dividing the world into social groups

People identify individuals as members of social groups because they share socially meaningful features. Social categorization is helpful because it allows people to deal with others efficiently and appropriately. Social categorization also helps us feel connected to other people. However, social categorization exaggerates similarities within groups and differences between groups. It forms he basis for stereotyping.

Social categorization: the process of identifying individual people as members of a social group because they share certain features that are typical of the group.
Why?

• It is a useful tool, enabling us to master our environment and function efficiently in society.
• Allows us to ignore unimportant information.
• We socially categorize because it allows us to feel connected to others.

Negative effects

• Makes all members of a group seem more similar to each other than they would be if they were not categorized.
  People often overestimate group members’ uniformity and overlook their diversity.
• It exaggerates differences between groups

Forming impressiosn of groups: establishing stereotypes

The content of stereotypes

Many different kinds of characteristics are included in stereotypes, which can be positive or negative. Some stereotypes accurately reflect actual differences between groups, though in exaggerated form. Other stereotypes are completely inaccurate.

Stereotypes include many types of characteristics

Stereotypes usually go well beyond what groups look like or act like, to include the personality traits group members are believed to share and the positive or negative emotions or feelings group members arouse in others.

Stereotypes can be either positive or negative

Stereotypes can include positive as well as negative characteristics.
Even positive stereotypes can have negative consequences.

• It ignores people’s individuality
• It may set unreasonably high standards
• May be part of an overall pattern of paternalistic attitudes toward a social group that actually reinforces the group’s weakness and dependence.

Stereotypes lead to perceive uniformity among group members and rigid expectations.

Stereotypes can be accurate or inaccurate

No good yardstick is available for measuring the accuracy or inaccuracy of most stereotypes.
Most stereotypes have some accuracy at least in the the sense that they reflect small differences that exist between groups or small differences that group members themselves feel to be true about their groups.

Stereotypes can be inaccurate.

Every stereotype is inaccurate when it is viewed as applying to every member of a group.

Seeking motives behind stereotyping

Early theorists traced prejudice and extreme negative stereotypes to deep inner conflicts in a few disturbed individuals, rather than to more normal social motives such as mastery and connectedness.

Authoritarian personality: based on Freudian ideas, people who are prejudiced because they cannot accept their own hostility, believe uncritically in the legitimacy of authority, and see their own inadequacies in others.

This explanation does not stand up against the accumulated evidence.

Motives for forming stereotypes: mastery through summarizing personal experiences

Stereotypes can be learned through personal experience with group members, but may still be biased because of emotions that arise during cross-group interactions and because people pay attention to extremes or inaccurately perceive groups’ characteristics. Social roles often shape group members’ behaviors, but people attribute the behaviors to group members’ inner characteristics. Learning about groups can also take place through media portrayals as well as firsthand experiences.

As people encounter group members, they try to make sense of their world by summarizing the information they get about those groups.

Bringing to mind positively evaluated group members can make feelings about a group more positive as well.
Positive or negative impressions of individual group members are important contributors to people’s overall impressions of a group.

Between-group interactions generate emotion

Feelings of uncertainty and concern often arise when people interact with novel groups, and these feelings can influence the stereotypes people form.
Why?

• A lack of knowledge of or familiarity with members of other groups.
• Members of different groups may be pursuing different sorts of goals during cross-group interactions, and these goals are associated with negative emotions.

Emotions become associated with group encounters. Classical conditioning.

People notice some members more than others

Our attention is typically drawn to what is unusual, unexpected, or salient.
Distinctive individuals can have a disproportionate impact on the formation of group stereotypes.

Some information attracts more attention than other information

Biases in processing lead us from as association between unusual or distinctive characteristics and are rare or infrequently encountered groups.
These processes can operate even if we have no prior stereotype of a group.

Illusory correlation: a perceived association between two characteristics that are not actually related.

When something occurs infrequently, it becomes distinctive and people pay attention to it.

Social roles trigger correspondence biases.

Regardless of how often we encounter a group, what we see the group doing has a big impact on our impressions.
Even this kind of firsthand observation can lead to biased stereotypes when a group’s social role shapes the behavior that can be observed.
Our stereotypes of particular groups often come to reflect the social roles occupied by those groups.

Stereotypes may not reflect what groups are actually like, instead, they reflect the roles groups paly in society relative to the perceiver.

Social roles and gender stereotypes

Male’s and females’ differing social roles contribute to gender stereotypes.

Learning stereotypes from the media

Media portrayals often reflect stereotypes that are deeply integrated in a culture.
Mainstream media help convey stereotypes.
Video games fail to accurately represent the population.

Media stereotyping is and underrepresentation is quite pervasive.

Gender stereotypes and the media

Commercials typically reinforce gender stereotypes.

Motives for forming stereotypes: connectedness to others

Social learning contributes to stereotypes. Stereotypes and discriminatory behavior are often accepted and endorsed as right and proper by members of a particular group. Group members learn such stereotypes from family and peers. As stereotypes are communicated, they may become stronger.

Learning stereotypes from others

Parents, teachers, and peers offer us our first lessons about group differences.
Children can pick up stereotypes simply by observing and imitating their elders.

Social norms: generally accepted ways of thinking, feelings, or behaving that people in a group agree on and endorse as right and proper.
When stereotypes are deeply embedded in the social norms of a culture, people learn them naturally as part of growing up.

Social communication of stereotypes

Stereotypes may even become stronger through the process of social communication.
When people form impressions of a group by being told about them secondhand, their impressions are more stereotypic than those of people who learn about the group through firsthand experience.
The secondhand impressions, then formed, remain highly stereotypic even after later direct experience with the group itself.
Discussion of group members’ behaviors among several people tends to make their impressions more stereotypic.

Motives for forming stereotypes: justifying inequalities

The stereotypes prevalent in a society often serve to justify existing social inequalities. They do so by portraying groups as deserving their social roles and positions on the basis of their own characteristics.

Using stereotypes: from preconceptions to prejudice

Group stereotypes often have a strong evaluative tinge.
Once a stereotype exists, it influences what people think and how they behave toward members of stereotyped groups.

Activation of stereotypes and prejudice

Once established, stereotypes and prejudice can be activated by obvious cues, use of group labels, or the presence of a group member, especially a minority in a social situation. Some stereotypes and prejudices come to mind automatically.

Some categories seem so important that we use them to classify people even when they appear irrelevant to the social context.

What activates stereotypes

The more obvious and salient the cues to category membership, the more likely is tis that the category and its related stereotypes will come to mind.
The deliberate use of prejorative group labels, ethnic or sexist jokes, or slurs can bring stereotypes to a listerner’s mind at once.

A category becomes particularly salient when only a single member of the group is present among multiple members of another group.

Stereotypes can be activated automatically

If reminders of a group membership surrounds us, categories come to mind can set off ac vicious cycle.
The more often a category is used, the more accessible it becomes, the more accessible it is, the more it is used.
A stereotype sometimes becomes so well learned and so often used that its activation becomes automatic.

Prejudice can be activated automatically

Facial electromyography (EMG), an direct measure of attitudes. When people react positively to an attitude object, activity in the zogoatic muscles increases, whereas negative responses are accompanied by increased activity in the corrugator muscles. It can be measured by electroded placed at the indicated positions.

Measuring stereotypes and prejudice

Stereotypes and prejudice can be measured by asking plain questions or in more subtle ways that make it difficult for people to hide their stereotypes or prejudiced feelings. People may actually hold conflicting views.

Implicit measures: alternatives to self-report measures.

Implicit and explicit measures of stereotypes and prejudice may measure different aspects of an individual’s overall views of a social group.

Impact of stereotypes on judgments and actions

Stereotypes can affect our interpretations of behaviors performed by members of groups, and also our actions toward them. In extreme cases, stereotypes may even affect life-or-death judgments. Stereotypes have greater effects when judgments must be made under time pressure and when emotions are intense. Feelings of power can impact stereotype usage.

Effects of cognitive capacity

Research shows that time pressure or other conditions that limit people’s cognitive capacity generally increase the effect of stereotypes on their judgments.
Sometimes the situation is too complex to process adequately.
Familiarity can impact stereotype usage because people have a sense that they do not need to think carefully about previously encountered material which they already thought about deeply and carefully in the past.
Effect of ‘morning’ and ‘evening’ people.

Effects of emotion

By disrupting careful processing and short-circuiting attention, strong emotions increase our reliance on stereotypes.

Effects of power

When stereotyping others serves a goal, powerful people will do it more readily. When avoiding stereotypes will serves a goal, powerful people will be more apt to avoid their use.

Trying to overcome prejudice and stereotype effects

People may try to overcome the effects of stereotypes and prejudice by:

• Suppressing stereotypic thoughts or prejudicial feelings
• Correcting for their impact on judgments
• Exposing themselves to counterstereotypic information

Al these tactics require motivation and cognitive capacity.

Suppressing stereotypes and prejudice

Well-intentioned efforts at suppressing the stereotype might have a negative result later.
Once-suppressed thoughts often rebound and become even more accessible. Suppressing a stereotype may make its content more likely to influence our thoughts and feelings later.
It may also not always be possible.

Correcting biased judgments

Being unprejudiced does not mean never having stereotypic thoughts or feelings, but rather acknowledging them and making a conscious effort to avoid being influenced by them. It is not easy.

Activating counterstereotypic information

Reduces implicit stereotypes.

Beyond simple activation: effects of stereotypes on considered judgments

Even when people make considered judgments, established stereotypes exert an effect. People tend to look for stereotype-confirming, on disconfirming, evidence and to interpret ambiguous information as stereotype-consistent. People may even elicit stereotype-consistent information from others by the way they interact with them.

• When we learn information that appears consistent with our expectations, we will leap to the conclusion that those expectations are correct.
• Stereotypes can bias the information people process.
• A stereotype that is socially shared boost our confidence by letting us know that other people agree with our beliefs and react in the same way we do.

When the judgment is important and when we choose to devote attention to the task, we may try to go beyond group stereotypes and collect further information about people as individuals.
When we do this, stereotypic information is less likely to come to mind.
But stereotypes can subtly bias the way we see other people.

Seeking evidence to confirm the stereotype: just tel me where to look

• We tend to notice and remember what we expect to see
• Special processing of unexpected behaviors is less likely to occur with groups

Interpreting evidence to fit the stereotype: well, if you look at it that way

When information is ambiguous, activation of a stereotype influences our interpretation of the behavior, making it seem consistent with the stereotype.

Comparing information to stereotypic standards: that looks good, for a group member

Stereotypes shift our standards for judgments.
By shifting our judgments, at least on characteristics like ‘tall’ that involve a strong subjective element.

Constraining evidence to fit the stereotype: the self-fulfilling prophecy

Changing stereotypes and reducing prejudice

Contact hypothesis: the theory that certain types of direct contact between members of hostile groups will reduce stereotyping and prejudice.

Barriers to stereotype change

Even when people obtain information that is blatantly inconsistent with a stereotype, stereotypes may remain unchanged. This is because people can:

• Explain away the inconsistency
• Create a new category for exceptions to the rule
• See the behavior as unusual group members as being irrelevant to the group stereotype

Explaining away inconsistent information

Compartmentalizing inconsistent information

Subtypes: a narrower and more specific social group, such as housewife, that included withing a broad social group, like women.
Protects stereotyped beliefs from change.

Differentiating atypical group members: contrast effects

Seeing stereotype-disconfirming individuals as remarkable or exceptional people.
Perceivers can decide that that these unusual people are not true group members at all.

Overcoming stereotype defenses: the kind of contact that works

Effective contact has to provide stereotype-inconsistent information that is repeated, that involves many group members and that comes from typical group members. Under these conditions, contact does reduce stereotypes.

Contact that is forced has stronger effects on reducing prejudice.

Repeated inconsistency: an antidote for explaining away

Stereotype change requires counterstereotypic behaviors o be performed more than once or twice.

Widespread inconsistency: an antidote for subtyping

Being typical as well as inconsistent: an antidote for contrast effects

If your goals is stereotype change, you should repeatedly remind others of your group membership, so that they cannot treat you as an exception to the rule.

Reducing prejudice and though contact

Pleasant contact with group members of other groups can reduce prejudice, even when that same contact does not alter stereotypes. Contact that involves the formation of actual friendships across group lines es especially effective in reducing prejudice.

A single positive encounter with a member of another group may be sufficient to reduce prejudicial evaluations, even if it cannot alter stereotypes.
Even more minimal forms of contact can create positive feelings about group members

• Imagining
• Exposure to faces

Friendships may be especially effective in reducing prejudice.
Even knowing that someone else from your group has a member of the other group as a friend is sufficient.