Social and Organizational Psychology

IBP 2017-2018

Causes and Cures of Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Discrimination

Discriminatory treatment can be:

• Short-term: minimal criteria such as being assigned to a group in class
• Long-term: ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual orientation.
• Seen as legitimate: e.g. discrimination against single people (singlism)
• Seen as illegitimate: e.g.: sexual orientation

People are risk averse with potential losses having greater psychological impact than potential gains

• People who are more privileged in some way might be more against equality, as they perceive it as a potential loss (e.g. whites against blacks)

Gender stereotypes: beliefs about the different attributes that males and females possess

• The glass ceiling effect: when qualified women have disproportionate difficulty attaining high-level position
• The glass cliff effect: women are more likely to be appointed to leadership positions following a crisis and when there is greater risk of failure
• Negative stereotypes towards men too: such as being low on warmth

Tokenism: acceptance of only a few members of a particular group

• It maintains perceptions that the system is not discriminatory (belief in meritocracy)
• People who are hired as token representatives of their groups are perceived negatively by other members of the organization
• The person being in a leadership position might be undermined as simply being there to “fill the quota”

Scales

• Objective scales: the meaning is the same no matter who they are applied to
• Subjective scales: standards that can take on different meanings, depending on who they are applied to
  • Shifting standards: the idea that descriptions are made with reference to some standard of judgment, and that this standard may shift depending on the person or object being described (e.g. being tall means something different for children and adults)

Stereotypes are resistant to change, but they are revised as the relations between the groups are altered

• Example: Women who are repeatedly exposed to women faculty behaving in nontraditional roles show less agreement with gender stereotypes

Prejudice: an attitude (usually negative) toward members of a social group

• Prejudice may reflect more specific underlying emotional responses to different outgroups including fear, anger, guilt, pity, envy, and disgust
• Can be automatic and implicit in nature

Social identity theory: prejudice is derived from our tendency to divide the world into “us” and “them” and to view our own group more favorably than various outgroups

• Threat to our group’s interests can motivate prejudice
• Terror management theory: prejudice towards atheists for example, reflects our own existential anxiety

Modern racism: more subtle form of discrimination

Bona fide pipeline: uses implicit measures to assess prejudices that people may be unaware they have

Collective guilt:  not engaging in strategies that allow us to conclude our group’s harmful acts were legitimate

• Motivated forgetting: instances of our group’s harm doing toward others are more difficult to recall

Techniques to reduce prejudice

• Direct contact between members of different groups
  • Especially when an outgroup member is seen as typical of their group, the contact is viewed as important, and it results in cross-group friendships
• Recategorization: shifting the boundary between “us” and “them” so as to include former outgroups in the “us” category.
  • Example: an inclusive category could be: human
• Training individuals to say “no” to associations between stereotypes and specific social groups, and to make situational attributions for negative outgroup behaviors.
• Providing individuals with evidence suggesting that one’s ingroup has less prejudiced views than oneself can be used to effectively reduce prejudice

References:

Baron, R., & Branscombe, N. (2016). Social psychology (14th edition) Harlow: Pearson Education Limited

--Chapter 6

http://psychology.iresearchnet.com/social-psychology/social-cognition/shifting-standards/