Social Psychology by Smith, E, R (fourth edition) a summary
- 3473 keer gelezen
Sociale psychologie
Chapter 5
Perceiving groups
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?
Negative effects
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.
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?
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.
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:
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 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
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
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:
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
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.
Join with a free account for more service, or become a member for full access to exclusives and extra support of WorldSupporter >>
This is a summary of the book Social Psychology by Smith. It is an introduction to social psychology and is about human behaviour in relation to groups and other humans. This book is used in the course 'Social psychology' in the first year of the study Psychology at the
...There are several ways to navigate the large amount of summaries, study notes en practice exams on JoHo WorldSupporter.
Do you want to share your summaries with JoHo WorldSupporter and its visitors?
Main summaries home pages:
Main study fields:
Business organization and economics, Communication & Marketing, Education & Pedagogic Sciences, International Relations and Politics, IT and Technology, Law & Administration, Medicine & Health Care, Nature & Environmental Sciences, Psychology and behavioral sciences, Science and academic Research, Society & Culture, Tourisme & Sports
Main study fields NL:
JoHo can really use your help! Check out the various student jobs here that match your studies, improve your competencies, strengthen your CV and contribute to a more tolerant world
5269 | 1 |
Add new contribution