Summary of the book Psychology of Prejudice and Discrimination.
Author: Mary E. Kite, Bernard E. Whitley, Jr.
Edition: 3
Chapters 1 to 6, 8 to 11 & 13 (according to the course Intergroup Relations taught at the RuG by Dr. Y. Koc, Prof. Dr. R. Spears in academic year ).
psychology of prejudice and discrimination whitley kite intergroup relations prejudice discrimination
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Comprehensive Book Summary for Intergroup Relations (PSB3E-SP02)
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PSB3E-SP02: Intergroup Relations
Ch1 Introducing the Concepts of Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Discrimination
Racial disparities in the criminal justice system may be due to police officer bias, but may also emerge
because other social factors disproportionately affect minorities (high unemployment, lack of
affordable housing).
Strong evidence that cultural stereotypes result in both consc & uncsonc bias.
Race and Culture
People can and do think past initial stereotypic judgments under some circumstances doesn’t
always happen.
Historical events can change views of other social groups quickly.
Race = a system for classifying human beings that is grounded in the belief that they embody
inherited & fixed biological charac that identify them as members of racial groups.
People use visual cues to cat themselves & others into groups.
Concept of race now: set of social categories.
Culture difficult to define because people use the term in several ways. Art, music, dance; groups w/
specific beh (because of age, etc.) a unique meaning & info system, shared by a group &
transmitted across generations, that allows the group to meet basic needs of survival, pursue
happiness & well-being, and derive meaning from life.
Culture infl stereotyping & prejudice because members of a culture hold set of beliefs in common.
Human action is driven by cultural expectations & experiences w/out consc awareness.
White privilege: ind members of dominant group in society, beliefs & actions seem normal & natural
& often taken for granted.
Group privilege: unearned favored state conferred because of one’s race, gender, social class, or
sexual orientation.
Seemingly minor advantages accumulate & their overall impact can be sign.
Whites feel under attack & being judged when they are asked about White privilege, report later
higher levels of racism (when strong racial identity), less likely to acknowledge that their group
benefitted from racial privilege when their intellectual ability was called into question.
Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination
Stereotypes = beliefs & opinions about the charac, attributes, and beh of members of various groups.
Pictures in each’s head, also come from shared beliefs that are integral part of culture. Stereotypes
are based on observations made about social world, thus may contain some truth, but often
exaggerated & applied on all members of the group.
Stereotypes can be descriptive (describe charac) & prescriptive (tell what should be like and done).
Positive stereotypes may be more readily accepted by target group members. But subtle &
unintended costs: may still be discouraging, living up to stereotype.
Prejudice = attitude directed toward people because they are members of a specific social group.
Attitudes: evaluations of or emotional responses to social group or its member. When emotional
reactions are mixed, people can have an ambivalent emotional response or it can be determined by
pos or neg feelings salient.
Discrimination = treating people differently from others based on membership of a social group. Can
manifest verbally & beh, in many settings.
Interpersonal discrimination = one person treats another unfairly because of person’s group
membership. Ind, person-to-person, stereotypic beliefs, evaluations of groups.
, PSB3E-SP02: Intergroup Relations
Organizational discriminations = practices, rules, and policies of formal organizations have
discriminatory outcomes.
White men are overrepresented as managers; minority men are overrepresented as operators &
laborers; members of minority groups are overrepresented in service occupations.
Institutional discrimination = norms, policies, and practices ass w/ social institution result in different
outcomes for members of different groups. Often results from decisions that are neutral in regard to
race, gender & sexual orientation, but end up having a disparate impact on members of a group. Can
also be overt practices that give 1 group an advantage by limiting other groups’ choices, rights,
mobility or access to info, resources or other people.
Cultural discrimination = discrimination & inequality built into our literature, art, music, language,
morals, customs, beliefs, and ideology to such a degree that they define a generally agreed-upon way
of life.
The Relationships among Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Discrimination
Low-prejudiced people rejected stereotype but high-prejudiced people accepted it.
Distinction between implicit prejudice (automatically w/out consc awareness) & explicit prejudice
(aware of & can control).
People who believe that prejudice is wrong & try to control & eliminate their prejudices can
successfully minimize the effects of stereotypes on their beh.
Intersectionality = people belong to many social groups at once. Also effects experiences.
Isms combine prejudice w/ a group centered worldview that emphasizes the ‘natural’ superiority of
one’s own group over others. Isms are based on a desire to control & dominate other groups. Isms
are reflected in beh.
American dilemma: contradiction of a society that professed equality as a basic value while denying
equality to a substantial portion of its population.
Gender-based prejudice has both benevolent (used as a justification for limiting the social roles
permitted to women) & hostile (justification for sexual exploitation of women) components.
Transgenders, homosexuals result in bias, prejudice & discrimination.
Ageism: neg reactions to older people. Benevolent component & neg stereotypes. Psychological
problems overlooked, underrepresented in media, employment discrimination.
Prejudice against people w/ physical disabilities (PWD): role of ambivalence, mixed feelings can play
in prejudice. Media often portrays PWDs in neg light.
Physical appearance can be a source of prejudice & discrimination. Attractive people more
advantages, women likely to be judged based on their physical appearance. Overweight seen in neg
light. People who are perceived to have neg traits & seen as responsible for those traits are devalued
more.
Classism = prejudice due to a person’s social class. Can emerge in unexpected situations.
Prejudice based on religion studied less, because less salient. The infl of religious-based prejudice,
prominent in much world history, continues to infl discourse in modern media, highlighting the
importance of religious-based prejudices.
Theories of Prejudice and Discrimination
PREDOMINANT TIME PERIOD SOCIAL & HIST. SOCIAL SCIENCE VIEW OF
THEORY CONTEXT QUESITON PREJUDICE
SCIENTIFIC <1920s White Id deficiencies of A natural
, PSB3E-SP02: Intergroup Relations
RACISM domination & ‘backward response to
colonial rule peoples’ ‘inferior peoples’
PSYCHODYNAMIC 1920s-1930s White Expl why Irrational &
domination is minority groups unjustified
challenged are stigmatized; attitudes
measurement of
attitudes &
stereotype
content
PSYCHODYNAMIC 1930s-1940s Universality of Id universal Unconsc defense
White racism in processes
US underlaying
racism
PSYCHODYNAMIC 1950s Legacy of Nazi Id the prejudice- Expression of
ideology & prone personality pathological
Holocaust needs
SOCIOCULTURAL 1960s Black civil rights How social Social norm
movement factors infl
prejudice
INTERGROUP 1970s Persistence of How prejudice is Expression of
RELATIONS racism in US rooted in social group interests &
structures intergroup relsh
COGN & 1980s – now Inevitability of Id universal An inevitable
EVOLOTIONARY prejudice & processes outcome of
intergroup underlying normal thought
conflict intergroup processes or
conflict & evolution.
prejudice
3 factors infl social psy’s move to cogn perspective:
1. Growing belief, fed by worldwide ethnic strife, that prejudice was both universal &
inevitable.
2. Realization that social structural expl couldn’t completely account for the apparent
inevitability of prejudice.
3. Occurrence of the ‘cognitive revolution’. Role of thought processes in directing beh.
The contact hypothesis: ingroup members have frequent contact w/ outgroup embers, prejudice &
discrimination would be reduced.
Re-fencing (subtyping): reflects how people respond to ind outgroup members who don’t fit their
stereotypic image.
Evolutionary theory: universal processes underlying prejudice & discrimination. All beh derives from
psy mechanism that evolved to fulfill functions that promote the transmission of one’s genes to
future generations. Protection from possible harm. Outgroup is rejected because can cause possible
harm.
People are fearful when their physical safety is threatened, are disgusted by the possibility of
contamination & get angry when they perceive barriers to a desired outcome.
People’s sense of morality & fairness likely evolved as means of promoting cooperation among
people along w/ the other psy mechanisms that support interdep relsh. Just as ethnocentrism is a
human universal, so are promotion of cooperation & fairness.
, PSB3E-SP02: Intergroup Relations
Ch3 Categorization and Stereotypes
Social Categorization
Categorization = process of simplifying the envir by creating categories on the basis of charac that a
particular set of people appear to have in common.
Once social groups are created, people develop beliefs about the members of those groups. Guide
future interactions w/ ind social group members.
Stereotype content can be measured both explicitly & implicitly.
Stereotype content model: warmth (friendly vs unfriendly) vs competence (successful vs
unsuccessful).
Pp recalled info that is consistent w/ stereotypic expectations much better than the info that was
inconsistent w/ their expectations. Stereotypic expectations affect both what people remember
about someone & how they use that remembered info in later judgments.
Everyone is subject to biases in cogn processing, people can be reluctant to recognize the ways in
which such biases infl their own beliefs about interactions w/ members of other social groups. When
people receive specific info about their biases & how those biases operate, they are more open to
the idea that they have unconsc racial biases & they generally have pos reactions to the learning
process. People who display the highest level of bias were the most motivated to control prejudice
after completing the modules & finding out their scores on IAT.
Basic social categories: e.g. race, gender, age, etc. for which people have info available in memory.
When a basic category membership cannot be easily determined, people feel off balance. Often,
people respond to their discomfort w/ disapproval of, or even physical threat or harm to, those who
don’t conform to their expectations. Need to put into the ‘correct’ category.
More specific categorization = subtypes. When needed a detailed understanding.
Prototypicality: fits the observer’s concept of the essential features charac of that category. The
more prototypical of a category a person is, the more quickly & easily the person is categorized =
racial phenotypical bias.
170-200 ms after a face is presented, determining basic category membership.
Slower categorization can be problematic related to evaluative judgments: the longer it takes, the
more neg evaluations.
Categorizing a racially ambiguous person, classify person as member of minority or socially
subordinate group rather than the majority group (hypodescent).
In absence of a reason to do otherwise, people categorize in terms of basic categories rather than
subtypes. The context in which a perceiver encounters another person can also infl categorization.
When a person in a group differs in some way from the other group members, onlookers pay the
most attention to the category that set the person apart from the others.
Racially prejudiced people tend to pay more attention to race than to other charac.
Consequences of Categorization
Minimal group paradigm = placement into the ‘overestimator’ or ‘underestimator’ group was
random to ensure that any differences in how the groups were perceived couldn’t have been due to
real group differences.
Ingroup overexclusion = some people want to avoid treating outgroup members as though they
were part of the ingroup. They draw a tight circle around their ingroup. Safer to misclassify people
who are actually ingroup members as outgroup members than to misclassify outgroup members as
part of the ingroup.
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