Chapter Sixteen: Social Behavior

G. Application: Understanding Prejudice

This application uses the concepts from the chapter to help you better understand why prejudice is so common.

1. Introduction
2. Stereotyping and Selectivity in Person Perception
3. Biases in Attribution
4. Proximity and Similarity Effects in Attraction
5. Forming and Preserving Prejudicial Attitudes
6. Dividing the World into Ingroups and Outgroups

Contents

Introduction

• Prejudice
  
  
• Discrimination
  
  
• Relationship between prejudice and discrimination - Figure 16.24.

Stereotyping and Selectivity in Person Perception

• Modern racism has become more subtle.
  
  
• Stereotypes can even infiltrate the thinking of people who are genuinely low in prejudice!
  
  
• Stereotypes persist because:
  • Selectivity of person perception.
  • Memory biases like the illusory correlation effect.

Biases in Attribution

• Biased attributions for success and failure sustain the mistaken stereotype.

• Fundamental attribution error when evaluating targets of prejudice.

• Defensive attributions unjustly blames the victim.

Proximity and Similarity Effects in Attraction

• Proximity effects perpetuate prejudice.

• The repulsion hypothesis (similarity effects) promotes prejudice.

Forming and Preserving Prejudicial Attitudes

Sources of Prejudicial Attitudes

• Observational learning, e.g. You learn it from your parents.

• Social norms may encourage positive rewards for prejudicial remarks (operant conditioning).

Dividing the World into Ingroups and Outgroups

Social dichotomies promote ethnocentrism.

• Ingroup versus outgroup

• If you strongly identify with an ingroup, you :
  • are more prejudiced against competing outgroups

  • think more simplistically about the outgroup e.g.overestimate outgroup homogeneity - "they all look alike"

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