Women face discrimination in work settings, higher education and government (e.g. Fisher, 1992).
- **Sexual orientation: Sometimes called heterosexism**.
Most adult in the US hold negative attitudes toward homosexual behavior, regarding it as wrong and unnatural (Herek & Capitanio, 1996; Yang, 1997).
- **Age**:
Elderly people are often assumed to be less capable physically and mentally (Levy & Langer, 1994)
- **Weight: Sometimes called “size discrimination”.**
Overweight people are perceived as less attractive, less intelligent, less happy, less self-disciplined, and less successful (Hebl & Heatherton, 1998).
- **Physical attractiveness: Also known as appearance prejudice.**
Physically attractive people receive more lenient punishments (Mazzella & Feingold, 1994).
*A generalization about a group of people in which certain traits are assigned to virtually all members of the group, regardless of actual variation among the members.*
- **Based on experience and accurately identifies certain attributes of a group overall.**
Adaptive, shortcuts to deal with complex situations.
- **May have a “grain of truth”**
e.g. crime and welfare rates are in fact relatively higher for African Americans.
- But some do not…
- **Over-generalized**
e.g. all men are aggressive.
- **Overemphasize negative attributes**
e.g. women are emotional; men are emotionally heartless.
*Stereotypes exert strong effects on how we process social information.*
**Perception:**
> Sagar and Schofield (1980) showed sixth graders drawing between 2 children whose races were systematically varied.
> They described the behavior as more mean and threatening when black children were involved than white children.
Information relevant to an activated stereotype is often processed more quickly, and remembered better, than information unrelated to it (Macrae et al., 1997).
Inconsistent information may be refuted or changed in subtle ways to make it consistent (Kunda & Oleson, 1995)
*Unjustified negative or harmful action toward a member of a group solely because of his/her membership in that group.*
Negative actions toward the objects of racial, ethnic, or religious prejudice have decreased somewhat in recent years in the US and many other countries.
In fact, “old-fashioned” racism, for instance, is simply replaced by modern racism (more subtle) (Swim et al., 1995).
Involves concealing prejudice from others in public settings, but expressed bigoted attitudes when it is safe to do so.
#### Assumptions of Social Identity Theory (Tajfel, 1982)
1.**We categorize:** We find it useful to put people, ourselves included, into categories.
2.**We identify:** We associate ourselves with certain groups (ingroups) and gain self-esteem by doing so.
3.**We compare:** we contrast our groups with other groups (outgroups), with a favorable bias toward our own group.
#### The act of categorization can group people as “us” (an ingroup) or “them” (an outgroup)
The part of a person’s self-concept that is based on his/her identification with a nation, religious or political group, occupation, or other social affiliation.
- **In-group favoritism effect/In-group bias (Tajfel et al., 1971)**:
The positive feeling and special treatment we give to people we have defined as being part of our in-group (leads to unfair treatment of others merely because we defined them as being in the out-group).
- **group-serving biases**:
Explaining away outgroup members positive behaviors; also attributing negative behaviors to their dispositions (while excusing such behavior by one’s own group).
E.g. A donating behavior: In-group members: She donated because she has a good heart; Out-group members: She donated to gain favor.
- **The assumed-similarity effect**:
Other in-group members are seen as more similar to the self than out-group members.
Allen and Wilder (1979) made students believe that they were grouped accordingly to artistic preference (in fact, randomly) and found that students assumed other ingroup members were more similar to them than outgroup members even on matters unrelated to art.
- **The outgroup homogeneity effect**:
Perceptions of outgroup members are more similar to one another than are ingroup members.
“They are all alike, while we are diverse.”
The greater our familiarity with a social group, the more we see its diversity; The less our familiarity, the more we stereotype (Brown & Wootton-Millward, 1993).
E.g. Many non-Europeans see the Swiss as a fairly homogeneous people; but to the people of the Switzerland, the Swiss are diverse, encompassing French-, German-, Italian-, and Romansh-speaking groups
*We acquire negative attitudes towards other social groups by hearing such views expressed by significant others.*
There are directly rewards for adopting the same views (e.g. love, approval).
#### Socialization
*A process by which children learn the conventional social norms from family
Our families and cultures pass on all kinds of information.* (e.g. finding mates, whom to trust and dislike).
> Swedish teens display increasing anti-immigrant prejudice over time if their parents voice such prejudice (Miklikowska, 2017).
> Parental attitudes assessed shortly after their babies are born predict their children attitudes 17 years later (Fraley et al., 2012).
#### The Media
*Media coverage reflects and reinforces stereotypes.*
e.g. Gilens (1999) found that the media presents an inaccurate picture of people on welfare, showing them as much more likely to be black and unemployed than is the case in reality
Cognitive biases occur because we need to simplify a complex world. These biases can produce stereotypes and prejudice even in the absence of socialization or competition between groups.
- We have a natural tendency to categorize in order to simplify our environment.
- People categorize others into groups on the basis of perceptually salient characteristics .
race, gender, language, or even accent
Taylor et al. (1978) asked subjects to view different people making different statements. They often forgot who said what, yet they remembered the race of the person who made each statement
- Social norms provide a basis for categorization based on other attributes.
*A shift in the boundary between the in-group (us) and some out-group (them).*
Gaertner et al. (1990) suggest helping people to experience working together cooperatively can induce people belonging to different groups to perceive each other as members of a single group.
e.g., your identity changes from Psychology major students in CIE to HKBU student.
The Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) is a statutory body set up in 1996 to implement the Sex Discrimination Ordinance (SDO) 《性別歧視條例》, the Disability Discrimination Ordinance (DDO) 《殘疾歧視條例》and the Family Status Discrimination Ordinance (FSDO) 《家庭崗位歧視條例》
The Commission works towards the elimination of discrimination on the grounds of sex, marital status, pregnancy, disability and family status
