discussion 3
crisalza09
Ch13PrejudiceandIntergroupRelationspart1.pptxChapter 13
Prejudice & Intergroup Relations
Part 1
Introduction to Prejudice
Warnings:
Some of the material regarding the description of hate crimes may be disturbing
Additionally, this topic may challenge you to confront some of your own biases and evaluate them from an academic standpoint.
Introduction to Prejudice
Content Outline:
We’ll begin by defining the ABC’s of intergroup relations
Then we’ll cover how prejudiced attitudes and bias come into play and implicit bias
Introduction to Prejudice
Before we begin, let’s clarify some terms, the ABC’s of intergroup relations
A) Affective (meaning emotions)
Here is where Prejudice comes into play.
Prejudice is a negative attitude or feeling toward an individual based solely on that individuals membership in a certain group
Groups can be anything…racial, religious, people who wear blue shoes, vegans…etc.
Introduction to Prejudice
ABC’s Continued…
B) Behavior
Discrimination (the action component):
Unequal treatment of someone based on them belonging to a certain group
For example, if the boss of a company refuses to hire people of a certain race, even when their credentials actually outweigh that of competitors from other races.
Introduction to Prejudice
ABC’s Continued…
C) Cognitive Component (or categorization)
Stereotypes:
Beliefs that associate people with certain traits
They can be good or bad
We will return to discussing stereotypes in more depth later in the lesson
Alright, now that we have covered those definitions…Let’s get started!
Do you have racist
attitudes or feelings?
If I had to guess, each one of you probably answered the previous question with a resounding ‘no’ or ‘of course not.’
I would say no too
But the situation is not so simple.
Racism is a sneaky, pernicious problem
Saying “No, I’m not racist” is a conscious declaration.
What about how racism affects us at a non-conscious level? How does it influence our thoughts and actions without us even being aware of it?
In social psychology, this idea is called ‘aversive racism’: having egalitarian values (everyone is equal), but also having negative/aversive feelings towards minorities
Implicit Bias
Understanding how groups of people interact and perceive each other is one the most important aspects of social psychology
The concept of aversive racism is often referred to as ‘implicit bias’ in Legal Psychology. Let’s stick with this term as I believe it’s more widely used/recognized.
You may still be skeptical about implicit bias…
Let’s examine some clever ways researchers have demonstrated this phenomenon
Implicit Bias
Imagine you’re taking part in a study in which you’re pretending to be a police officer.
Police often have to make split-second, life and death decisions
You have two seconds to decide whether:
A. Suspect is armed and dangerous…SHOOT
B. Suspect is unarmed…DON’T SHOOT
If you saw the following photo, what would you do?
You’d shoot right? How about the next one?
No shoot. How about this next one?
- Did you shoot or not?
- What if you would have seen the following instead?
Implicit Bias
So the picture with a man reaching in the bag is a tough call right? It could be a knife, it could be something else.
It’s ambiguous.
And how someone responds to a black man reaching in the bag should be the same as how one responds to a white man doing the same thing, right?
But that is not the case
Implicit Bias
*Participants were significantly more likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than white suspects, especially given ambiguous circumstances like in this picture
None of the participants would have claimed to be racist, yet non-conscious,
implicit bias was a
large factor.
Also, black participants
were more likely to shoot
the black suspect as well
Racial Profiling in America
One of the biggest problems with implicit bias is how it affects law enforcement in America
As a Legal Psychologist, I can tell you there is a huge amount of research on implicit bias in law enforcement, most notably towards black men
All you have to do is open any news outlet to read about the most recent instance of a young, unarmed, black man being murdered
Many jurisdictions train officers to be aware of this research, but that doesn’t make the problem go away
As a country, we still have so much work to do here
Implicit Bias
Still not convinced that you yourself may have automatic, non-conscious preferences for one race over another? Or some group over another (e.g. young vs old)? Let’s try an experiment on Harvard’s website.
It’s called the IAT, Implicit Association Test, it will take you about 10 minutes. Your results are private/confidential. At the end you’ll get a summary.
Try it! Pick one of the tests for race, gender, sexuality, or age https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
Implicit Bias
IAT Results:
You will see results at the end that indicate either: no preference, slight preference, moderate preference, or strong preference
If you got ‘no preference,’ congrats, you won!
I got a slight preference on the test I took
Here is what these test results are demonstrating:
Concepts in the brain are interconnected, and some are closer to each other than others
For example, people respond faster to ‘tigers have stripes’ than they do to ‘tigers have lungs,’ even though both are true
This is called a connectionist theory of mind
Implicit Bias
IAT Results Continued:
What this is telling you, then, is the following
Let’s say you took the sexuality exam and you were told you have a moderate preference for straight people to gay people
This means that you responded faster when asked to sort good words and straight people together, and bad words and gay people together, than when doing the opposite
Meaning, it’s easier for your brain to associate gay-bad than gay-good
That implies that the concept of straight people more closely related to good concepts in your brain than the concept of gay people.
Implicit Bias
IAT Results Continued:
Note that if an old person still associates good words with youth more quickly than with being old, that’s called internalized ageism.
Or internalized homophobia, if a gay person takes the IAT and it tells him/her that they still have a moderate preference for associating straight with good concepts than gay with good concepts
Same goes for any race and internalized racism.
In the earlier study where we saw black participants were still likely to shoot black men in ambiguously dangerous situations, that’s the same concept as we’re getting at here.
Implicit Bias
Important Note:
The point of this exercise is not to make anyone feel bad or guilty
But it is very important to recognize that even if we state “I believe everyone is equal and I treat everyone equally” that doesn’t mean, despite our best efforts, that we don’t still harbor some implicit biases that can affect our thoughts and actions.
Implicit Bias
Other demonstrations of implicit bias in research:
European Americans were more likely to sit farther away, maintain less eye contact, and have a colder tone of voice with African Americans.
With online dating, among white women who claimed race didn’t matter to them, 97% of their replies were to white men.
In a shooting study similar to the one we previously discussed, participants were more likely to shoot someone wearing Muslim headgear (turban/hijab), regardless of whether they were armed
Implicit Bias
Other demonstrations of
implicit bias in research:
Implicit Association Tests and other lines of research reveal strong findings related to ageism. Generally people strongly prefer young people, young faces, etc. There are far more negative associations with the concept of being old than being young.
Legal Psychology Findings:
If you have a jury of mostly one race and a defendant of that same race, and the evidence is weak, the jury will be less likely to convict or and will issue a lenient sentence. This is called the similarity-leniency effect.
But, if the evidence is strong, the defendant makes the group look bad, so then the sentence become more harsh and punitive, the Black Sheep effect.
Next Time
During part 2 of your lecture, next class, we’ll look into explicit bias, stereotypes, the causes of prejudice and ways to overcome it.
