1. Prejudice
(Chapter 13)
Dr. Bradford

2. Focus Questions
• What is prejudice?
• How can we measure prejudice? Implicit
prejudice?
• What conditions lead to prejudice?
• What conditions tend to reduce prejudice?

3. Prejudice
• Prejudice: a hostile or negative attitude
toward people in a distinguishable group,
based solely on their membership in that
group.
• Three components:
1. Cognitive
2. Emotional (‘affective’);
3. Behavioral (discrimination).

4. Prejudice (Cognitive)
• Close your eyes and imagine the looks and
characteristics of the following people:
• A compassionate nurse
• A computer scientist
• A Black Musician

5. Prejudice (Cognitive)
• Did you imagine a male nurse?

6. Prejudice (Cognitive)
• A female computer scientist?

7. Prejudice (Cognitive)
• A black classical composer?

8. Prejudice (Cognitive)
• Stereotype: 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.
– Stereotypes can be positive or negative
– Why do we stereotype? “The law of least
effort”- because the world is complicated … for
most things we rely on simple, sketchy beliefs.

9. Prejudice (Cognitive)
• Positive Stereotypes
– Example: African American athletic ability
– In one study, students were asked to listento a 20-
minute audio tape of a college basketball game and to
rate the performance of ‘Mark Flick.’ Students who
were told that ‘Mark Flick’ was African American
consistently rated his performance higher than those
who were told he was caucasion.
• Illusory correlation: the tendency to see
relationships, or correlations, between events
that are actually unrelated.

10. Prejudice (Cognitive)
• Imagine an aggressive construction worker.
How is this person dressed, where is this
person located, and what, specifically, is this
person doing to express aggression?

11. Prejudice (Cognitive)
• Now imagine an aggressive lawyer. How is
this person dressed, where is this person
located, and what, specifically, is this person
doing to express aggression?

12. Prejudice (Cognitive)
• Findings: most people imagine the
construction worker using physical
aggression and the lawyer using verbal
aggression.

13. Prejudice (Emotional)
• Logical arguments are not affective in
countering emotions!
• The emotional or ‘affective’ component of
prejudice can be explicit or implicit.

14. Prejudice (Behavioral)
• Discrimination: an unjustified negative or harmful
action toward the members of a group solely because
of their membership in that group.
• ‘micro-aggressions’: the slights, indignities, and put-
downs that many minorities and people with
disabilities face.
• Formal vs. Interpersonal discrimination: e.g. in one
study, employers were less verbalyl positive, spent less
time interviewing, and used fewer words when talking
to, applicants who they believed were homosexual
compared to applicants they believed were not
homosexual.

15. Modern Racism and
Other Implicit Prejudices
• Modern racism: outwardly acting unprejudiced
while inwardly maintaining prejudiced attitudes.
• Implicit Association Test (IAT):
– Claim: if it takes whites longer to associate positive
words with black faces than negative words with black
faces, then whites must harbor some implicit
prejudice towards blacks.
– However, other researchers showed they got a
significant effect when using nonsense words or
neutral words, so whatever it is measuring, it might
not be a stable prejudice, but how much the word
associated with the target stands out, i.e. its salience.

16. Modern Racism and
Other Implicit Prejudices
• ‘Shooter-bias’ in a video
game
• Findings: Participants
were especially likely to
pull the trigger when the
people in the picture were
black, whether or not they
were holding a gun.

17. Modern Racism and
Other Implicit Prejudices
• However, the book does
not mention that this bias
also holds for black video
game players!
• What does this mean?

18. Automatic vs. Controlled Stereotypes
• Automatic processing: occurs whenever an appropriate
stimulus is encountered … causing the stereotype for that
group to be accessed from memory, without your
awareness.
• Controlled processing: occurs with your awareness- as
when you choose to disregard or ignore the stereotyped
information that has been brought to mind.
• Study showed that people showed stereotyped words
(e.g. black, hostile, lazy, welfare) so fast that they could
not consciously remember them, were more likely to
evaluate negatively African American characters who
acted ambiguously (i.e. their behavior could be
interpreted positively or negatively) in short stories.

19. Effects of Prejudice on the Victim
• Self-fulfilling prophecy
– In one study, White college undergraduates were
asked to interview candidates for a job. They acted
disinterested in African American candidates, sat
farther away, tended to stammer, and ended the
interview sooner than compared to white candidates.
– The ‘employers’ (actually confederates in the study),
then interviewed only white applicants, acting
towards half of them the way they had acted towards
African Americans.
– Independent judges watching these interviews
evaluated those applicants who had been treated as
the African Americans had!

20. Effects of Prejudice on the Victim
• Self-fulfilling prophecy
– This study shows that how applicants were
evaluated, how competent they appeared to be,
was largely influenced by something over which
they had little control: the expectations of the
interviewer.

21. Effects of Prejudice on the Victim
• Stereotype threat: the stress and apprehension
experienced by members of a group that their behavior
might confirm a cultural stereotype.
• Study: African and American and white students were
given a difficult test: the GRE. Half of them were told it
measured intellectual ability, and the other half were told
the test was still being developed, wasn’t reliable, and
didn’t measure anything.
• Findings: white students performed equally well (or
poorly) regardless of whether they thought they were
being evaluated. African American students who thought
they were being evaluated performed much worse than
those who were led to believe the test was meaningless,
who also performed as well as whites.

22. What Causes Prejudice?
• In 1942, 98% of the white population
supported segregation of schools. By 1988,
only 3% of whites said they wouldn’t want
their child to attend school with black
children.
• Institutionalized Discrimination
• Institutionalized Racism
• Institutionalized Sexism (see pg. 377)

23. What Causes Prejudice?
• Out-Group Homogeneity: the believe that ‘they’
[members of the out-group] are all alike.
• Dispositional attributions – the conclusion that a
person’s behavior is due to some aspect of his or her
personality
• Situational attributions- the conclusion that a person’s
behavior is due to aspect of the person’s situation or
environment.
• Fundamental attribution error (Ch 4.)
• Ultimate attribution error- the tendency to make
dispositional attributions about an entire group of
people

24. What Causes Prejudice?
• Blaming the victim
– We tend to rationalize or justify what happens
after the fact. In one study, two people worked
equally hard on some task. By a flip of the coin,
one person receives a very large reward and the
other nothing.
– Findings: after the fact, observers tended to
reconstruct what happened and convince
themselves that the unlucky person must not have
worked as hard.

25. What Causes Prejudice?
• Blaming the victim
– Study on Rape: In one study, college students
were given a description of a woman’s friendly
behavior toward a man, which they judged to be
appropriate. However, students who were told
that the woman was also raped by this man,
judged her behavior as inappropriate! She was
judged as having brought the rape on herself.

26. What Causes Prejudice?
• Why do we blame the victim?
– The more we believe in a just world (the idea that
people get what they deserve in life), the more we
tend to blame the victim.
– When something bad happens to someone else, we
feel bad for them, but at the same time, feel relieved
that it wasn’t us. Blaming the victim makes us feel
safe. We think we can protect ourselves from that
fear by convincing ourselves that the victim must have
done something to bring on the tragedy. We feel safer
because we believe we would have behaved
differently, more cautiously, etc.

27. How can prejudice be reduced?
• Contact hypothesis: contact with people from
other groups tends to reduce your prejudice
against them.
– Study: black students at majority white
universities felt a greater sense of belonging and
satisfaction the more white friends they made.

28. How can prejudice be reduced?
• NOT ALL CONTACT REDUCES PREJUDICE!
• After all, slavery is also a kind of ‘contact.’

29. How can prejudice be reduced?
Six Conditions in which Contact Reduces Prejudice:
1. Mutual interdependence
2. Having a common goal
3. Equal status and power
4. Must occur in friendly, informal setting
5. Individual must learn that these out-group
members who they come to know are typical of
their group
6. Social norms that promote and support equality
among groups are operating in the situation

30. Sex and Gender
• Sex = biological, physical
characteristics; “Nature”
• Gender = cultural roles or
social expectations about
the attributes and behavior
of males and females;
“Nurture”
– ‘Gender is not something you
have, it is something you do’

31. Gender Gap Rankings
Country
(top 10)
Overall
Rank
• Ranking based on the
Iceland 1 extent to which women
Norway 2 have achieved equality
Finland 3 in 4 areas:
Sweden 4 1. Economic participation
New Zealand 5 and opportunity
Ireland 6
2. Education
Denmark 7
3. Health
Lesotho 8
Philippines 9 4. Political empowerment
Switzerland 10
*USA *19

32. Gender Gap Rankings
Country Overall
(bottom 10) Rank
Egypt 125
Turkey 126
Morocco 127
Benin 128
Saudi Arabia 129
Cote d’Ivoire 130
Mali 131
Pakistan 132
Chad 133
Yemen 134

33. Sex and Gender
• What are some ‘cultural
scripts’ (stereotypes) we
have about men and
women?
– Dress, emotional states, ways
of talking…
Would you ever see a male
human proposing to a female
dog in a cartoon?

35. VS

36. Sex and Gender

37. WOMEN DRESSING UP LIKE LITTLE
GIRLS DRESSING UP LIKE WOMEN
• “The fact that many women dress up as sexy little girls points to both the
sexualization of female children and the infantilization of adult women.”
Dorothy from the
Goldilocks from Goldilocks Alice from Alice in
Wizard of Oz
and the Three Bears Wonderland

38. HALLOWEEN GENDER BINARY

39. HALLOWEEN GENDER BINARY

40. HALLOWEEN GENDER BINARY

41. HALLOWEEN GENDER BINARY

42. HALLOWEEN GENDER BINARY

43. HALLOWEEN GENDER BINARY