Stereotypes and Prejudice

Cognitive schemas can result in stereotypes and contribute to prejudice.

Stereotypes

Stereotypes are beliefs about people based on their membership in a particular group. Stereotypes can be positive, negative, or neutral. Stereotypes based on gender, ethnicity, or occupation are common in many societies.

Examples: People may stereotype women as nurturing or used car salespeople as dishonest.

The Stability Of Stereotypes

Stereotypes are not easily changed, for the following reasons:

• When people encounter instances that disconfirm their stereotypes of a particular group, they tend to assume that those instances are atypical subtypes of the group.
• People’s perceptions are influenced by their expectations.

Example: Lucy has a stereotype of elderly people as mentally unstable. When she sees an elderly woman sitting on a park bench alone, talking out loud, she thinks that the woman is talking to herself because she is unstable. Lucy fails to notice that the woman is actually talking on a cell phone.

• People selectively recall instances that confirm their stereotypes and forget about disconfirming instances.

Example: Paul has a stereotype of Latin Americans as academically unmotivated. As evidence for his belief, he cites instances when some of his Latin American classmates failed to read required class material. He fails to recall all the times his Latin American classmates did complete their assignments.

Functions

Stereotypes have several important functions:

• They allow people to quickly process new information about an event or person.
• They organize people’s past experiences.
• They help people to meaningfully assess differences between individuals and groups.
• They help people to make predictions about other people’s behavior.

Everyday Use of Stereotypes

The word stereotype has developed strong negative connotations for very good reasons. Negative stereotypes of different groups of people can have a terrible influence on those people’s lives. However, most people do rely on stereotypes nearly every day to help them function in society. For example, say a woman has to work late and finds herself walking home alone on a dark city street. Walking toward her is a group of five young men talking loudly and roughhousing. The woman crosses the street and enters a convenience store until the young men pass, then continues on her way. Most people would say she acted prudently, even though she relied on a stereotype to guide her behavior.

Dangers

Stereotypes can lead to distortions of reality for several reasons:

• They cause people to exaggerate differences among groups.
• They lead people to focus selectively on information that agrees with the stereotype and ignore information that disagrees with it.

They tend to make people see other groups as overly homogenous, even though people can easily see that the groups they belong to are heterogeneous.

Prejudice

A prejudice is a negative belief or feeling about a particular group of individuals. Prejudices are often passed on from one generation to the next.

Functions

Prejudice is a destructive phenomenon, and it is pervasive because it serves many psychological, social, and economic functions:

• Prejudice allows people to avoid doubt and fear.
• Prejudice gives people scapegoats to blame in times of trouble.

Example: Gorav  blames his unemployment on foreign nationals whom he believes are incompetent but willing to work for low wages.

• Prejudice can boost self-esteem.

Example: A poor white farmer in the nineteenth-century South could feel better about his own meager existence by insisting on his superiority to African-American slaves.

• Evolutionary psychologists suggest that prejudice allows people to bond with their own group by contrasting their own groups to outsider groups.

Example: Most religious and ethnic groups maintain some prejudices against other groups, which help to make their own group seem more special.

• Prejudice legitimizes discrimination because it apparently justifies one group’s dominance over another.

Ingroup and Outgroup

People’s social identities depend on the groups they belong to. From a person’s perspective, any group he belongs to is an ingroup, and any group he doesn’t belong to is an outgroup. People generally have a lower opinion of outgroup members and a higher opinion of members of their own group. People who identify strongly with a particular group are more likely to be prejudiced against people in competing outgroups.

People tend to think that their own groups are composed of different sorts of people. At the same time, they often think that everyone in an outgroup is the same. According to the contact hypothesis, prejudice declines when people in an ingroup become more familiar with the customs, norms, food, music, and attitudes of people in an outgroup. Contact with the outgroup helps people to see the diversity among its members.

Competition and Cooperation

Hostility between an ingroup and an outgroup increases when groups compete. Researchers have found that hostility between groups decreases when those groups have to cooperate in order to reach a shared goal. In such a situation, people in the two groups tend to feel that they belong to one larger group rather than two separate groups.

Reducing prejudice

Research shows that prejudice and conflict among groups can be reduced by:

• The groups have equality in terms of legal status, economic opportunity, and political power.
• Authorities advocate equal rights.
• The groups have opportunities to interact formally and informally with each other.
• The groups cooperate to reach a common goal( super ordinate goal).
• Education and information dissemination.
• Highlighting individual identity rather than group identity.