Define the distinction between implicit and explicit processing.
Explicit: controllable and accessible via conscious thought
Implicit: uncontrollable, automatic, and not accessible via introspection
A) What are social categories?
B) What are two of their functions?
A) Categories where we distinguish people as like you are not, such as gender or political standpoint
B)
1) Forms our reasoning (evaluation & stereotypes), more likely to see actions in a positive light with those we see as similar to ourselves
2) Facilitates social interaction: who we choose to be around, how we interpret ambiguous behaviours
What are 4 sources of intergroup cognition?
Experience, peers/family, media, biology
What did Aboud (2003) say about the development of intergroup cognition?
Explicitly, ingroup liking emerges before dislike of outgroup
Age 3/4 shows ingroup liking, and outgroup dislike arises after age 7
What do Bigler, Jones, & Lobliner say about development of intergroup cognition?
- Children seem to spontaneously form categories (e.g. people sitting on left of classroom) and prefer ingroup members by age 6
- Suggests a relationship between one’s desire to affiliate with group and self-esteem because the study shows that when children like people in their group, they ten to feel higher self-esteem
What did McGlothlin & Killen say about Effect of Contact?
White children in an all-white school show more hostile interpretation to a black transgressor then those in a racially mixed school
- Suggests that children’s biases are influenced by the exposure they have to different groups of people
What is the paradox on racial bias?
A developmental decrease in negative attitudes toward s the outgroup is shown (race bias emerges by age 3/4, peaks at 7, and declines in adolescence)
BUT
A developmental increase in negative behaviour towards the outgroup is shown (fewer interracial interactions/friendships and more discrimination)
What are 5 forms of racial discrimination?
- housing: more likely to buy from a white real estate agent
- employment: white counterparts more likely to be hired
- healthcare: doctors giving lesser care or lesser listening to people of colour
- education: admissions, accessibility
- interpretations of behaviours through cultural stereotypes
What are two limitations of explicit measures when testing for biases?
- Access: our explicit measures assume that our thoughts and feelings have access to all of our brain processing, when there are some processes that we cannot have access to or reflect on
- Social desirability: people do not want to say things which will offend or cause negative judgements on them, want to please others
What is a way to measure implicit bias?
The Implicit Association Test (IAT), measures reaction time to see strength of association between concepts.
Sort items into two categories quickly, the faster/more accurate responses = stronger association
What are two facts about the development of implicit bias?
1) - Implicit bias is learned gradually: through parents, peers, media, personal experience
- Implicit bias is formed early and automatic: once you see a person is like you (e.g. you are white and so are they), you prefer them DUE TO ingroup preference and/or mere familiarity
What were the results of the following groups in Baron’s study of implicit biases?
A) White subjects
B) African-American Subjects
C) Latino-American subjects
D) Native Japanese subjects in rural Japanese community
A)
- White children quicker to pair white faces with good words and black faces with bad words
- 6 year old’s, 10 year old’s, and adults equally implicitly preferred their own racial group
- As people grow older, their explicit biases reduce (adults less likely to say they prefer white people), but implicit biases remain the same (adults still have same implicit racial bias as the 6-year-old)
B) African American adults and 5-12 year old children showed no implicit racial bias, no implicit intergroup preference
C) - Latino-American adults showed no implicit intergroup preference for themselves against white people, but did show preference for themselves against black people (another stigmatized group)
- Latino-American children showed no implicit intergroup preference for themselves against white people, but did show preference for themselves against black people (another stigmatized group)
D) - Japanese children (6 and 10 year olds) implicitly preferred themselves both compared to white people and black people
Japanese adults also implicitly preferred themselves both compared to white people and black people
What were the 4 result findings of Baron et al. study on implicit biases?
1) Early acquisition
- Biases form early, set in young minds
2) Group membership
- If you are a culturally stigmatized group, you are already internalizing biases that are put upon you
3) Stable across development
- Social group preferences and biases tend to stay the same from 6-years old onwards
4) Roots prior to age 6
- Has to come from roots present before age 6
- Early life experiences are important for acquisition
What did Gonzalez et al. find about the development of intergroup cognition?
- When showing children positive black exemplars and positive white exemplars, children who were shown the positive black exemplars tested for no implicit race bias afterwards (children under 7 showed no significant data, and children who were exposed to flowers and white exemplars showed implicit bias for white people)
- Interesting study to highlight the importance of experience in changing implicit race bias
What are 4 sources of bias that Rudman identifies?
1) Cultural experiences: your cultural environment
2) Early experiences: not just experiences early in life, but one’s first impressions (e.g. adult first exposed to cigarettes)
3) Affective experiences: highly charged emotional experiences (e.g. a person from Boston slaps you in the face, then it will have a disproportionate effect on your bias on Boston people than 5 average encounters)
4) Cognitive consistency principles: our associations ought to make sense or be correlated with one another (should not be in contrast with one another), (e.g. if I strongly identify as males and have strong self-esteem, then I must see males in a relatively good regard)
What does Gelman & Heyman say about Psychological Essentialism?
- Essentialism is about identity, and leads to beliefs about the stability of that identity for individuals and groups
- Membership fixed at birth
- Highly resistant to change (immutable)
- Exterior transformations not relevant
Essentialism, when applied to human groups, is false
What are the 3 beliefs of essentialism?
1) People believe (intuitively) that certain categories are rooted in nature, some parts of our identity are given to us
2) Belief that some unobservable property (essence) causes things to be the way they are, makes us who we are
3) Belief that everyday words reflect this real structure of the world, for example: dog: there must be something shared in common beneath this dog and that dog even though they are different colours and sizes
How did Gelman & Heyman study look at importance of noun labels?
Their study looked at 5- and 7- year old children and put them in a verbal predicate and noun label condition, where they labelled Rose as eating a lot of carrots or as a carrot eater.
Then asked subjects about stability of this behaviour (past, future, with no family support, with family opposition)
If participants answered yes, it showed that they judged this as stable
What were the findings of Gelman & Heyman’s study about noun labels?
By age 5:
Personal characteristics (e.g. carrot eating) were more stable when they were referred to by a noun (e.g. she’s a carrot eater) than a verbal predicate.
What is an implication of noun labelling?
Using nouns tells kids that it is something central to their identity and is fixed, makes it less likely that the child will change as they believe that is who they are
What was Rhodes et al. main research question?
Does the language we use affect what kids actually do with their time and behaviour? and when you use identity oriented language that promotes essentialism way of thinking, does that different construction leave kids to engage differently with the assigned activity?
What are the 4 studies in Rhodes et al.’s research question?
STUDY 1:
- 40 children (even number M and F) and covered objects with cups and had the children smell them and guess what they were. One group was given “be science!” language and the other was “do science” language.
- Female participants in the “be science” group were much less likely (60%) to continue additional science trials. Boys were the reverse.
STUDY 2:
- Attempted to replicate findings of Study 1 with a different science experiment: predicting if objects would sink or float in water
- Female participants were more likely to stop participating when in the “be science” group. Boys had no affect.
STUDY 3:
- Tested younger, pre-school aged children to test how gendered patterns emerge in the preschool years.
- Male participants benefited from “be scientist” condition and female participants struggled more in the “be scientist” condition
STUDY 4:
- Investigated whether gendered patterns to identity-oriented language were associated with relevant stereotypes
- Tasks had to do with “being or doing a carer” and feeding animals
Found no significant effects on results
What are the key findings of Rhode et al.’s study?
- When using identity-oriented language, children in negatively stereotyped gender (girls) are less likely to positively engage in science exercise in the classroom, But looking at non-stereotyped domain, it made no difference: only made difference when activating an existing stereotype
- Purpose of 4th experiment was to find out if it is language that has to do with all of it (i.e. identity oriented language) or does it have to do with identity oriented language when there is a stigmatized stereotype. Found the latter, suggests that effects are pronounced or preserved when it is in a stereotyped domain
What are three components of human language?
Symbols, generativity (ability to envision words), recursion (putting together sentence fragments
