What is Intergroup Bias?
• Systematic tendency to perceive one‟s own group (the ingroup) more favourably than a group to which one does not belong to (the outgroup).
What things can bias range from?
Ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, weight, physical appearance, ability, ideologies, etc.
What are 3 types of ways bias can manifest itself as?
- Attitude (prejudice)
- Behaviour (discrimination)
- Cognition (stereotyping).
Define prejudice
Negative attitudes or feelings toward a certain group and its individual members.
Define discrimination
Action or behaviour in favour or against an individual
based on their group membership.
Define stereotyping
Generalised belief that links a whole group of people with certain traits or characteristics.
Why have blatant forms of bias declined over the years?
• Social norms have lead to a decline in such expressions as they are seen as morally wrong.
What is Aversive Racism?
Form of racism that surfaces in subtle ways when it is safe, socially acceptable, and easy to rationalise
What is implicit bias?
Stereotypes or prejudice considered unconscious or
implicit when people express them without awareness and without being able to control their responses
- Implicit prejudice and stereotypes broadly represent mental association between a group and feelings or beliefs.
What kind of tools are used to measure implicit bias?
IAT, evaluative priming, GNAT, etc.
e.g. reaction times are used for responding to different coloured people with good and bad
ERP and fMRI also used to study implicit biases
What has been shown about implicit bias and behaviour?
Implicit attitudes and stereotypes predict a
variety of behaviours
However, meta-analyses suggest that implicit attitudes and stereotypes have weak relationship with actual behaviour
Implicit attitudes and stereotypes may predict outcomes at the context
level
What has ERP and fMRI found about implicit bias?
- ERP and fMRI studies have shown that people perceive greater threat from certain outgroups than ingroups.
- Studies using fMRI show that people dehumanise certain outgroups.
How is the economic perspective a cause for implicit bias?
- Competition for material resources can lead to intergroup bias.
- Poor economic conditions relate to increased hatred toward outgroups
• Tendency for scapegoating: blame an innocent individual or group for a negative experience
What is Realistic Conflict Theory?
- Competition for scarce resources between groups breeds prejudice, stereotypes, and hostility
- Competition between two groups sufficient for intergroup hostility and not necessarily differences in background, histories, etc.
- Resource conflict doesn‟t have to be real; it may be perceived or subjective.
• Superordinate goals that require groups to work
together (not just putting them together) helps reduce hostility between them.
What is the Motivational Perspective?
- Humans live, work, play, and fight in groups.
- A fundamental motive is need to belong and affiliate.
- Serves basic motive of self-protection.
- Also generates readiness for “us vs. them” mentality
What is Social Identity Theory (SIT)
• Our self concept and self esteem not only derived from our personal identity and accomplishments, but also from status and accomplishments of groups to which we belong.
People strive to achieve or maintain a positive social identity; positive identity derives from favourable comparisons made between the ingroup and relevant outgroups
• People engaged in ingroup favouritism showed higher self-esteem than
those who did not.
• Watching one‟s team win a game increased self-esteem and more
optimistic predictions about the future
• Some studies also show that derogating (devaluing) outgroup members can boost
self-esteem
What is Uncertainty Reduction
- We are motivated to know who we are and how we relate to others – we like to feel relatively certain about things in life.
- People identify with groups more strongly under times of uncertainty.
- Identification with groups that are normative, homogenous, intolerant of dissent, and governed by a more ideologically orthodox system.
Cognitive Perspective
• Intergroup biases result from the ways in which we process information about people.
• Social categorization: The classification of people into groups on the basis of various attributes
- • Categorization of race and gender occurs rapidly.
Social Categorization
• Social categorization adaptive and helpful in processing complex world.
However it can lead to overestimation of between group differences and underestimation of within group differences
What can Social Categorization lead to and what is it?
Outgroup Homogeneity Effect
- Tendency to assume that there is greater similarity among members of outgroups than among members of ingroups.
Why does the Outgroup Homogeneity Effect occur?
- Often have more contact with ingroup members to notice divergent opinions.
- We do not treat ingroup members as representative of the whole; we think of it as idiosyncrasies of the individual.
What is Biased Information Processing
Stereotypes also influence how we communicate, process information and interpret events
e.g. • Participants rated drawings of ambiguous behaviour as more aggressive and less playful when performed by a Black child than White child
Define Subtyping
Explaining away exceptions to a stereotype by creating a subcategory that differs from the group as a whole.
- basically: if the stereotype is: black people are not smart.
if pointed out to smart black person that person will dismiss it as an exception and say that as a whole black people are still not smart
What is socialisation?
Process by which people learn the norms, rules,
and information of a culture or group.
