While stereotypes are the cognitive component of social cognition, prejudice is the affective component. Prejudice refers to how a person feels about an individual based on their group membership (as a result of the stereotypes a person may hold about that group). Prejudice can be positive or negative, depending on the content of the stereotypes a person holds. As mentioned in the section on Stereotypes, people often hold stronger stereotypes about outgroup members, and therefore, are more likely to show negative prejudice against them. This phenomenon is known as ingroup favoritism—the tendency to respond more positively to people from our ingroups than we do to people from outgroups.
Social identity theory (Tajfel, Billig, Bundy, & Flament, 1971) describes this tendency to favor one’s own in-group over another’s outgroup. As a result, outgroup disliking stems from this in-group liking (Brewer & Brown, 1998).
The tendency to favor their ingroup develops quickly in young children, beginning at the age of 3 years and increasing up to about 6 years of age, and almost immediately begins to influence their behavior (Aboud, 2003; Aboud & Amato, 2001). Young children show greater liking for peers of their own sex and race and typically play with same-sex others after the age of 3. And there is a norm that we should favor our ingroups: People like people who express ingroup favoritism better than those who are more egalitarian (Castelli & Carraro, 2010). Ingroup favoritism is found for many different types of social groups, in many different settings, on many different dimensions, and in many different cultures (Bennett et al., 2004; Pinter & Greenwald, 2011). Ingroup favoritism also occurs on trait ratings, such that ingroup members are rated as having more positive characteristics than are outgroup members (Hewstone, 1990). People also take credit for the successes of other ingroup members, remember more positive than negative information about ingroups, are more critical of the performance of outgroup than of ingroup members, and believe that their own groups are less prejudiced than are outgroups (Shelton & Richeson, 2005). People also talk differently about their ingroups than their outgroups, such that they describe the ingroup and its members as having broad positive traits (“We are generous and friendly”) but describe negative ingroup behaviors in terms of the specific behaviors of single group members (“Our group member, Bill, hit someone”) (Maass & Arcuri, 1996; Maass, Ceccarielli, & Rudin, 1996; von Hippel, Sekaquaptewa, & Vargas, 1997). These actions allow us to spread positive characteristics to all members of our ingroup but reserve negative aspects for individual group members, thereby protecting the group’s image.
People also make trait attributions in ways that benefit their ingroups, just as they make trait attributions that benefit themselves. This general tendency, known as the ultimate attribution error, results in the tendency for each of the competing groups to perceive the other group extremely and unrealistically negatively (Hewstone, 1990). When an ingroup member engages in a positive behavior, we tend to see it as a stable internal characteristic of the group as a whole. Similarly, negative behaviors on the part of the outgroup are seen as caused by stable negative group characteristics. On the other hand, negative behaviors from the ingroup and positive behaviors from the outgroup are more likely to be seen as caused by temporary situational variables or by behaviors of specific individuals and are less likely to be attributed to the group.
Ingroup favoritism has a number of causes. For one, it is a natural part of social categorization—we categorize into ingroups and outgroups because it helps us simplify and structure our environment. It is easy, and perhaps even natural, to believe in the simple idea that “we are better than they are.” Ingroup favoritism also occurs at least in part because we belong to the ingroup and not the outgroup (Cadinu & Rothbart, 1996). We like people who are similar to ourselves, and we perceive other ingroup members as similar to us. This also leads us to favor other members of our ingroup, particularly when we can clearly differentiate them from members of outgroups. We may also prefer ingroups because they are more familiar to us (Zebrowitz, Bronstad, & Lee, 2007).
But the most important determinant of ingroup favoritism is simple self-enhancement. We want to feel good about ourselves, and seeing our ingroups positively helps us do so (Brewer, 1979). Being a member of a group that has positive characteristics provides us with the feelings of social identity—the positive self-esteem that we get from our group memberships. When we can identify ourselves as a member of a meaningful social group (even if it is a relatively trivial one), we can feel better about ourselves.
For a review of some classic and recent studies on the causes of ingroup favoritism, please read the following article;
In-Group Favoritism Is Difficult to Change, Even When the Social Groups Are Meaningless (Scientific American, 2019)
Although people have a general tendency to show ingroup favoritism, there are least some cases in which it does not occur. One situation in which ingroup favoritism is unlikely is when the members of the ingroup are clearly inferior to other groups on an important dimension. The players on a baseball team that has not won a single game all season are unlikely to be able to feel very good about themselves as a team and are pretty much forced to concede that the outgroups are better, at least as far as playing baseball is concerned. Members of low-status groups show less ingroup favoritism than do members of high-status groups and may even display outgroup favoritism, in which they admit that the other groups are better than they are (Clark & Clark, 1947).
For more information on this important study and some follow-up studies, please see the following links:
Landmark Cases: Brown v Board Doll Test (C-Span) (2:54)
How a Psychologist’s Work on Race Identity Helped Overturn School Segregation in 1950s America (Smithsonian Magazine, 2017)
Study: White and black children biased toward lighter skin (CNN, 2010)
Traditionally, prejudice and attitudes have been measured through explicit attitude measures, in which participants are directly asked to provide their attitudes toward various objects, people, or issues (e.g., a survey). These explicit measures of attitudes can be used to predict people’s actual behavior, but there are limitations to them. For one thing, individuals aren’t always aware of their true attitudes, because they’re either undecided or haven’t given a particular issue much thought. Furthermore, even when individuals are aware of their attitudes, they might not want to admit to them, such as when holding a certain attitude is viewed negatively by their culture. For example, sometimes it can be difficult to measure people’s true opinions on racial issues, because participants fear that expressing their true attitudes will be viewed as socially unacceptable. Thus, explicit attitude measures may be unreliable when asking about controversial attitudes or attitudes that are not widely accepted by society.
In order to avoid some of these limitations, many researchers use more subtle or covert ways of measuring attitudes that do not suffer from such self-presentation concerns (Fazio & Olson, 2003). An implicit attitude is an attitude that a person does not verbally or overtly express. For example, someone may have a positive, explicit attitude toward his job; however, nonconsciously, he may have a lot of negative associations with it (e.g., having to wake up early, the long commute, the office heating is broken) which results in an implicitly negative attitude. To learn what a person’s implicit attitude is, you have to use implicit measures of attitudes. These measures infer the participant’s attitude rather than having the participant explicitly report it. Many implicit measures accomplish this by recording the time it takes a participant (i.e., the reaction time) to label or categorize an attitude object (i.e., the person, concept, or object of interest) as positive or negative. For example, the faster someone categorizes his or her job (measured in milliseconds) as negative compared to positive, the more negative the implicit attitude is (i.e., because a faster categorization implies that the two concepts—“work” and “negative”—are closely related in one’s mind).
One common implicit measure is the Implicit Association Test (IAT;Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998), which does just what the name suggests, measuring how quickly the participant pairs a concept (e.g., cats) with an attribute (e.g., good or bad). The participant’s response time in pairing the concept with the attribute indicates how strongly the participant associates the two. Another common implicit measure is the evaluative priming task (Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995), which measures how quickly the participant labels the valence (i.e., positive or negative) of the attitude object when it appears immediately after a positive or negative image. The more quickly a participant labels the attitude object after being primed with a positive versus negative image indicates how positively the participant evaluates the object.
Please watch the following video for a demonstration of how the IAT works:
Individuals’ implicit attitudes are sometimes inconsistent with their explicitly held attitudes. Hence, implicit measures may reveal biases that participants do not report on explicit measures. As a result, implicit attitude measures are especially useful for examining the pervasiveness and strength of controversial attitudes and stereotypic associations, such as racial biases or associations between race and violence. For example, research using the IAT has shown that about 66% of white respondents have a negative bias toward Black people (Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald, 2002), that bias on the IAT against Black people is associated with more discomfort during interracial interactions (McConnell, & Leibold, 2001), and that implicit associations linking Black people to violence are associated with a greater tendency to shoot unarmed Black targets in a video game (Payne, 2001). Thus, even though individuals are often unaware of their implicit attitudes, these attitudes can have serious implications for their behavior, especially when these individuals do not have the cognitive resources available to override the attitudes’ influence.
However, in recent years, the IAT has come under scrutiny for a number of reasons, including that follow-up studies have failed to replicate the phenomenon. Read the following articles for more information on the debate:
12 Reasons to Be Skeptical of Common Claims About Implicit Bias (Psychology Today, 2022)
In Bias Test, Shades of Gray (New York Times, 2008)
How to Think about ‘Implicit Bias’ (Scientific American, 2018
Mark Twain once said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” But can travel really reduce peoples’ prejudice?
Read this academic journal article including 5 individual but related studies examining this very question as well as some popular-press articles about this topic:
Cao, J., Galinsky, A. D., & Maddux, W. W. (2014). Does travel broaden the mind? Breadth of foreign experiences increases generalized trust. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 5(5), 517-525.
New study confirms Mark Twain’s saying: Travel is fatal to prejudice (PsyPost, 2013)
Travel is said to increase cultural understanding. Does it? (National Geographic, 2020)
If you don’t have much experience reading academic journal articles, you can get some tips here.
The idea of travel reducing prejudice is related to the social psychology idea of contact hypothesis - the idea that intergroup contact will reduce prejudice. What this suggests is that a good way to reduce prejudice is to help people create closer connections with members of different groups. People will be more favorable toward others when they learn to see those other people as more similar to them, as closer to the self, and to be more concerned about them. However, contact can be expected to work only in situations that create the appropriate opportunities for change. For one, contact will only be effective if it provides information demonstrating that the existing stereotypes held by the individuals are incorrect. When we learn more about groups that we didn’t know much about before, we learn more of the truth about them, leading us to be less biased in our beliefs. But if our interactions with the group members do not allow us to learn new beliefs, then contact cannot work.
The research on intergroup contact suggests that although contact may improve prejudice, it may make it worse if it is not implemented correctly. Improvement is likely only when the contact moves the members of the groups to feel that they are closer to each other rather than further away from each other. In short, groups are going to have better attitudes toward each other when they see themselves more similarly to each other—when they feel more like one large group than a set of smaller groups.
Read this article about a famous study on intergroup contact and think about how that study relates to the work on travel and prejudice:
Revisiting Robbers Cave: The easy spontaneity of intergroup conflict (Scientific American, 2012)
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