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Chapter Review
INTRODUCTION
The experiences of Thurgood Marshall are detailed.

PREJUDICE: THE UBIQUITOUS SOCIAL PHENOMENON
Prejudice is ubiquitous; it affects all of usmajority group members as well as minority. People are
prejudiced against many aspects of identity: nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, religion,
appearance, physical state, and even professions and hobbies.

A. Prejudice and Self-Esteem
Prejudice is dangerous, fostering negative consequences from lowered self-esteem to genocide.
Clark and Clark (1947) showed that African-American children as young as 3 were already convinced that it
was not desirable to be black, choosing to play with white rather than black dolls. This evidence led to the 1954
Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate schools.
Goldberg (1968) showed that women had learned to consider themselves intellectually inferior to men, rating
the same article higher when it was written by John McKay than by Joan McKay.

B. A Progress Report
Over the past decades, blatant discrimination has been reduced; the previous two findings no longer
replicate. However, prejudice still exists in subtleand sometimes blatantforms.

PREJUDICE DEFINED
Prejudice is an attitude and thus has affective, cognitive, and behavioral components.
Prejudice is a hostile or negative attitude toward a distinguishable group of people based solely on their
membership in that group. Prejudiced people direct their prejudice towards members of the group as a whole,
ignoring distinguishing characteristics.

A. Stereotypes: The Cognitive Component
Journalist Walter Lippman introduced the term stereotype in 1922. A stereotype is a generalization about a
group of people in which identical characteristics are assigned to virtually all members of the group, regardless
of actual variation among the members. Stereotypes are not necessarily emotionally laden and do not
necessarily lead to discrimination. Frequently stereotyping is merely a way to simplify a complex world
Allports (1954) law of least effort.

1. Sports, Race, and Attributions
The potential abuse engendered by stereotyping can be subtle as well as blatant, and involve positive as well
as negative characteristics (e.g., the stereotype that African-Americans are good basketball players). The
abuse involves ignoring the overlap of distributions and ignoring individual differences in characteristics. For
example, Stone, Perry, & Darley (1997) found that those students who believed a student was African-
American rated him as having better athletic ability than those who thought he was white, who rated him as
having greater basketball sense.
2. Stereotypes, Attribution, and Gender
Gender stereotypes are still pervasive in our society. Women are seen as more nurturant and less assertive
than men; this may be due to their involvement in the homemaker role. Evolutionary psychologists argue that
the difference is due to a basis in the behaviors required for reproductive success. Whatever the cause of the
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difference, this stereotype does have some basis in truth. Work by Eagly, Wood, and Swim shows that there
are indeed behavioral differences between men and women such that women are more concerned with the
welfare of others and men are more independent and dominant.
Nonetheless, gender stereotyping often does depart from reality and can cut deeply. For example, people
tend to see mens ability and womens motivation as responsible for their success, and mens lack of effort and
womens lower ability as responsible for failure. These results, originally found in the 1970s, continue to be
replicated in work in the late 1990s.
Research shows that girls are more likely to blame themselves for their failures, and boys are likely to blame
bad luck. Jacobs and Eccles (1992) showed that daughters of women who held gender stereotypic beliefs
were most likely to hold such self-defeating beliefs themselves.

B. Discrimination: The Behavioral Component
Discrimination is an unjustified negative or harmful action towards a member of a group, simply because of
his or her membership in that group. For example, Bond, DiCandia, & McKinnon (1988) compared how white
vs. black patients in a psychiatric hospital (run by an all-white staff) were treated. They found that, in the first
30 days of a stay, there appeared to be an assumption that blacks would be more violent than whites, as their
offenses were more likely to be treated with physical restraints or drugs (Figure 131). However, eventually the
staff did notice that there was no racial difference in violent incidents and began to treat whites and blacks
equally.
1. Discrimination against Homosexuals
In a study by Hebl et al. (2002) confederates applied for jobs in the community. In some job interviews the
confederates portrayed themselves as homosexuals and in other interviews they did not. Hebl found that in the
cases where the confederates were portrayed as homosexuals the potential employers were less verbally
positive and spent less time interviewing them. However, the employers did not formally discriminate against
them (e.g., not calling them back as often for follow-up interviews as the other candidates).

WHAT CAUSES PREJUDICE?
Whether or not there is a biological root to prejudice is unknown; in any case, it is clear that prejudice occurs
between biologically similar people who hold different beliefs.
Prejudices are easy to learn, although childhood prejudices are not necessarily maintained. For example,
Rohan and Zanna (1996) found the greatest similarity of beliefs for parents and their children with egalitarian
values. Children whose parents hold prejudices may be exposed to competing views and not hold their
parents prejudices.
A schoolteacher (Jane Elliot) in Riceville, Iowa, divided her class by eye color, telling the blue-eyed students
that they were better than the brown-eyed students and giving them special privileges; in less than half an
hour, the formerly cohesive class was split along eye-color lines, with the blue-eyed students taunting and
punishing the others, and the brown-eyed students feeling so low that their academic performance was
depressed. The next day, the eye-color roles were reversed, and the day after that, the class was debriefed.
Even 20 years later, the students claimed the exercise had a life-long impact (see Eye of the Storm and A
Class Divided in the film list).

A. The Way We Think: Social Cognition
One explanation for prejudice is that it is the inevitable byproduct of categorization, schemas, heuristics, and
faulty memory processes in processing information.
1. Social Categorization: Us versus Them
The first step in prejudice is the creation of group categorizations. Once we have mental categories, we group
stimuli into them by similarities, downplaying differences between members of a group and exaggerating
differences between members of different groups.
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2. In-group bias
In-group bias is the especially positive feelings and special treatment we reserve for people we have defined
as being part of our in-group (the group with which a person identifies and of which he or she feels a member),
and the negative feelings and unfair treatment we reserve for others simply because we have defined them as
being in the out-group (groups which an individual does not identify with).
Tajfel postulates that the underlying motive behind in-group bias is self-esteem maintenance and
enhancement. To study this, he invented the minimal group paradigm, in which arbitrary groups were formed
by putting strangers together on the basis of trivial criteria. Even in these minimal groups, people still displayed
in-group bias by rating in-group members more highly, liking them better, and rewarding them more. People
even preferred to take less money as a reward for their own group, if it meant beating the out-group, rather
than taking more money but being beat by the out-group.
3. Out-Group Homogeneity
Another consequence of social categorization is the out-group homogeneity bias, the perception that those
in the out-group are more similar (homogenous) to each other than they really are, as well as more similar than
the members of the in-group are (i.e., the belief that theyre all alike). Quattrone and Jones (1980) showed
that Rutgers and Princeton students watching videos of other students (purportedly from Rutgers or Princeton)
making decisions would judge the students selection as typical of others at his school when the person went to
the rival school but not if they went to the students own school (Figure 132).
4. The Failure of Logic
There are two reasons why it is almost impossible to get a person holding a deep-seated prejudice to change
his or her mind. First, it is primarily the emotional aspect of attitudes that makes a prejudiced person hard to
argue with; logic is not effective in countering emotionspeople will ignore or distort any challenge to their
belief. Second, people with strong prejudices have a firmly established schema for the target group(s); this will
lead them to pay attention to, and recall more often, information that is consistent with their beliefs than that
which is inconsistent. Thus stereotypes become relatively impervious to change.
5. The Persistence of Stereotypes
Table 131 displays the beliefs of students about Americans, Japanese, Jews, and African-Americans from
1933 to 1969. Over 30 years, the stereotypes remained fairly stable, becoming somewhat less negative. By
1969 many students felt uncomfortable with the task and only agreed to do it if it was made clear they were
displaying their knowledge of societal stereotypes and not their own beliefs.
6. The Activation of Stereotypes
Greenberg and Pyszczynski (1985) conducted a study to find out whether knowing a stereotype will affect the
processing of information about a target person even for unprejudiced people. Observers watched a staged
debate between a white and a black student; which student performed better in the debate was manipulated.
Additionally, a planted confederate in the audience either made a racist remark, a nonracist remark, or no
remark about the black student. When this student was the poorer debater, the racist remark activated the
negative stereotype and led to lower ratings of him than in the other conditions (Figure 13.4). Similarly,
Henderson-King and Nisbett (1996) found that it took only one negative action by one African-American to
activate the negative stereotype against blacks and discourage participants from wanting to interact with a
different African-American. These findings suggest that stereotypes exist in most of us and are easily activated
to have negative effects on the perception and treatment of out-group members.
7. Automatic and Controlled Processing of Stereotypes
Patricia Devine (1989) developed a theory about how stereotypical and prejudiced beliefs affect information
processing. Her theory is based on the distinction between automatic and controlled information processing.
According to her theory, when we process information about another, a two-step process takes place: first the
stereotypes that we know about are automatically triggered, then in the controlled process we decide whether
or not to accept the stereotype; unprejudiced people will use the controlled process to override it. However, if a
person is distracted, overwhelmed, or not attending, the controlled processing will not be initiated, and the
stereotype will prevail (see Figure 135). In a test of this theory, Devine showed that high and low prejudiced
Ss showed equal knowledge of the stereotype of African-Americans; in a second part of the study, she
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displayed either stereotypical or nonstereotypical words to Ss subliminally; then she asked them to rate an
ambiguous story about Donald. Those Ss who had been subliminally exposed to the stereotypical words
rated Donald more harshly, regardless of level of prejudice. Finally, in a third study, Devine showed that, when
processing consciously, high prejudice students listed significantly more negative words than low prejudice
students in describing black Americans.
8. The Justification-Suppression Model of Prejudice
Crandall and Eshleman (2003) offer a model of the expression of prejudice. They content that people struggle
between the urge to express prejudice and their need to maintain a positive self-concept. If we find valid
justification for holding a negative attitude toward a group, we can act against them and still feel as though we
are not bigots.
9. The Illusory Correlation
An illusory correlation is the tendency to see relationships, or correlations, between events that are actually
unrelated. Illusory correlations are most likely to occur when the events or people are distinctive or
conspicuous; minority group members are so by definition. Once formed, an illusory correlation increases
attention to confirming information and decreases attention to disconfirming information. The media create
illusory correlations by their stereotypical presentations of women and minorities.
10. Can We Change Stereotypical Beliefs?
Kunda and Oleson (1997) found that when people are presented with examples that strongly challenge their
existing stereotypes, they tend to dismiss the disconfirming example as the exception that proves the rule,
and some actually strengthen their stereotypic belief.
Nonetheless, there are some situations when stereotypes can change.

B. How We Assign Meaning: Attributional Biases
1. Dispositional versus Situational Explanations
Stereotypes are negative dispositional attributions. Thomas Pettigrew has called our making dispositional
attributions about a whole group of people the ultimate attribution error. Bodenhausen (1988) found that
students were more likely to find a defendant guilty of a crime (ignoring extenuating circumstances) when his
name was Carlos Ramirez than when it was Robert Johnson. In an earlier study, Bodenhausen and Wyer
(1985) had found that when a crime was consistent with a group stereotype, Ss were less lenient in parole
decisions, ignoring other relevant information, than when the crime was inconsistent with a group stereotype.
Thus when people act in a way that confirms our stereotype, we make dispositional attributions and ignore
possible situational causes.
2. Stereotype Threat
Steele and J. Aronson (1995) have shown that at least one major contributing factor is situational. They
define stereotype threat as the apprehension experienced by members of a minority group that they might
behave in a manner than confirms an existing cultural stereotype. This worry in turn interferes with their ability
to perform well in these situations. For example, Steele and Aronson found that when white and black students
were told that a difficult test they were taking was just in the development phase and thus not valid, there were
no differences in performance; but when the students were told that the same test was a valid measure of
intellectual ability, the blacks performed more poorly than the whites.
Stereotype threat applies to gender as well as race. Spencer and Steele (1996) found a similar phenomenon
among women taking math tests. Even white males can display the phenomenonwhen compared to Asian
males on a math exam (J. Aronson et al., 1999, 2000).
The more conscious individuals are of the pertinent stereotype, the greater the effect on their performance
(Brown & Pinel, 2002).
Research indicates that providing a counter-stereotypic mind-set (e.g., Im a student at a top university) can
eliminate the effects of stereotype threat.
3. Expectations and Distortions
When an out-group member behaves in a way that disconfirms our stereotypes, we are likely to make a
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situational attribution for his or her performance, leaving the stereotype intact. For example, Ickes et al. (1982)
told college men that the person they would interact with was either extremely friendly or extremely unfriendly.
In both conditions, the Ss went out of their way to be nice to their partners and their partner returned their
friendliness. However, those who expected their partner to be unfriendly explained his friendly behavior away
as being a phony response due to their own pleasant behavior.
4. Blaming the Victim
Blaming the victim is the tendency to blame individuals (make dispositional attributions) for their
victimization; ironically, it is motivated by a desire to see the world as a fair and just place where people get
what they deserve. Believing that people get what they deserve leads one to blame victims for their outcomes.
Negative attitudes toward the poor, including blaming them for their own plight, are more prevalent among
individuals who display strong belief in a just world (Furnham & Gunter, 1984).
5. Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
The self-fulfilling prophecy is a process in which we find confirmation and proof for our stereotypes by
unknowingly creating stereotypical behavior in out-group members through our treatment of them.
Word, Zanna, and Cooper (1974) conducted a set of experiments that demonstrates the phenomenon. In the
first study, they asked white undergraduates to interview job applicants who were either white or black. The
students tended to display discomfort when interviewing the African-Americans: for example, they sat further
away, stammered, and terminated the interview earlier. In a second experiment, the researchers varied the
behavior of the interviewers so that they acted towards a job candidate either the way that the interviewers had
acted towards whites or the way that the interviewers had acted towards blacks in the first study. They found
that those applicants who had been interviewed in the way that African-Americans had been interviewed were
judged to be more nervous and less effective than the others (Figure 136).

C. Prejudice and Economic Competition: Realistic Conflict Theory
Realistic conflict theory is the theory that limited resources lead to conflict between groups and result in
increased prejudice and discrimination.
1. Economic and Political Competition
Several historical studies document that discrimination against out-groups covaries with the scarcity of jobs or
other resources.
Although correlational data is supportive of the theory, it still does not allow a causal inference. To allow this,
an experiment is essential, such as that conducted by Sherif et al. (1961). In the classic Robbers Cave
experiment, two groups of 12-year-old boys at a summer camp were randomly assigned to one of two groups,
the Eagles or the Rattlers. In the first phase of the study, the groups were isolated and placed in situations
designed to increase group cohesiveness. In the second phase of the study, the researchers set up a series of
competitive activities in which the two groups were pitted against each other. Hostility between the two groups
rapidly escalated. In the next phase of the study, researchers tried to eliminate hostility by eliminating
competitive games and increasing contact. This failed to reduce the hostilities (the final resolution follows later
in the chapter).
2. The Role of the Scapegoat
Scapegoating, the tendency for individuals, when frustrated or unhappy, to displace aggression onto groups
that are disliked, visible, and relatively powerless, may occur when people are frustrated (for example, by
scarcity of resources) but there is no clear target to blame the frustration on. It may occur even in the absence
of direct competition.
Such scapegoating may be seen in recent years with homosexuality.

D. The Way We Conform: Normative Rules
Through both explicit and implicit socialization, we are trained in the norms of our culture. Stereotypes and
prejudiced attitudes are part of this normative package.
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1. When Prejudice is Institutionalized
Institutionalized racism refers to the idea that racist attitudes are held by the vast majority of us because we
live in a society where stereotypes and discrimination are the norm; institutionalized sexism is the idea that
sexist attitudes are held by the vast majority of us for the same reason. In societies in which racism and sexism
are institutionalized, normative conformity leads to the tendency to go along with the group in order to fulfill
their expectations and gain acceptance. Pettigrew (1958) argues that the greatest determinant of prejudice is
this slavish conformity to social norms. For example, he showed that ministers in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the
1950s were personally in favor of desegregation but kept these fears to themselves. Other studies show that
peoples prejudice and discrimination changes when they move to an area with different norms, or even, in a
study of miners in West Virginia, when they are underground and when above. Over the past 50 years,
American norms for attitudes such as that towards desegregation have changed drastically.
2. Modern Prejudice
Although American norms have changed and the blatant expression of prejudice has diminished, prejudice is
still with us. Modern racism is prejudice revealed in subtle, indirect ways because people have learned to hide
prejudiced attitudes in order to avoid being labeled as racist. For example, many parents protest against their
children being bussed only when the busing is interracial. Because of the nature of modern prejudice, it can
best be studied using subtle or unobtrusive measures. For example, the bogus pipeline technique uses an
impressive-looking machine labeled as a lie detector; the machine is a fake. People who are hooked up to the
machine and believe that their true attitudes can be detected showed higher levels of racism and sexism than
those completing the paper scales than white males.
3. Subtle and Blatant Prejudice in Western Europe
Pettigrew and Meertens (1995) examined blatant and modern racism in France, the Netherlands, and Great
Britain. They found that those who scored as racist on both scales wanted to send immigrants back; those who
scored low on both wanted to improve their rights and were willing to take actions to do so, and those who
scored as nonracist on the blatant scale but racist on the subtle scale did not want to take action to send
immigrants back but nor were they willing to support any actions to help improve their rights.

E. Subtle Sexism
Subtle forms of prejudice can also be directed toward woman. Many men have feelings of ambivalence toward
women and as Glick and Fiske (2001) have shown this ambivalence can take one of two forms: hostile
sexism or benevolent sexism. Hostile sexism suggests that women are inferior to men while benevolent
sexism tends to idealize women romantically.

HOW CAN PREJUDICE BE REDUCED?
The hope that prejudice can be reduced by education has proven naive. Change requires more.
A. The Contact Hypothesis
The contact hypothesis is the idea that merely bringing members of different groups into contact with each
other will erode prejudice. This idea lay at the basis of the 1954 Supreme Court decision on school
desegregation. For example, Deutsch and Collins (1951) had shown that white and black families randomly
assigned to an integrated housing unit showed reductions in racism compared to those assigned to segregated
units. However, things did not work so smoothly in school desegregation: there was tension, and, in more than
half of the studies, prejudice actually increased. In a quarter of the studies, the self-esteem of African-American
children was found to have decreased after desegregation. Mere contact does not work.
B. When Contact Reduces Prejudice: Six Conditions
Allport (1954) suggested that six conditions are necessary for inter-group contact to reduce prejudice: (1)
mutual interdependence, or the existence of situations where two or more groups need each other and must
depend on each other in order to accomplish a goal; (2) a common goal that is important to both of them; (3)
equal status of group members; (4) having informal interpersonal contact; (5) multiple contacts with several
members of the out-group so that individuals can learn that their beliefs are wrong; and (6) social norms in
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place that promote equality. When these conditions are met, suspicious or even hostile groups will reduce their
stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. Sherifs Robbers Cave study, described above, ultimately resolved
the intergroup hostility by fostering each of these six conditions (Figure 13.7).
C. Why Early Desegregation Failed
In most classrooms, the environment is very competitive; when minority students who have had deficient
preparation are bussed in, they are guaranteed to lose the competition. The situation is ripe for the creation of
self-fulfilling prophecies by both majority and minority group members. Thus Stephen (1978) found a general
decrease in self-esteem of minority students following desegregation. To change the atmosphere of the
classroom so that it meets the six conditions outlined above, Aronson and his colleagues developed the jigsaw
classroom. This is a classroom setting designed to reduce prejudice and raise the self-esteem of children by
placing them in small desegregated groups and making each child dependent on the other children in his or
her group to learn the course material and do well in the class. Formal studies demonstrate that children in
jigsaw classrooms perform better and show greater increases in self-esteem than those in traditional
classrooms; further, they show more evidence of true integration and better abilities to empathize with and see
the world through the eyes of others.
D. Why Does Jigsaw Work?
Gaertner et al. (1990) suggest that the process is effective because it breaks down in-group and out-group
categorization and fosters the notion of the class as a single group.
Another reason is that it places people in a favor-doing situation, which leads people to like those they do
favors for.
A third reason why the jigsaw process is effective is that it encourages the development of empathy.
Bridgeman thus showed that 10-year-old students who had spent two months in a jigsaw classroom were more
likely to successfully take the perspective of a story character and correctly answer questions from this
characters point of view than were students who had not had the jigsaw classroom experience.
1. The Gradual Spread of Cooperative Learning
The cooperative learning movement has been widely accepted by researchers as one of the most effective
ways of improving race relations, building empathy, and improving instruction in schools. However, the
educational system, like all bureaucracies, resists change, and the slowness of change can have tragic
consequences.