Social Lecture 2 - measuring prejudice through direct and indirect measures PDF

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measuring prejudice through direct and indirect measures...

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PSYC 102: INVESTIGATING PSYCHOLOGY SOCIAL LECTURE 2: MEASURING PREJUDICE Learning Outcomes  Introduce key definitions/ concepts  A couple of classic perspectives  Measuring prejudice o Indirect measurement o Direct measurement Prejudice  Prejudice – a biased attitude or feeling towards another group (or members of another group) based on generalisation about what that group is like  Prejudice as a feeling – “prejudice represents a negative feeling towards outgroup members” (Nelson, 2013) o Affect – prejudice (negative affect) o Behaviour – discrimination (negative) o Cognition – stereotypes (negative)  Prejudice as an attitude – has an affective, behavioural and cognitive component Behaviour and Cognition  Discrimination (behaviour) – actions or behaviour, toward an individual or group based on their perceived group identity/membership  Stereotypes (cognition) – Specific beliefs about members of another group, generalized from beliefs about the group itself      

Why are we prejudiced? Personality Realistic conflict theory Social identity theory Cognitive misers Group norms and conformity

Personality  Authoritarianism (Adorno et al., 1950)  Motivated by the Holocaust  The F(ascist) Scale o Conventionalism o Authoritarian Submission [ingroup] o Authoritarian Aggression [convention violators]  Anti-interception o Superstition o Power o Cynicism o Projectivity o Sexual Concerns  Right- versus Left-wing  Social dominance orientation (Pratto et al, 1994)

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o Social dominance theory (SDT)  Society minimises conflict through ideologies that create hierarchical structures  SDO = attitudinal aspect of SDT  Some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups  It is unjust to try to make groups equal Authoritarianism o My beliefs and those of my ingroup are objectively correct. Anyone who is different from us is a problem Social dominance orientation o The world is a zero-sum game. If someone wins, someone else must lose Both tend to predict things like: o Discriminatory towards minority groups, opposition to social policies designed to improve welfare of minority groups, beliefs that legitimise inequality

Cognitive Misers  Walter Lippmann (1922) o Public Opinion  For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.  Gordon Allport o The human mind must think with the aid of categories... Once formed, categories are the basis for normal prejudgment. We cannot possibly avoid this process. Orderly living depends upon it.  See also: Pendry & Macrae (1994) Measuring Prejudice  Direct measure o Self-report o “if you want to know something about someone, just ask” o Closed-set vs open-ended  Pros and cons to both o Strengths  Fast and easy, “direct”, quantitative o Weaknesses  Lack of desire, or lack of ability, to report accurately, “bogus pipelines”  Indirect measure o Many different approaches  Constrative vignettes  Matched guise technique  Behavioural measures  “interview offers” o Psychological measures  Heart rate

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 Eye tracking  Facial activity  EEG/ MRI o Adams, Wright, Lohr (1996) Implicit measures o 99%, or possibly 99.9%, of our activity is purely automatic and habitual (William James, 1899) o Implicit measures – “opposite or explicit measures”  Non-conscious, not directly assessible  Attitude is “implicit” to the behaviour/ measure o Word fragment completion test  Gilbert and Hixon (1991)  Complete as many fragments as possible in 15 seconds o Fazio et al (1995)  The “evaluate priming” task  Looking at reaction times to pairing of positive/ negative concepts with different social categories o Strengths  Cheap, practical, bypasses response biases o Weaknesses  Validity  Ecological, predictive validity unclear  Relies on the assumption that association = attitude

Summary  Definition: prejudice as affect/ attitude  History: some classical perspectives  Measure types: o Direct (explicit) o Indirect (implicit)...