The types of prejudice PDF

Title The types of prejudice
Author Khloe King
Course  Social Psychology
Institution Central Washington University
Pages 13
File Size 107.1 KB
File Type PDF
Total Downloads 14
Total Views 164

Summary

Stereotypes are not built on valid experiences, but are formed from rumors and images made by the media, or generated in our heads as a way to justify our own prejudices and cruelties. For example. it is useful to think that women are biologically predisposed beings to domestic work, if a male-domin...


Description

THE TYPES OF PREJUDICE

Introduction The sense of helplessness and helplessness created in those oppressed by prejudice, carries almost Inevitably to a decline in one's esteem; process that begins as early as early childhood. Such is the legacy of society with prejudice, that, although things are changing, it would be a mistake to think that prejudice and discrimination have ceased to be a serious problem; every year we witness numerous acts of violence due to prejudice.

Positive and negative prejudice From a technical point of view, it is possible to distinguish between positive and negative prejudices, so before Mr X, who has told me that he is a lawyer, is presented to me, I will already be inclined to like or dislike, and I will even be waiting to find certain characteristics in him. On this issue we are not going to deal with positive prejudice, but the negative one. Negative prejudice: hostile or negative attitude towards a distinguishable group based on generalization derived from imperfect or incomplete information. The characteristics that are assigned to the group subject to prejudice are either totally inappropriate, or based on a certain germ of truth that applies to the whole group as a whole. It is an opinion that is already formed, so that any information against, or distorted to support it, or is discarded to move to another line of attack, the person of entrenched prejudice is virtually immune to all information that disagrees with his stereotype. We all have prejudices to some degree, whether against an ethnic group, or people with different sexual preferences, or living in certain geographical areas, or in certain types of food... Etc. For example. If someone told us that caterpillars are a tasty, protein-rich food, we probably wouldn't eat them and find some reason to hold the prejudice clearly. Stereotype: This is the result of assigning identical characteristics to anyone in a group, regardless of the actual variations that occur between members of that group, for example. to think that Jews are materialistic, and from an early age we learn to assign those identical characteristics.

Stereotyping does not necessarily constitute an intentional abusive act; it's often just a way to simplify the world and we all do. To the extent that the stereotype is based on experience and is quite accurate, it can be a simple and adaptive way to deal with complex events, on the contrary, if it prevents us from seeing individual differences within a group of people, it is una adaptive and potentially dangerous, for example. many whites associate with black violent conditions. When a person behaves according to our stereotypes, we tend not to notice the information that might give us clues as to why he actually behaved as he did; we assume that there must be something in them and not in their living conditions, that caused behavior, (there is a cognitive bias and unless we are vigilant, anyone can make the same mistake). Stereotypes are not built on valid experiences, but are formed from rumors and images made by the media, or generated in our heads as a way to justify our own prejudices and cruelties. For example. it is useful to think that women are biologically predisposed beings to domestic work, if a male-dominant society wants to keep them tied to the vacuum cleaner, in such cases, the stereotype is certainly abusive. The character of the stereotype is not always insulting on its own, even if the stereotype seems neutral or positive, for example, homosexuals have artistic temperament, it can be ungrateful for those who suffer it, since it means not being perceived and treated as an individual with individual own traits, whether positive or negative. Stereotype threat: in most cases the stereotype is directly insulting and can have debilitating effects for the members of the group it targets. For example, what Steele and Aronson called "threat of stereotype," discovering the fear of black students in strongly-regarded educational contexts, to confirm the existing stereotype of their supposed intellectual inferiority, and which in turn interferes with their ability to perform well on evaluative tasks like any academic test.

Stereotypes and attributions Stereotyping is a special case of the attribution phenomenon; the need to find a cause that explains people's behavior is part of our tendency to go beyond information giving and often being functional, for example. someone we don't know behaves amicably; we don't know why they do it, we go beyond the given information and make guesses trying to figure out if it's a friend or an interested party, and our interpretations may be appropriate and functional, or not. The error of definitive attribution is the tendency to make attributions consistent with the beliefs or prejudices we have in ambiguous situations. The added problem is that prejudice, apart from influencing attributions, can lead to erroneous

conclusions that justify and intensify negative feelings, thus transforming the whole process of attributions into a spiral: prejudice, negative attributions or stereotypes, intensifying prejudice. Gender stereotypes: there is an almost universal tendency to consider women more predisposed to caring for others and that they are less authoritarian than men, possibly because of the role traditionally assigned to women as a housewife. From a male point of view, there are reasons that women would have evolved towards that greater predisposition to care than men, although there is no clear way to determine whether caring for others is more typical of the nature of women than that of men. It is true that women tend to manifest more sensitive and friendly behaviors and to show more concern for the well-being of others. Men tend to behave more dominantly, controlling and independent, but there is a high level of coincidence in terms of these characteristics, there are men with social sensitivity and women without it, and the application of the stereotype to all women and men deprives the individual of their right to be treated as such, with individual and specific characteristics and abilities. Damage; gender stereotypes often move away from reality and can be harmful, if the sexual stereotype is strong enough, even members of the stereotypical group tend to believe it. For example. it has been shown that young girls are already prone to undervalue their own skills and also that girls' tendency to undervalue their skills may have more impact in traditionally male areas, such as mathematics. These beliefs may be influenced by the prevailing attitudes of our society, but they have the deepest influence of the attitudes of the most important people in the lives of girls, their parents. They maintain strong gender stereotypes, and perceive their children's abilities accordingly, which in turn has an impact on their beliefs, e.g. daughters of women with strong gender stereotypes, who believe they don't have much capacity for math. The problem with such negative attributions is that they hinder subsequent returns, causing effort-intensive tasks to give up on the belief that they lack capacity.

Blaming the victim It is not always easy for those who have never endured prejudice, to emerge an empathetic reaction and to fully understand what it means to see the objective of it. You may feel sorry for yourself, but there is often a certain moralizing attitude, a tendency to blame the victim, for example. if she was raped, maybe it's because she did something provocative... Such suggestions is a request that the marginal group submit to more rigid guidelines than those established for the majority. The tendency to blame the victim is often motivated by the desire to see the world as a right place, apparently people are terrified to think that they live in a world where a person, without being to blame for anything, may not receive the treatment he deserves or needs.

The phenomenon of blaming the victim and the effect in hinds ago: after knowing the outcome of an event, it seems as if we already knew what was going to happen and we could have even predicted it, even if this result was not the most likely, but it is nothing more than an illusion. The strength of this effect can strengthen belief e.g. that rape victims are responsible for their own misfortune, causing those who know the circumstances of the rape to tend to blame the woman's conduct, for example. if she let a man kiss her. Understanding and impaling with the victim's plight should empower us to reconstitute the facts from his vision, but we forget that it is not possible for him to look back and reorient his conduct, which we can do.

Prejudices in science: Scientists are trained to be objective and impartial people, but even they can be influenced by the dominant environment, for example. Pearson studied ethnic differences laden with prejudice. Misguided conclusions have often been drawn from biased experiments and tests. IQ tests: Most of them are biased against residents of the countryside and ghettos, as the terms and phrases with which they express their examples are more familiar to children raised in urban residential areas. Therefore before attributing the low yields of e.g. blacks in this kind of testing to their "stupidity", we must know if they are neutral with respect to cultural content. Janis and Field's experience of persuasion: I intentionally skew up against women concluded that they were easier to persuade than men, the result of which perhaps only indicates that people are more persuaded in the issues they do not care about or do not know, for example. women on men's issues and vice versa. Conclusion: when we are educated in a prejudiced society, we often accept these prejudices without criticism and not to look at scientific data critically, using it as support for our own prejudices.

Subtle effects of prejudice Living in a society are racist and sexist signs can have subtle but important effects on behavior, both of the dominant majority and women; much of that behavior occurs without being aware of it. One example: self-fulfilling prophecy: our conceptions of how people are often influenced by our behavior so that we obtain from them the behaviors and characteristics we expected at the beginning: "belief creates reality." For example.

people who maintain stereotypes of blacks as bums and fools will treat them as such and inadvertently create the same conditions or characteristics associated with that stereotype. An example: strategies to contrast hypotheses that produce confirming evidence: not all of us maintain rigid stereotypes, and often adopt social beliefs only on an interim basis, trying to confirm our hypotheses; the problem sometimes sees the strategies we use to do so produce confirming evidence. For example. in an experiment when subjects were asked to contrast the hypothesis that certain subjects would fit the profile of an extrovert they chose questions that made people look extroverted, such as "what would you do to animate a meeting?" In short: when we hold beliefs about others, the self-fulfilling prophecy ensures that we form a social reality in line with our expectations, and even when we test the accuracy of our beliefs, we often use without realizing strategies that confirm them even if they are wrong. All of this helps to understand why stereotypes are so resistant to change. Most of us probably think we don't have prejudices and subtly discriminate. For example. some subtle racism tends to emerge when it can be easily rationalized. This would be difficult to justify refusing to help a minority member whose need comes from circumstances beyond his control, but when denying aid seems more reasonable, for example. if the person is vague, help can be denied while protecting one's unprejudiced image. In extraordinary circumstances where conscious control is minimized, even those who have no prejudices, fall into automatic prejudices, and end up behaving or thinking according to the common stereotype.

Subtle sexism and socialization of gender roles: There are also very subtle forms of prejudice against women, exemplifying unaware ideologies. The unconscientisty ideology: (Bem) refers to a set of beliefs that we implicitly accept and are not aware of, because we cannot imagine alternative conceptions of the world. For example. we are socialized in such a way that it is difficult for us to imagine a trucking woman whose husband stays at home looking after the house and the children. We do not notice the existence of this ideology because it is dominant, but it can have important consequences, for example. most women who in early childhood gained a traditional view of their gender role (women at home) will not choose to seek a higher education. Current trends in raising women's consciousness are beneficial not only for them, but also for men, because while women expand their field of interests and enter into new occupations, prohibitions on the male role become less restrictive.

Notion of gender role and socialization: it is the role that is considered appropriate to biological sexual identity (men, maintain the family, hide sensitivities, be aggressive... focused on the house, children, marriage, sensitivity, less competition...). Because of this way of stereotyping the gender role, even graduates receive not much credit in intellectual leadership compared to men, and no longer only from men, but also from the women themselves. But women's sexism against others is almost always something that goes unnoticed, and is less considered discriminatory by both them and them. The process of socializing the role of gender makes many people consider these roles as characteristically rigid and restrictive, and as they are socially conditioned stereotypes, rewards are received for the actions that maintain them. It is difficult for them to flex, e.g. if a woman tries to deflect her rigid role too much, risks losing friendships, being criticized (and the self-fulfilling prophecy is set in motion), by needing to compare us to others, lowers the likelihood of escaping the established role, whether we are men or not. We should adapt behaviors according to the situation and not the role. For example. if we seek reconciliation after a dispute, the flexibility of the energetic attitude is more appropriate. It seems that if we can agree to commit to a transgender conditionor,if it is counterweighted to other "appropriate" ones, for one's own sex, for example. the man who cares for the house will have greater social approval if it is also for example. good fisherman or mechanic. The phenomenon of fear of success: Another consequence of the socialization of the gender role, found by M. Horner (years 6070), which is that women fear success in particular, when it seems inadequate for the expectations of their role and they predict more negative consequences. It has been seen that men have the same thing if they experience success in some non-traditional situation. Therefore the phenomenon is similar to that of the ability to be persuaded; for both men and women, they exhibit symptomatic behaviors of such effects depending on the situation. Importance of context (power of the situation): Although there may be some differences between the behavior of men and women, many of them are rooted in the different situations in which men and women find themselves. Women can be more persuaded, fearing success because they are evaluated according to rules of the male game, and so do men when evaluated according to women's standards. On the other hand, even when men and women behave identically, they are judged by different standards, for example. success in women can be attributed to luck or effort, in men, to their own capacity. Therefore, before concluding that one sex is less than the other, in any area, we have to look carefully at the context in which the conduct occurs. Importance of stereotypical roles: everyone, all men and women, blacks, poor or rich, homosexual or heterosexual, are victims because we are limited by stereotypical roles. Some roles are more restrictive and annoying than others and the effort of any group to get rid of the chains of prejudice benefits us all, because,

as we learn to accept the behavior of others when it diverges from their role, our own divergent behavior will be more accepted and we will be more free to implement our potentials (having a richer and more complete development).

Interdependence: a possible solution To end segregation, you can't just put kids of different races and ethnic trees in the same schools, the important thing is what you do when they're there. Initial stresses can start as a result of contact, e.g. in the Sherif and cabbage experiment. (by putting two groups into situations of conflict and competition hostility occurs, and once established, it cannot be removed by eliminating conflict and competition: by establishing strong mistrust, bringing groups together even in non-competitive situations of equal status, it would only serve to increase hostility and distrust). Sherif managed to reduce hostility: he did so by placing the two groups of children in situations where they were mutually interdependent; depended on each other to achieve their goals, e.g. Emergency situations such as fixing the water supply or pushing a vehicle: this diminishes hostile feelings and negative stereotypes, they began to cooperate with each other. The key is mutual interdependence, situations in which subjects are needed to achieve a goal. More researchers have demonstrated this key factor and its importance: Deutsch: Groups operating in problem solving are friendlier and more attentive, when it introduces an atmosphere of cooperation than when the competitive atmosphere prevails. Keenan and Carnavale: cooperation within groups can also foster cooperation between groups. Relationships within the same group are transferred to their relationship with others. Unfortunately, cooperation and interdependence are not usually in school classrooms. We have to take into account the process and the content, which exist simultaneously in any interaction. The content would be the substance of the process, while this is the dynamics of the process. (e.g. arithmetic is the content, and the way to impart it is the process). The process is often undervalued, but it is much more important, you almost always learn more about the process than from the content, you could say. In general, classroom processes always promote the same values: there is only one class expert, the teacher; there is only one correct answer, and the rewards only come from the teacher, never from intercom with peers, moreover, this collaboration will usually be failed. This leads to a competition for the respect and approval of the teacher, to envy and jealousy towards the successful ones by the

losers, and finally understanding and friendship are not promoted among any classmate. It is created even among children of the same race or ethnicity, and if there is also inequality of race or ethnicity, the situation can be even more tense and complex. However, competitiveness is not inevitable, most teachers want to try new, more cooperative techniques. Aronson et al. develop a simple method for children to live interdependent learning: assembly technique. What they did was propose that to learn Pulitzer's biography, the children would depend on each other, since, divided into groups, each had different fragments of information biographical information. One of the members of the group was charged with teaching the rest of their information and, to top it all off, they were going to be examined. It was a situation of dependence and the children were able to learn to listen to each other and teach each other. In any case, it took several days for them to get used to this technique, and certain problems (Carlos) could arise, but eventually cooperative behaviors were established. Years later the process was repeated, with consistent and sharp results: children with the interdependence of assembly activities appreciate each other more, develop more interest in school and more self-esteem than those of tradition...


Similar Free PDFs