Intergroup relations (Y1)

Stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination

Stereotypes - association of social group with specific characteristics

  • Association of a social group with specific characteristics
  • A schema about a social group
  • Can be negative, positive or mixed
  • Stereotypes are often associated with different emotions and behavioural tendencies
  • Not necessarily based on experience
  • Often formed in childhood
  • Slow to change

Prejudice - unfavourable attitude towards a social group and its members

  • Latin (prae) - pre and judicium (judgement)
  • Unfavourable attitude towards a social group and its members
  • Three component attitude model -
    -> Cognitive - beliefs
    -> Affective - strong feelings (usually negative)
    -> Conative - behavioural intention
  • Different kinds
  • Can be implicit / old-fashioned / modern
  • Implicit bias - bias we are unaware of that impacts our behaviour towards prejudicied out groups; dual process of automatic and controlled

Discrimination - a behavioural expression of prejudice

  • A behavioural expression of prejudice
  • Individual v institutional
  • Subtle forms -
    -> Failure to help
    -> Tokenism
    -> Reverse discrimination

Effects of prejudice

Stigma -

  • Crocker, Major and Steele (1998) - stigmatised individuals possess, or are believed to possess, some attribute or characterise that conveys a social identity tat is devalued in a particular social context
  • Important variables - control and variability
  • Self-esteem, self worth and wellbeing
    -> stigmatised groups are devalued by society
    -> They find the difficult to avoid society's negative evaluation of them
    -> Evaluations may be internalised, damaging self worth, self esteem and wellbeing

Stereotype threat -

  • Stigmatised groups are aware of negative stereotypes (even if they personally do not believe in them)
  • Stereotype threat - the fear that you’ll confirm a negative stereotype about a group that you belong to (Steele and Aronson, 1995)
  • When faced with stereotype threat, often people get so nervous that they perform worse, confirming the stereotype
  • Causes - anxiety, distraction, reduced effort
  • Less than human -
    -> Severe prejudices reduce the target to less than human - dogs, pigs, rats, parasites or insects - barbarians who lack culture, self-restraint, moral sensibility and cognitive capacity (Jahoda, 1999)
    -> Immigration
    -> Genocides - killing of indigenous populations by colonisers, Armenian, Greek and Assyrian Genocide, Holocaust, Rwanadan Genocide, Bosnian Genocide, Rohingya Genocide, Uyghur Genocide, Darfur Genocide

Dehumanisation - two forms -

  • Animalistic (human uniqueness) v mechanistic (human nature)
  • In postmodern society, humans can be reduced to machines (Haslam, 2006)
    -> Cold, robotic, passive and lacking in depth
    -> Lacking in emotionality, warmth, cognitive openness, individual agency

How media influences prejudice online -

  • Newspapers - terror being associated with being a Muslim more than Neo-Nazi's or White Supremacists
  • The media does not associate white supremacists who do terror attacks against a minority as terrorism
  • When two races have committed the same crimes, the media shows them differently - white people in a suit / school uniform, professional picture, whereas black people are given a mug shot, non-professional picture, messy hair and beaten / bruised

Explanations for prejudice

History -

  • 1920-1950 - prejudice as psychopathology,
  • 1950-1990 - normal processes fuel prejudice - contemporary forms developed because of social norms
  • Mid 1990-present - prejudice is multidimensional, new methods to compare implicit and explicit, new conceptual perspectives

Social norms and internalisation - Crandall, Eshleman and O'Brien, 2002 -

  • The more appropriate it is to have prejudice, the higher the level of reported prejudice
  • If social norms support an opinion, they internalise the prejudice that is normal so as not to be ousted by equally as it is seen as a normal opinion

Theories of prejudice -

  • Frustration-aggression (scapegoating)
  • Authoritarian personality - Adorno et al, 1950
  • Social cognitive explanations - schemas
  • Realistic conflict theory - expected conflict leads to stereotyping

Right wing authoritarianism -

  • People high in RWA have been found to be prejudiced against African-Americans (Altemeyer, 1998), Native Americans (Altemeyer, 1998), Women (Duncan, Peterson and Winter, 1997), lesbians and gay men (Whitley and Lee, 2000), disabled people (Noonan, Barry and Davis, 1970) and people with AIDS (Peterson, Doty and Winter, 1993)
  • Authoritarians protect their value system by degrading outgroups
  • High authoritarians see themselves as more moral, and therefore they feel justified in looking down on anyone defined by authority figures as less moral
  • Consistently been associated with prejudice, discrimination and hostility against outgroup members

Social dominance theory - Sidanius and Pratto, 1999 -

  • Society contains ideologies that either promote or attenuate intergroup hierarchies
  • Individual differences in the extent to which these competing ideologies are accepted
  • SDO correlates positively with non-egalitarian political and social attitudes - including sexism, racism, chauvinism, patriotism and nationalism
  • Men have stronger SDO than women, and tend to show greater intergroup bias than women (Sidanius et al, 2000)

Social identity theory -

  • Minimal group paradigm - Tajfel and Turner, 1979 -
    -> Tajfel et al, 1971 - mere categorisation - assignment to random groups lead to intergroup favouritism and outgroup derogation
    -> Behaviour cannot be explained in terms of relative deprivation, frustration or competition for limited resources (e.g. Realistic conflict theory, Sherif 1966)
  • Interpersonal-intergroup continuum - interaction ranges on spectrum from purely interpersonal (individuals) to purely intergroup (group)
  • Categorisation changes how people see each other, making an us and a them salient - people enhance similarities within the group and differences between groups
  • Group identification - degree to which people see themselves in terms of group membership, and the value and emotional attachment to the group

Minimal group studies - Tajfel et al, 1971 - people are strongly biased in favour of their own group, even when randomly allocated to that group

  • Self-enhancement - prejudice is an attempt to enhance one's self-esteem by making the group they identify with more attractive (i.e. intergroup favouritism, intergroup differentiation
  • Uncertainty reduction - in times of uncertainty, we strive to identify with highly entative (coherent) groups, which may also be normatively homogenous and prejudiced

Targets of prejudice

Racism / ethnic-based prejudice -

  • Minority groups - a group of people distinguished by differences that make them set apart and or subordinated - most often negatively stigmatised, ostracised, oppressed and outcast (Blanz et al, 1995) and are a counternormative group (Moscovici, 1976 and 1994)
  • Classification of minorities is complex - more about power than numbers
  • Context is important - anti-immigration post Brexit for example has increased in the UK, but same migrant groups do not face this discrimination in the US
  • Race - ascribing social meaning to groups based on physical characteristics
  • Ethnicity - socially constructed categories based on cultural traits that a society deems important, and it is the culture of a group of people, including customs, language, religion and heritage
  • Racism - prejudice and discrimination against people based on their ethnicity / race - it is taught
  • Blatant racism - derogatory stereotypes, abuse, persecution, assault and discrimination
  • McConahay (1978, 1986) - modern racism - how prejudices have changed post-civil rights movement
    -> Modern racists start from the presumption that discrimination is a thing of the past - because of this, they conclude that minorities push too hard, these tactics and demands are unfair and recent gains made are undeserved
  • Symbolic racism - when individuals express negative attitudes towards racial or ethnic groups in ways that are socially acceptable, yet still reflect underlying prejudice (Sears and Henry, 2000)
    -> Racism still exists, however, expressed in more subtle ways due to social norms
    -> Private and public displays differ
    -> individual differences are important
    -> Emotions - hostility and dislike

Aversive racism - a form of implicit bias, where individuals who may hold egalitarian values still exhibit negative attitudes, or behaviours towards certain groups in ambigious situations (Gaertner and Dovidio, 1986) - ambivalent racism

  • Conflict between positive and negative
  • Some individuals have internalised non-prejudiced / egalitarian values (beliefs), however, still have unconscious negative feelings
  • Situational norms / justifications influential to whether or not discrimination occurs
  • Emotions - fear, discomfort, guilt and unease
  • Sexism
    • Classism
    • LGBTQIA+ Discrimination
    • Religious discrimination
    • Migrants and refugees
    • Neurodivergent discrimination
    • Disabled individuals
    • Weight discrimination

Ageism - prejudice and discrimination based on age -

  • Generation X (1961-1980) - sceptical, self-reliant risk takers, who balance work and personal life
  • Millenial (1981-1996) - hopeful, value meaningful life, diversity and change, technologically savvy
  • Often socially overlooked and a lack of research reflects this problem (Nelson, 2005)
  • Implicit association - young and good, old and bad
  • Institutionalized
  • Sources -
    -> Fear of death - terror management theory
    -> Benevolent ageism - incompetent and warmth stereotypes
    -> Unique category - ageing is inevitable, and stereotypes may be different from personal experiences

Microaggressions - subtle verbal, behavioural or environmental slights that communicate intentional or unintentional hostility towards stigmatised groups (Sue et al, 2007)

  • They are common, sometimes ambiguous (Williams, 2020)
  • Not often intended to cause harm (Mekawi and Todd, 2021)
  • Myth of meritocracy - belief that success and merit and effort and that we all have the same opportunities, but in reality due to social factors it is not meritocratic

Intersectionality - Crenshaw, 1989 -

  • our identities are complex and we often belong to multiple social groups
  • How do these multiple identities intersect and create unique effects and experiences of discrimination

Ways to reduce prejudice

The contact hypothesis - Allport, 1954

Intergroup contact can improve intergroup relations in contexts of:

  • Equal status within the situation (not coming into the situation)
  • Common goals (active goal-oriented effort)
  • Intergroup cooperation - must be an interdependent effort without intergroup competition
  • Institutional support - authorities, laws, norms or customs

Tropp and Pettigrew (2006) - metanalysis of 515 studies from 1949-2000 - 713 independent samples:

  • Intergroup contact typically reduces intergroup prejudice
  • Optimal conditions Allport suggested achieved a higher mean effect size
  • Allport's conditions are however not essential for intergroup contact to achieve positive outcomes

Types of contact -

  • Direct contact
  • Indirect contact -
    -> Extended contact - Wright, Aron, McLaughlin-Volpe and Ropp 1997
    -> Imagined contact - Turner, Crisp and Lambert, 2007

Other methods -

  • common ingroup identify
  • propaganda
  • social norms
  • media
  • prevalence
  • targeting / priming specific emotions

Intergroup behaviour

SIT approach founded on an attempt to explain intergroup conflict and social change

  • Status - consensual evaluation of the prestige of a group and its members as a whole
    -> Permeability - how easy it is to join or leave a group
    -> Legitimacy - how justified are status differences
    -> Stability / security - how strong / stable are status differences
  • Social mobility belief system - belief that intergroup boundaries are permeable, and it is possible for someone to pass from lower-status to a higher-status group to improve social identity
  • Social change belief system - belief intergroup boundaries are impermeable, and lower-status groups can only improve social identity by challenging the legitimacy of a higher-status group

Social mobility (belief system) -> individual mobility to improve social identity -> exit and passing - assimilation into high-status group


Social change (belief system) -> no cognitive alternatives -> social creativity for social identity leads to either -
-> New dimensions of intergroup comparison
-> Redefining value of existing dimensions
-> Comparison with different outgroups


Social change -> cognitive alternatives -> social competition to improve social identity -> civil rights activity, political lobbying, terrorism, revolution and war etc