Chapter 5
Stereotypes & Prejudice
Stereotypes & Prejudice
In the ABC framework, stereotypes are the cognitive part and prejudice is the affective part. This is the behavioral part: unfair treatment based on group membership.
What is discrimination?
Impact matters more than intent. The outcome is the same whether it is deliberate or not.
A distracted shopper buys a brand because an attractive celebrity endorses it, without scrutinizing the claims. Name this route to persuasion.
What is the peripheral route?
Used when people are unmotivated or unable. Attractiveness, expertise, and consensus do the work.
In Sherif’s autokinetic task, people followed others because they assumed the group knew what was correct. Name this type of influence.
What is informational social influence?
It produces private acceptance. Asch’s line task is normative influence, with public conformity 37% of the time.
Ringelmann found that individual output declines on pooled tasks as the group gets bigger. Name this effect.
What is social loafing?
Less likely when the task is meaningful, efforts are identifiable, and the group is small and cohesive.
Final Jeopardy Rules
Groups are given only the category before they must lock in their wager.
Groups will have time to discuss and write out their final answer. They may not change their wager.
Category: Group Behavior across Chapters! Your answer must span at least two chapters.
Lock in your bets!
The tendency to see “they’re all alike” while seeing members of our own group as diverse individuals
What is the outgroup homogeneity effect?
Ingroup members are seen as individuals. Outgroup members get lumped together.
This test infers attitudes people may not know they have by measuring how quickly they pair concepts.
What is the Implicit Association Test (IAT)?
Other measures: self-report, the bogus pipeline, and covert measures.
In Milgram’s baseline study, about this percentage of participants delivered the maximum shock when prodded by an authority.
What is 65%?
Without commands from the experimenter, fewer than 3% went all the way.
Xiomara’s weekly paddleboarding club is larger and more structured than a family, and less emotionally close. Name this type of group.
What is a social group?
Primary groups are small and intimate. Collectives are large and short-lived, like a one-day festival crowd.
An employee privately doubts a failing project, but the leader speaks first, nobody objects, and she stays quiet.
Name two concepts from different chapters that help explain her silence.
What are normative social influence (Ch 7), self-censorship in groupthink (Ch 8), and subjective norms (Ch 6)?
Fear of disapproval, a directive leader, and beliefs about what others expect can override private attitudes.
Unlike most stereotypes, gender stereotypes have this quality: they describe what men and women should be like, not just what they are like.
What is prescriptive?
They are descriptive and prescriptive, so people who violate them can be criticized.
LaPiere (1934) found that restaurants served a Chinese couple, yet most later said they would not. Name what this suggests and one flaw in the study.
What is a weak attitude-behavior link?
The survey respondent may not have been the staff member who served them.
Attitudes better predict intentions than behavior.
A nonprofit asks for $100, hears “no,” then says, “Even $10 would help.” Name this tactic and one reason it works.
What is door-in-the-face (perceptual contrast or reciprocal concessions)?
Cialdini (1975): 50% agreed after refusing the large request, versus 17% in the control group.
Zajonc said the presence of others raises arousal, which strengthens this response, helping on easy tasks and hurting on hard ones.
What is the dominant response?
This is the explanation for social facilitation.
A student worries about confirming a negative stereotype about her group and struggles on a hard test, even though she rejects the stereotype. Name this phenomenon.
What is stereotype threat?
Anxiety and distraction hurt performance. Growth framing and positive role models reduce it.
Alex values exercise but rarely goes to the gym. The theory of planned behavior names two factors, besides attitude, that shape intentions. Name them.
What are subjective norms and perceived behavioral control?
Norms: what others think we should do.
Control: whether we believe we can do it.
A gym advertises $30 per month, you agree, and then it reveals a $50 initiation fee. You sign anyway. Name this tactic.
What is low-balling?
Commitment keeps people from backing out. Foot-in-the-door escalates the request; low-balling worsens the deal.
A cohesive, isolated leadership team under pressure to launch dismissed engineers’ O-ring concerns before the Challenger disaster. Name this flawed decision style.
What is groupthink?
Remedies: outside consultation, a devil’s advocate, separate subgroups, and second-chance meetings.
After mere contact failed, Sherif ended the hostility between the Rattlers and the Eagles with shared problems, like restoring the water supply, that required cooperation. Name this type of goal.
What are superordinate goals?
Realistic conflict theory: competition for scarce resources breeds hostility between groups.
People who endured a severe initiation to join a boring group liked it more than people with a mild initiation (Aronson & Mills). Name this way of reducing dissonance.
What is effort justification?
We alter our attitudes to justify our suffering. Related: insufficient justification and insufficient deterrence.
According to social impact theory, three factors determine how likely influence is to change behavior. Name them.
What are the strength of the source, immediacy, and the number (and unanimity) of sources?
Think of light bulbs: strength, distance, and number all shape how much light reaches a surface.
Groups are about half as productive as individuals at brainstorming. (Name two reasons.)
What are production blocking, social loafing, performance matching, or evaluation apprehension? (any two)
Osborn’s rules (no criticism, more ideas) do not prevent process loss.