Chapter 9: Prejudice: Disliking Others (2947.0K) - Bad Request

a need to be liked and accepted. Thus, people become more likely to favor (or
oppose) discrimination after hearing someone else do so, and they are less supportive
of women after hearing sexist humor (Ford & others, 2008; Zitek &
Hebl, 2007).
During the 1950s, Thomas Pettigrew (1958) studied Whites in South Africa and
the American South. His discovery: Those who conformed most to other social
norms were also most prejudiced; those who were less conforming mirrored less of
the surrounding prejudice.
The price of nonconformity was painfully clear to the ministers of Little Rock,
Arkansas, where the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation decision was
implemented. Most ministers privately favored integration but feared that advocating
it openly would decrease membership and financial contributions (Campbell &
Pettigrew, 1959). Or consider the Indiana steelworkers and West Virginia coal miners
of the same era. In the mills and the mines, the workers accepted integration. In
the neighborhoods, the norm was rigid segregation (Minard, 1952; Reitzes, 1953).
Prejudice was clearly not a manifestation of “sick” personalities but simply of the
social norms.
Conformity also maintains gender prejudice. “If we have come to think that
the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman,” wrote George
Bernard Shaw in an 1891 essay, “we have done so exactly as English children come
to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot—because they have never
seen one anywhere else.” Children who have seen women elsewhere—children of
employed women—have expressed less stereotyped views of men and women
(Hoffman, 1977). Women students exposed to female science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics (STEM) experts likewise express more positive implicit
attitudes toward STEM studies and display more effort on STEM tests (Stout &
others, 2011).
In all this, there is a message of hope. If prejudice is not deeply ingrained in personality,
then as fashions change and new norms evolve, prejudice can diminish.
And so it has.
Institutional Supports
Social institutions (schools, government, media) may bolster prejudice through
overt policies such as segregation, or by passively reinforcing the status quo. Until
the 1970s many banks routinely denied mortgages to unmarried women and to
minority applicants, with the result that most homeowners were White married
couples. Similarly, political leaders may both reflect and reinforce prevailing
attitudes.
Schools are one of the institutions most prone to reinforce dominant cultural attitudes.
An analysis of stories in 134 children’s readers written before 1970 found that
male characters outnumbered female characters three to one (Women on Words
and Images, 1972). Who was portrayed as showing initiative, bravery, and competence?
Note the answer in this excerpt from the classic Dick and Jane children’s
reader: Jane, sprawled out on the sidewalk, her roller skates beside her, listens as
Mark explains to his mother:
“She cannot skate,” said Mark.
“I can help her.
“I want to help her.
“Look at her, Mother.
“Just look at her.
“She’s just like a girl.
“She gives up.”
Institutional supports for prejudice, like that reader, are often unintended and
unnoticed. Not until the 1970s, when changing ideas about males and females
Prejudice Chapter 9 323