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

group memberships can provide useful information with minimal effort (Macrae &
others, 1994). Stereotypes sometimes offer “a beneficial ratio of information gained
to effort expended” (Sherman & others, 1998). Stereotypes represent cognitive efficiency.
They are energy-saving schemes for making speedy judgments and predicting
how others will think and act. Thus, stereotypes and outgroup bias may, as
Carlos David Navarrete and others (2010) have noted, “serve ultimate, evolutionary
functions,” by enabling our ancestors to cope and survive.
SPONTANEOUS CATEGORIZATION
We find it especially easy and efficient to rely on stereotypes when we are
• pressed for time (Kaplan & others, 1993).
• preoccupied (Gilbert & Hixon, 1991).
• tired (Bodenhausen, 1990).
• emotionally aroused (Esses & others, 1993b; Stroessner & Mackie, 1993).
• too young to appreciate diversity (Biernat, 1991).
Ethnicity and sex are powerful ways of categorizing people. Imagine Tom,
a 45-year-old African American real-estate agent in Atlanta. I suspect that your
image of “Black male” predominates over the categories “middle-aged,” “businessperson,”
and “American southerner.”
Experiments expose our spontaneous categorization of people by race. Much
as we organize what is actually a color continuum into what we perceive as distinct
colors, such as red, blue, and green, so our “discontinuous minds” (Dawkins,
1993) cannot resist categorizing people into groups. We label people of widely varying
ancestry as simply “Black” or “White,” as if such categories were black and
white. When individuals view different people making statements, they often forget
who said what but remember the race of the person who made each statement
(Hewstone & others, 1991; Stroessner & others, 1990; Taylor & others, 1978). By
itself, such categorization is not prejudice, but it does provide a foundation for
prejudice.
Indeed, categorization is necessary for prejudice. Those who feel their social
identity keenly will concern themselves with correctly categorizing people as us
or them. Jim Blascovich and his co-researchers (1997) compared racially prejudiced
people (who feel their racial identity keenly) with nonprejudiced people. Both
groups were equally speedy at classifying white, black, and gray ovals. But how
much time did each group take to categorize
people by race? Especially when
shown faces whose race was somewhat
ambiguous ( Figure 9.6 ), prejudiced people
took longer, with more apparent concern
for classifying people as either “us”
(one’s own race) or “them” (another race).
Prejudice requires racial categorization.
PERCEIVED SIMILARITIES
AND DIFFERENCES
Picture the following objects: apples,
chairs, pencils.
There is a strong tendency to see objects
within a group as being more uniform than
they really are. Were your apples all red?
Your chairs all straight-backed? Your pencils
all yellow? Once we classify two days
in the same month, they seem more alike,
temperature-wise, than the same interval
Prejudice Chapter 9 333
FIGURE :: 9.6
Racial Categorization
Quickly: What race is this person?
Less-prejudiced people
respond more quickly, with less
apparent concern with possibly
misclassifying someone (as if
thinking, “who cares?”).