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

336 Part Three Social Relations
Distinctive people, such as Houston Rockets 7’6” former player Yao
Ming, draw attention.
book over a tennis book. A person who has both a pet
snake and a pet dog is seen more as a snake owner than a
dog owner.
People also take note of those who violate expectations
(Bettencourt & others, 1997). “Like a flower blooming
in winter, intellect is more readily noticed where it is not
expected,” reflected Stephen Carter (1993, p. 54) on his own
experience as an African American intellectual. Such perceived
distinctiveness makes it easier for highly capable job
applicants from low-status groups to get noticed, although
they also must work harder to prove that their abilities are
genuine (Biernat & Kobrynowicz, 1997).
Ellen Langer and Lois Imber (1980) cleverly demonstrated
the attention paid to distinctive people. They asked
Harvard students to watch a video of a man reading. The
students paid closer attention when they were led to think
he was out of the ordinary—a cancer patient, a homosexual,
or a millionaire. They noticed characteristics that other viewers
ignored, and their evaluation of him was more extreme.
Those who thought the man was a cancer patient noticed
distinctive facial characteristics and bodily movements and
thus perceived him to be much more “different from most
people” than did the other viewers. The extra attention we
pay to distinctive people creates an illusion that they differ
from others more than they really do. If people thought you
had the IQ of a genius, they would probably notice things
about you that otherwise would pass unnoticed.
DISTINCTIVENESS FEEDS SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS When surrounded by
Whites, Blacks sometimes detect people reacting to their distinctiveness. Many
report being stared or glared at, being subject to insensitive comments, and receiving
bad service (Swim & others, 1998). Sometimes, however, we misperceive others
as reacting to our distinctiveness. Researchers Robert Kleck and Angelo Strenta
(1980) discovered this when they led Dartmouth College women to feel disfigured.
The women thought the purpose of the experiment was to assess how someone
would react to a facial scar created with theatrical makeup; the scar was on the right
cheek, running from the ear to the mouth. Actually, the purpose was to see how
the women themselves, when made to feel deviant, would perceive others’ behavior
toward them. After applying the makeup, the experimenter gave each woman
a small hand mirror so she could see the authentic-looking scar. When she put
the mirror down, he then applied some “moisturizer” to “keep the makeup from
cracking.” What the “moisturizer” really did was remove the scar.
The scene that followed was poignant. A young woman, feeling terribly selfconscious
about her supposedly disfigured face, talked with another woman who
saw no such disfigurement and knew nothing of what had gone on before. If you
have ever felt similarly self-conscious—perhaps about a physical handicap, acne,
even just a bad hair day—then perhaps you can sympathize with the self-conscious
woman. Compared with women who were led to believe their conversational partners
merely thought they had an allergy, the “disfigured” women became acutely
sensitive to how their partners were looking at them. They rated their partners as
more tense, distant, and patronizing. Observers who later analyzed videotapes of
how the partners treated “disfigured” persons could find no such differences in
treatment. Self-conscious about being different, the “disfigured” women had misinterpreted
mannerisms and comments they would otherwise not have noticed.
Self-conscious interactions between a majority and a minority person can therefore
feel tense even when both are well intentioned (Devine & others, 1996). Tom,