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

correlations in people’s minds (Risen & others, 2007). This enables the mass media
to feed illusory correlations. When a self-described homosexual person murders or
sexually abuses someone, homosexuality is often mentioned. When a heterosexual
does the same, the person’s sexual orientation is seldom mentioned. Likewise,
when ex-mental patients Mark Chapman and John Hinckley, Jr., shot John Lennon
and President Reagan, respectively, the assailants’ mental histories commanded
attention. Assassins and mental hospitalization are both relatively infrequent, making
the combination especially newsworthy. Such reporting adds to the illusion of
a large correlation between (1) violent tendencies and (2) homosexuality or mental
hospitalization.
Unlike the students who judged Groups A and B, we often have preexisting
biases. David Hamilton’s further research with Terrence Rose (1980) revealed that
our preexisting stereotypes can lead us to “see” correlations that aren’t there. The
researchers had University of California at Santa Barbara students read sentences in
which various adjectives described the members of different occupational groups
(“Juan, an accountant, is timid and thoughtful”). In actuality, each occupation was
described equally often by each adjective; accountants, doctors, and salespeople
were equally often timid, wealthy, and talkative. The students, however, thought
they had more often read descriptions of timid accountants, wealthy doctors, and
talkative salespeople. Their stereotyping led them to perceive correlations that
weren’t there, thus helping to perpetuate the stereotypes.
Likewise, guess what happened when Vaughn Becker and his colleagues (2010)
invited university students to view a White and a Black face—one angry, one not—
for one-tenth of a second. Then, as a brief distraction, they added two numbers that
accompanied the faces (as in Figure 9.8 ). The participants’ subsequent recollections
of what they had viewed revealed racial bias. “White anger flowed to neutral Black
faces (34 percent likelihood) more readily than Black anger flowed to neutral White
faces (19 percent likelihood).”
Attribution: Is It a Just World?
In explaining others’ actions, we frequently commit the fundamental attribution
error that was discussed in Chapter 3: We attribute others’ behavior so much to
their inner dispositions that we discount important situational forces. The error
occurs partly because our attention focuses on the person, not on the situation. A
person’s race or sex is vivid and gets attention; the situational forces working upon
that person are usually less visible. Slavery was often overlooked as an explanation
for slave behavior; the behavior was instead attributed to the slaves’ own nature.
Until recently, the same was true of how we explained the perceived differences
between women and men. Because gender-role constraints were hard to see, we
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Prejudice Chapter 9 339
FIGURE :: 9.8
Ingroup biases influence
perceptions. When briefly
shown two faces, one neutral,
one angry, people more often
misrecalled the Black rather than
the White face as angry (Becker
& others, 2010).