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

Just-world thinking also leads people to justify their culture’s familiar social systems
(Jost & others, 2009; Kay & others, 2009). The way things are, we’re inclined to
think, is the way things ought to be. Such natural conservatism makes it difficult to
pass new social policies, such as voting rights laws or tax or health care reform. But
after a new policy is in place, our “system justification” works to sustain it. Thus,
Canadians mostly approve of their government policies, such as national health
care, strict gun control, and no capital punishment, whereas Americans likewise
mostly support differing policies to which they are accustomed.
SUMMING UP:
• Recent research shows how the stereotyping
that underlies prejudice is a by-product of our
thinking—our ways of simplifying the world. Clustering
people into categories exaggerates the uniformity
within a group and the differences between
groups.
• A distinctive individual, such as a lone minority
person, has a compelling quality that makes us
aware of differences that would otherwise go unnoticed.
The occurrence of two distinctive events (for
Prejudice Chapter 9 343
What Are the Cognitive Sources of Prejudice?
WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES
OF PREJUDICE?
Identify and understand the consequences of prejudice.
How can stereotypes create their own reality? How can prejudice undermine people’s
performance? Prejudice has consequences as well as causes.
Self-Perpetuating Prejudgments
Prejudice involves preconceived judgments. Prejudgments are inevitable: None of
us is a dispassionate bookkeeper of social happenings, tallying evidence for and
against our biases.
Prejudgments guide our attention and our memories. People who accept gender stereotypes
often misrecall their own school grades in stereotype-consistent ways. For
example, women often recall receiving worse math grades and better arts grades
than were actually the case (Chatard & others, 2007).
Moreover, after we judge an item as belonging to a category such as a particular
race or sex, our memory for it later shifts toward the features we associate
with that category. Johanne Huart and his colleagues (2005) demonstrated this by
showing Belgian university students a face that was a blend of 70 percent of the
features of a typical male and 30 percent female (or vice versa). Later, those shown
the 70 percent male face recalled seeing a male (as you might expect), but also
misrecalled the face as being even more prototypically male (as, say, the 80 percent
male face shown in Figure 9.9 ).
Prejudgments are self-perpetuating. Whenever a member of a group behaves as
expected, we duly note the fact; our prior belief is confirmed. When a member of
a group behaves inconsistently with our expectation, we may interpret or explain
away the behavior as due to special circumstances (Crocker & others, 1983). The
example, a minority person committing an unusual
crime) helps create an illusory correlation between
people and behavior. Attributing others’ behavior
to their dispositions can lead to the group-serving
bias: assigning outgroup members’ negative behavior
to their natural character while explaining away
their positive behaviors.
• Blaming the victim results from the common presumption
that because this is a just world, people
get what they deserve.