What Is Prejudice? Positive Stereotypes. Negative Stereotypes. Hate Speech: form of expression intended to attack or incite hatred of a class of persons. Hate Crime: criminal offense motivated by a bias. Hate Group: organization that attacks or condemns a class of people. What Are the Health Effects of Prejudice? Face reality head-on. Denial can be powerful. Name and acknowledge your experiences, whether it is to a family member, friend, or counselor.
Make meaning out of experiences. How can we learn from these experiences? How can they inform us? Control what you can. You may not be able to change other people, but what do you have control over?
How can you structure your interactions? What are some healthy outlets you can use? Exercise agency whenever possible. Listen and Validate. Intervene in the Moment. Please stop.
Leave them alone. You should walk away. Excuse me, will you show me where the bathroom is? Did you see the game today? Come join us! Try saying: That woman looks uncomfortable. Do you know him? I think he needs some help. Will you help me? Are you okay? I saw what happened back there. Can I help you out of this situation? Do you know her? I heard what she said to you and wanted to check in. Be an Ally, Advocate, and Activist. Number of Hate Crimes by Motivation. Next Step. What are some examples of social groups that you belong to that contribute to your identity?
Social groups can include gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, social class, religion, sexual orientation, profession, and many more. And, as is true for social roles, you can simultaneously be a member of more than one social group. An example of prejudice is having a negative attitude toward people who are not born in the United States.
Although people holding this prejudiced attitude do not know all people who were not born in the United States, they dislike them due to their status as foreigners. Can you think of a prejudiced attitude you have held toward a group of people? How did your prejudice develop? Prejudice often begins in the form of a stereotype —that is, a negative belief about individuals based solely on their membership in a group, regardless of their individual characteristics.
Stereotypes become overgeneralized and applied to all members of a group. We cannot possibly know each individual person of advanced age to know that all older adults are slow and incompetent.
Therefore, this negative belief is overgeneralized to all members of the group, even though many of the individual group members may in fact be spry and intelligent. Another example of a well-known stereotype involves beliefs about racial differences among athletes. As Hodge, Burden, Robinson, and Bennett point out, Black male athletes are often believed to be more athletic, yet less intelligent, than their White male counterparts.
These beliefs persist despite a number of high profile examples to the contrary. Sadly, such beliefs often influence how these athletes are treated by others and how they view themselves and their own capabilities. Whether or not you agree with a stereotype, stereotypes are generally well-known within in a given culture Devine, Sometimes people will act on their prejudiced attitudes toward a group of people, and this behavior is known as discrimination.
As a result of holding negative beliefs stereotypes and negative attitudes prejudice about a particular group, people often treat the target of prejudice poorly, such as excluding older adults from their circle of friends. Have you ever been the target of discrimination? If so, how did this negative treatment make you feel? However, it is important to also point out that people can hold positive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors toward individuals based on group membership; for example, they would show preferential treatment for people who are like themselves—that is, who share the same gender, race, or favorite sports team.
This video demonstrates the concepts of prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination. In the video, a social experiment is conducted in a park where three people try to steal a bike out in the open. The race and gender of the thief is varied: a White male teenager, a Black male teenager, and a White female.
Does anyone try to stop them? The treatment of the teenagers in the video demonstrates the concept of racism. Why are these aspects of an unfamiliar person so important? Although these secondary characteristics are important in forming a first impression of a stranger, the social categories of race, gender, and age provide a wealth of information about an individual. This information, however, often is based on stereotypes.
We may have different expectations of strangers depending on their race, gender, and age. What stereotypes and prejudices do you hold about people who are from a race, gender, and age group different from your own? What are some stereotypes of various racial or ethnic groups? Racism exists for many racial and ethnic groups. Mexican Americans and other Latino groups also are targets of racism from the police and other members of the community.
For example, when purchasing items with a personal check, Latino shoppers are more likely than White shoppers to be asked to show formal identification Dovidio et al. In one case of alleged harassment by the police, several East Haven, Connecticut, police officers were arrested on federal charges due to reportedly continued harassment and brutalization of Latinos. Have you witnessed racism toward any of these racial or ethnic groups?
Are you aware of racism in your community? Sexism is prejudice and discrimination toward individuals based on their sex. Typically, sexism takes the form of men holding biases against women, but either sex can show sexism toward their own or their opposite sex.
Like racism, sexism may be subtle and difficult to detect. Common forms of sexism in modern society include gender role expectations, such as expecting women to be the caretakers of the household. For example, women are expected to be friendly, passive, and nurturing, and when women behave in an unfriendly, assertive, or neglectful manner they often are disliked for violating their gender role Rudman, Research by Laurie Rudman finds that when female job applicants self-promote, they are likely to be viewed as competent, but they may be disliked and are less likely to be hired because they violated gender expectations for modesty.
Sexism can exist on a societal level such as in hiring, employment opportunities, and education. Have you ever experienced or witnessed sexism? Why do you think there are differences in the jobs women and men have, such as more women nurses but more male surgeons Betz, ? Women now have many jobs previously closed to them, though they still face challenges in male-dominated occupations. People often form judgments and hold expectations about people based on their age.
These judgments and expectations can lead to ageism , or prejudice and discrimination toward individuals based solely on their age. Bargal noted that there had to be high levels of motivation to take part, emphasising that people have to want to at least be open to challenging their own biases.
Moreover, it was concluded that potential effects in terms of attitude change could have been encumbered by the fact that the intervention was short term. The final real-life case study is an intervention developed and tested as part of a psycho-educational initiative at various universities across the United States.
Souweidane's 'An Initial Test of an Intervention Designed to Help Youth Question Negative Ethnic Stereotypes' was based on perspective-taking principles and the idea of reducing prejudice by challenging stereotypes.
Pre and post-test surveys as well as observations were used to test effectiveness of the intervention. Part of the activities included using media to talk about stereotypes - for example, looking at websites such as 'Facing History and Ourselves' to learn more about the history of anti-Semitism.
The results from the study were encouraging in terms of improving tolerance and positive relations, and improvements in negative stereotypes. The intervention was said to have positive effects on participants' critical thinking which Walsh argued is crucial to reduce prejudice , and this was especially the case for peer educators. Particularly promising was the effectives of peer-based learning, which is supported by social learning theory and action research.
Young people may play an important role in helping their peers confront and address negative ethnic stereotypes. Involving young people as leaders and educators in interventions targeting young people has numerous merits acknowledged in the literature cf.
Stukas et. This theory was supported by the example outlined here:. Research on this topic may be enhanced by adopting empowerment theory practices in the development of an intervention. The significant improvement among the peer educator group supports this approach. This study has demonstrated that empowering youth to take on a leadership role, such as a peer educator, positively affects the youth leader. Future research may want to focus on engaging youth in interventions targeting them so that we gain greater understanding of the youth educator role effect and so that improved outcomes may be achieved" Some limitations included that the intervention was limited to four sessions, and the author suggests that more time for example, a semester-long class would be more likely to affect change Although this report focuses on real-life interventions in order to get a sense of what might be most straightforwardly transferred to other contexts, findings from lab-based studies can also be applied carefully elsewhere.
A particularly useful lab-based intervention to include as a case study is Devine et al 'Long-term reduction in implicit race bias: A prejudice habit-breaking intervention'.
The three month longitudinal study aimed to determine whether interventions can have long-term effects in terms of reducing implicit biases. The intervention took place in the University of Wisconsin, USA , with 91 non-Black participants, and the authors claim that their study "is the first to our knowledge to produce long-term change in implicit bias using a randomized, controlled design" As discussed in section 3 of this report, the existence of implicit biases mean that even people who are consciously non-prejudiced and consider themselves to be supportive of equality can unintentionally act in prejudiced ways towards others.
As Devine et al comment, "this process leads people to be unwittingly complicit in the perpetuation of discrimination" In this study, the authors seek to build on promising but limited results from what they term 'easy-to implement strategies' such as perspective taking and imagining counter-stereotypic examples. They note that reductions in prejudice from such short-term interventions are "likely to be highly contextual and short-lived" Participants were therefore engaged in a long-term process, with intentional efforts to overcome biased responses.
Being confronted with this evidence was thought to increase awareness of bias, and this awareness was developed through the other aspects of the intervention, such as the training section which provided participants with strategies to overcome these in everyday settings for example through perspective taking and stereotype replacement. Importantly, the study noted improvement of attitudes over time, perhaps as people became increasingly self-aware and used the strategies taught to overcome instances of prejudice.
Of course it is important to note the limitations of the study. Participants were all psychology students, common in lab-based studies but controlled for as best as possible.
It is also unclear how easily this type of intervention would be administered in real-life - perhaps in school settings it might be more feasible than other settings. Another key issue is to think about who the interventions are targeting and who they are likely to be missing. Most people do not consider themselves to be prejudiced so whether they would commit to a goal of 'breaking the prejudice habit' is questionable. However, it may be the case that such strategies are still useful in that they address the problem of people wanting to be tolerant and free of prejudice, but still holding implicit bias.
Given that we have already established the difference between many people's intentions regarding equality and their attitudes to the implementation of measures which aim to actually tackle inequality, it is likely that such interventions would address an important discrepancy. In many ways, the interventions discussed in the previous section could be termed 'diversity training' because the objective is to help people value diversity, as opposed to fearing difference - a key cause of prejudice.
This section, however, looks at more short-term and isolated diversity training programmes, rather than focused and longer term interventions targeted at certain populations. These often take place in corporate workplaces, and with adults as opposed to children and adolescents, though some do focus on younger people. This type of training comes in many forms, with some 'instructional' in nature such as showing movies or delivering lectures, and others encouraging interactive activities such as role plays and discussions.
Diversity training may involve group discussions about 'difference', based on the same values which are at the heart of educational initiatives: overcoming ignorance; expressing hidden assumptions; and feeling empathy for other groups or individuals Paluck Diversity training is an industry with huge levels of investment, yet as Abrams comments, there is "almost no adequate evaluative research" Following a discussion of the general theoretical concerns with short-term diversity training, this section will draw on two case studies of applied prejudice-reduction interventions to explore the strengths and weaknesses of this type of approach.
The first empirical example took place in Australian workplaces with adults, and the second in the UK with children and adolescents in school and community settings. A central criticism regarding diversity training programmes is that they are rarely "guided by the theoretical models of learning or prejudice reduction" Paluck and Green Pendry et al further highlight the separation between theory and practice as they comment that despite diversity trainers and social psychologists having similar objectives i.
Moreover, diversity training programmes are often considered to have potential 'backlash' effects, perhaps as a result of the 'blanket' designs often applied, the short-term nature of most of these initiatives, and delivery not always being sensitive to its environment. As discussed in the previous section, discussing group difference can be positive in terms of improving attitudes towards out-groups, however it is important that these discussions are handled carefully.
Paluck suggests that diversity training courses might reinforce stereotypes, and actually 'backfire' by increasing, renewing or even fostering new sensitivities. Plaut et al suggest that majority participants may also in some cases feel excluded, for example if the emphasis is put on the celebration of minority cultures. Yet a 'colour-blind' approach which suggests that everyone is equal is similarly problematic. As Abrams 72 comments, we know that everyone is not equal; there remain huge inequalities in all societies.
Therefore, initiatives that 'pretend' everyone is equal and do not highlight difference and inequality might be seen to lack credibility and sophistication. Pendry et al point out that diversity training "differs from the superordinate concept of diversity management in that it does not necessarily imply any background change in system-level structure, decision making or organization ethos" This is important: an organisation with management dominated by middle-class white men compelling its staff to attend 'diversity training' may appear insincere if a commitment to diversity is not shown in the institution as a whole.
Some general limitations of diversity training courses which are similar to those highlighted in the educational initiatives section are also worth mentioning. Firstly, diversity training programmes are often not evaluated at all, or are evaluated by participants directly after sessions, making it impossible to track any long-term effect on attitudes or behaviours.
It is also important to reiterate the point that real change is only possible if people are motivated to change:. This report so far has emphasised the point that people have to want to overcome prejudice, and that meaningful change will generally only occur over time. It is questionable whether compulsory attendance at a workplace 'diversity' training course, for example, which may be one-day in length, and often shorter, would satisfy this criteria.
One of the few academically-evaluated applied prejudice reduction programmes was published in , the culmination of research in Australian workplaces in the s: 'Stereotype Change and Prejudice Reduction: Short- and Long-term Evaluation of a Cross-cultural Awareness Programme' by Hill and Augoustinos. The Cross-Cultural Awareness programme was an anti-racist educational course used in South Australia in various institutions including some government agencies. Staff attended a three-day training programme on either a compulsory or voluntary basis, depending on the type of role.
The programme's objective was to reduce prejudice towards Aboriginal Australians, a group frequently stereotyped, stigmatised, and discriminated against, and to promote knowledge and appreciation of indigenous culture. It is important to point out the methodological limitations of the study. As well as the small sample 62 participants , there was no control group and the study was non-random due to location workplace.
However, it was evaluated using a social-psychological approach, and given the oft-cited issue of interventions failing to be grounded in theory, it is worthy of consideration. Moreover, it included a 3 month follow-up, addressing another key limitation of such interventions, in that long-term attitude or behaviour change is rarely captured.
The training course involved group discussion, role-play and videos, and was facilitated by Aboriginal employees the target outgroup. Participants were encouraged to reflect on their own beliefs and stereotypes, and to think more broadly about prejudice and discrimination. The results of the intervention were relatively positive. There was a significant improvement in knowledge, and a reduction in negative stereotyping and 'old-fashioned prejudice' p.
However, there were limitations. Firstly, effects seemed to reduce after the 3 month period. This could reflect a deficiency with the intervention, however it is likely to be an indication of the fact that negative stereotyping is a difficult habit to break.
Furthermore, the decrease in 'old-fashioned' racism was not matched by a decline in 'modern' racism - for example, the belief that Aboriginal Australians have too much influence as a result of Government initiatives to promote equality. This chimes with the earlier discussion about the discrepancy between people's broad attitudes to equality and their attitudes towards specific measures to work towards this.
They note that:. Genuine institutional and cultural change is undoubtedly more difficult to achieve, but this evaluated case study stresses the importance of bearing in mind that prejudice is not simply a 'personal pathology', and that interventions should look at the structural arrangements of society as a whole.
This echoes Pendry et al argument that diversity management is crucial. Another relatively rare example of evaluated short-term diversity training initiatives are outlined in a report entitled 'The Search for Tolerance: Challenging and changing racist attitudes and behaviour among young people', produced for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation JRF. These studies reinforce the complexity of the 'contact theory' as it plays out in real-life, in the form of diversity training programmes.
The report is based on five separate case studies of small projects in the United Kingdom. The initiatives focused on tackling racism and improving intergroup relations, and are described below:.
Tower Hamlets Summer University is a voluntary sector, informal education project. The 'Diversity Awareness Programme' for convicted racially motivated offenders is run by probation officers. The Jubilee Football Tournament was run by two housing associations and could be described as a community cohesion project" 1. Six hundred young people, mostly 11 and 12 years old, took part in the five projects in total.
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