Understand here: Differences between stereotypes, prejudices

• Stereotype: Stereotypes  are representations or a theory which are used to organize, interpret and recall information about a person and his or her group. Stereotype is considered as the mental processing of our knowledge Simply said, our minds are trained to make less efforts and so categorizing people in accordance to their group membership helps people to put less effort into understanding others and gives us a sense that we are able to predict other’s behaviour and therefore their group membership.

• Prejudice: If stereotype is the thinking component of processing then prejudice is our feeling part of processing. Prejudice , traditionally reflects a negative response or feeling towards the other person only because the person belongs to a certain group.

• Discrimination: When the prejudice is no longer just a feeling but comes out in the form of negative actions because the person is of a certain ethnic, racial or gender group, it is known as discrimination. Extreme forms of discriminations include hate crimes such as genocide, murder, rapes, mass killings and subtle form of discrimination include calling derogatory or offensive names, racial jokes, blatant insults in front of peers, denial of jobs, homes or promotions.

If used my example to simplify the terms, here is how the three terms can be understood

1. Wearing glasses and less talkative= People wearing glasses are socially awkward : Stereotype

2. Wearing glasses, less talkative, less liked=People with glasses are not to be mingled with, they are no fun so stay away: Prejudice

3. Wearing glasses so socially awkward: Bullying and Harassment : Discrimination

Our behaviour during stereotyping, prejudices and discriminating

Stereotyping someone: Stereotypes provide us with information about the typical traits possessed by people belonging to these groups and, once activated, these traits seem to come automatically in mind (Bodenhausen and Hugenberg,2009). It is seen that information relevant to an activated stereotype is often processed more quickly and remembered better  (Dovidio, Evans and Tyler, 1986 ; Macrae, Bodenhausen  , Milne and Ford 1997). Similarly we tend to pay attention to those information which confirm our stereotype for the person. For example, we collect and remember instances when a ‘socially-awkward’ person fumbled in front of people to confirm that such people are scared to speak in a crowd.

Another interesting phenomenon seen is putting a person who does not fit in the stereotype assumed about the group, we do not alter our stereotype but instead place the person in a special category or are a subtype of the group (Queller and Smith 2002; Richards and Hewstone 2001). Subtyping is done so that the stereotype of the group is protected as whole. Example: Stereotype- Good-looking people are not intelligent. Subtype: The person is an exception if he is good-looking as well as intelligent but overall the stereotype prevails.

Prejudices towards someone: Since prejudice is the feeling component about a certain group, we need to understand that there are not only negative feelings about a group but a range of emotions about various groups we come across which include emotions such as fear, disgust, pity, anger, envy or guilt (Glick, 2002 ; Mackie and Smith , 2002). Examples could be our primary emotional response towards LGBT community is disgust while our primary emotional response towards a group of good looking people is envy ,fear and anger.

Tracing back the roots of prejudices:

• Threats to self-esteem: People want to see their own group positively (Tajfel and Turner, 1986), which means they need to compete with other groups to look better than them.. When our group’s positive perception is threatened by any activity, we retaliate by derogating the threat’s source, more often than not the other group in competition. Several studies, using reminders of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as the threatening event, have found increases in identification with the nation and the representatives of it such as former President George W. Bush (Landau et al. 2004)  

• Competition for Resources: The best things we want in our lives are not abundant-good jobs, seats in prestigious education institutes, good-looking partners, nice homes. Quite commonly, this results in a feeling that if one group gets the good things , the other group remains deprived- which is technically termed as zero-sum outcomes.

This leads to competition in groups with each member of the group looking at the other members of the group negatively, also known as realistic conflict theory ( Bobo, 1983).

• The feeling of Us vs. Them: (Tajfel, 1982) argued that a history of conflict, personal animosity , individual self-interest or competition are not necessary to create group behaviour. In a task where participants were divided on trivial basis , with one group viewing paintings by artist Klee and other by Kandinsky and participants were to allocate points or money to other two participants. It was found that participants favoured their own group member more than the other group member (Tajfel, Billig, Bundy & Flament, 1971). Tajfel also gave social identity theory which suggests that individuals seek to feel positive about their group and derive some of their self-esteem from their group membership. 

Discrimination: Some fascinating concepts 

• Bona Fide Pipeline: In an experiment, people are shown adjectives and briefly shown faces of people belonging to various races and they have to quickly push buttons whether the adjectives are ; ‘good’ or ‘bad’ meaning. (Banaji and Hardin, 1996 ; Twoles-Schwen and Fazio 2001). This experiment is shown to quickly expose the implicit racial attitude of the person in the experiment.

• Moral Disengagement: It is a belief that sanctioning is not needed once the harm to be done is legitimized (Bandura, 1999). In other words, it becomes ‘okay’ to harm someone or a group to protect our interest such as ignoring the bullying by the police officers in correctional facilities so that prisoners ‘ toughen up’ . 

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The post ends here. In the next post related to this topic, I will elaborate on kinds of stereotypes, positive prejudices and methods to end the prejudice and its related maladies.