PERCEIVING GROUPS

PERCEIVING GROUPS
• Introduction
• Stereotypes
• Prejudice
• Gender Stereotypes
• Racism
• Perceiving Discrimination
• Stereotype and Academic Achievement
• Perceiving groups is another way to understand people’s behavior in addition to perceiving self and others.
• Perceiving groups deals with how people think, feel and behave toward members of social groups.
• Group is defined as two or more people perceived as having at least one of the following characteristics:
Direct interactions with each other over a period of time
Joint membership in a social category based on gender, race or other attributes.
Shared, common fate, identity, or set of goals.

Three Key Concepts
• Stereotypes – A belief that associates a group of people with certain traits.
• Prejudice – Negative feelings toward persons based on their membership in certain groups.
• Discrimination – Any behavior directed against persons because of their membership in a particular group.

Three Reactions
There are two paths to discrimination: one based on stereotypes, the other on prejudice. These variables are interrelated.
Discriminatory practices may support stereotypes and prejudice;
Stereotypes may cause people to become prejudiced; and
Prejudiced people may use stereotypes to justify their feelings.


Stereotypes
How Stereotypes are formed?
• Historical perspective: Stereotypes spring from past events.

• Political perspective: Stereotypes are viewed as a means by which groups in power come to rationalize war, religious intolerance, and economic oppression.

• Sociocultural perspective: It has been argued that real differences between social groups contribute to perceived differences.

• Social psychologists question – Regardless of how stereotypes are born within a culture, how do they grow and operate in the minds of individuals?
• It involves two processes: These reflect basic cognitive processes; they are in part, by-products of how human think and process information about their world.

Social Categorization: is the classification of persons into groups on the basis of common attributes – gender, race, culture, religion etc
Advantages & Disadvantages

Ingroups versus Outgroups: Groups with which an individual feels/does not feel a sense of membership, belonging and identity and groups. “We” as contrast to “they/others”/”Us” and “them”. Outgroup Homogeneity effect.
Advantages & Disadvantages

Sociocultural and Motivational Factors
• These are situational factors, such as the cultural context in which people live and the motivations that people have in particular settings.

• There are numerous ways in which people can divide others into social categories.

• But- “Why are some categorizations – such as race, gender, and sexual preferences – more likely to dominate our perceptions than others?”

• Eg. Black male firefighter-we are quick to categorize that person as black than as male or firefighter.

Cognitive Factor
• Cognitive explanation to that is – if the perceivers have recently been thinking about one of the categories, that category becomes more likely to dominate perceptions, than the other alternatives.

Sociocultural Factors
• These include how different groups are portrayed by-
-media: portray people differently as a function of race.
-parents: warn children about playing with children of other races. (Through the process of enculturation)
-peers: influence individual’s racial prejudices dramatically.
-schools: may favor one race over the another while admitting students in the school.
-other social contacts: membership to social organizations/ religious groups/political parties
-community members: through the process of socialization.

Cultural Variations
• Within different cultures, variations exist as to how they make ingroup-outgroup distinctions.
• For example, cultures which value group harmony are more likely to perceive ingroup homogeneity than people from individualistic cultures, which value the distinctiveness of the individual.

Motivational Factors
• Motivational factors influence people’s perceptions of individuals belonging to different races, gender, social strata, occupations, age etc.
• According to the social situations or circumstances, a person will categorize an individual based on how motivated he/she is toward a particular category.

• For example, you would tend to view an individual in the work place on the basis of professional qualifications and not gender or race.

• You may be motivated to like and respect a particular individual because of the purpose he/she serves to you.

• People in relatively powerful positions in society may be motivated to categorize others in ways that help them maintain the status quo and justify their feelings of superiority

How Stereotypes Distort Perceptions of Others?
How Stereotypes Distort Perceptions of Others?
• Two ways in which perceptions of individuals are distorted: Confirmation Biases and Contrast Effects.

Confirmation Biases: It involves people’s tendencies to interpret, seek, and create information that seems to confirm their expectations.

Example-Basketball player: White or Black: what abilities they exhibited? Playing athletically versus playing intelligently.
What about Indian versus Chinese?
• In addition to interpreting information in a biased manner, perceivers often seek information about stereotyped others in a way that prevents them from disconfirming the stereotype.

• Stereotypes affect not only our perceptions and interpretations but also our memories. That is, we tend to remember stereotype-consistent information about others better than stereotype-inconsistent information.

How Stereotypes Survive?
• Stereotypes offer us quick and convenient summaries of social groups.
• Researchers have identified several mechanisms to answer the question:
Illusory Correlations
Attributions
Subtyping
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Illusory Correlations
• It is an overestimate of the association between variables that are only slightly or not at all correlated.
• People tend to overestimate the association between variables that are distinct – variables that capture attention simply because they are novel or deviant. Example – Minority group behavior versus majority group behavior.
• Secondly, people tend to overestimate the association between variables that they already expect to go together. For example-paired words.
• Stereotypes can lead people to expect social groups and traits to fit together and to overestimate the frequency with which they are associated.

Attributions
• People maintain their stereotypes through the attributions that they make about other people and their behaviors.
• Perceivers attribute other people’s behaviors to personal factors and situational factors.
• One important attributional bias is the fundamental attribution error – the tendency to focus on the role of personal causes and underestimate the impact of situations on other people’s behaviors.
• This bias perpetuate stereotypes.
• Discrimination can impair the performance of stereotyped individuals. Because of fundamental attribution error, perceivers fail to take this effect into account when judging such individuals.
• Fundamental attribution error represents a way in which perceivers fail to take into account situational influences.

Subtyping Subtyping
• Why people hold negative views about a social group even when they like individual members of that group?

• According to Gordon Allport, “There is a common mental device that permits people to hold prejudgments even in the face of contradictory evidence”.

• It is a device of admitting exceptions. That is, by excluding a few favored cases, the negative rubric is kept intact for all other cases.

• For example – creating a subtype in female gender-career women.
• Thus to change negative stereotype about particular group, it is better to expose people to many examples from that group. Examples from tribal communities.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
• Self-fulfilling prophecies occurs when a perceiver’s false expectations about a person cause the person to behave in ways that confirm those expectations.
• Stereotypes can trigger such behavioral confirmation.
• Examples-

Is Stereotyping Inevitable?
• Stereotypes are defined as beliefs that associate a group of people with certain traits.
• But more powerful is that they can bias our perceptions and responses even if we don’t personally agree with these beliefs.
• Just being aware of stereotypes in one’s culture is enough to cause the effects.
• Stereotypes are activated with our awareness.

Three viewpoints on Stereotype Activation
People have become highly aware of stereotypes through sociocultural mechanisms-parents, media, community, etc. Because of this high awareness, people automatically activate stereotypes whenever they are exposed to members of groups for which popular stereotypes exist.

Stereotype activation can be triggered implicitly and automatically, influencing subsequent thoughts, feelings and behaviors even among perceivers who are relatively low in prejudice.

Even people who are not particularly prone to believing in stereotypes may become more likely to activate them if they have a particular goal in a specific situation. For example-when their self-esteem is threatened, people may become motivated to stereotype others so that they may feel better about themselves

How to Prevent Stereotype Activation?
• Take the perspective of a member of a stereotyped group.

• Be motivated to exercise fairness and egalitarianism toward other groups.

• Be motivated to like a member of a stereotyped group.



Comment
• Prejudice is aroused by perceived threats to an important ingroup.
• Social identity theory proposes that self-esteem is influenced by the fate of social group with which we identify.
• Why do gender stereotype endure?
• Institutional and cultural factors fuel racism.


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