Explanations of Prejudice

e I'm Dr Keon west of The Institute of psychological Sciences at the University of Leeds I'm going to talk today about explanations of prejudice to talk about

explanations of prejudice I first have to talk a bit about what Prejudice is after that I'll talk about realistic conflict theory mostly to get it out of the way because I don't think that's what we're talking about when we talk

about Prejudice at least not in the Layman sense then I'll talk about four different theories psychological theories of why people are prejudiced that have nothing to do with realistic

conflict so to begin what is Prejudice it seems like a very simple concept but Prejudice is actually a bit hairy to Define everyone agrees that prejudice involves differential group treatment

work by other psychologists proposes that prejudice should be unfair as opposed to Fair although work by Chris kandle helps us understand that maybe fair and unfair are again Concepts that we're mixing up with the idea of what is

Prejudice and what isn't it's very complicated so I won't go into it too much but for now we'll accept that it's in some way unfair or unreasonable not just based on actual things that are going on and this will become important

a bit later on my other slide and finally psychologists like Beverly Daniel Tatum say that it's not just unfair but it has to do with power relationships so if you don't like a group of people but they have all the

power over you that's still not Prejudice because no one cares what you think only if someone cares what you think does it actually count as Prejudice you don't have to agree with all of this but try to understand it as a framework for what I'll be talking

about later when we talk about why we have prejudices so the first thing I'll talk about just to get it out of the way is realistic conflict and this is exactly what it

sounds like conflict between groups for resources that they really need resources however don't need to be concrete resources they can be abstract

resources so you can have competition over who gets to be the more popular group or who gets to be the ones in charge they don't have to be physical things like food and in fact some people argue that these resources can be real

or imagined so it doesn't matter if there isn't any actual competition over actual food if people think there's competition over food that's enough to count it as realistic

conflict to represent that in a picture you'll see that I have on one side blue circles and on the other side green circles and in the middle a pairing there are the tasty little resources

food or money or whatever it is that they want to have but there's not enough for both there's only enough for one group or the other group so that might make one group respond by attacking the

other group or demonstrating Intergroup bias doing unpleasant things to the other group so that the resources are then left for them and suddenly there's enough for everybody that's realistic conflict but it's not what we're going

to talk about what we'll be talking about is psychological reasons for prejudice even when there isn't any realistic conflict or at least that's not dependent on realistic conflict the

first psychological theory I'll talk about will be Terror management Theory Terror management theory is a bit of a funny name but it basically means that we are prejudiced in order to escape

mortality what does that mean well Terror management takes into account the fact that people have a need for self-preservation but this need for self-preservation is frustrated by our

knowledge of our own impending death this frightens us to cope with this people can adopt a worldview that offers them either a symbolic or a literal form

of immortality what does that mean a symbolic form of immortality means you attach yourself to something bigger than yourself so you could say I might be shortlived but this thing that I'm

attached to is bigger than I am and it's Immortal so if you're a soldier and you're fighting for England you might say I would die in this war but there would be some corner of the world that would be forever England as said in a

famous poem in that way you become immortal through your belonging to a group there are other worldviews that offer you literal immortality at least that's what they claim to offer you so

if you're a Buddhist for example your body might die but your soul is Immortal and you will be reincarnated over and over again and in that way you never truly die and many other religions have

after lives or other ways of coping with the human mortality where does a Prejudice come in Prejudice comes in through groups that seem to undermine the group that you

belong to or the worldview that you hold this doesn't have to be deliberate but if any group poses an alternate worldview or an alternate cultural frame then this gives you some psychological

discomfort so if you are proud of England but you're afraid that France is going to slowly deride England until it no longer exists you might not like the French or

if you're a Buddhist and you bump into a group of Christians who say reincarnation isn't real but there's this other afterlife that you won't have access to this might make you uncomfortable to represent that as a picture you'll then see these blue

circles on one side and the green circles on the other side and in creeps the scary figure of death who makes them feel really afraid at this point they treat the other group badly to get rid

of them or to at least treat them as though their worldview isn't legitimate and by doing that they make themselves feel better is there evidence to support Terror management Theory well yes there is some the evidence shows that if you

make people more aware of their own mortality or if you make death more Salient people respond with more Prejudice towards out groups that's fine but other people criticize Terror management Theory saying that it's hard

to distinguish between threats to mortality and just threats and if you threaten people they're going to be less Pleasant to other people and this has been a problem for Terror management Theory I won't go into it in depth but

I've attached some paper as a talk about whether or not this works the second psychological theory I'll talk about is subjective uncertainty reduction theory and this is basically using Prejudice to escape

uncertainty this Theory says that human beings have a need to feel certain about things or at least they like to avoid feeling uncertain about things particularly important things to get

around this uncertainty we we attach ourselves to groups and these groups give us clear behavioral prescriptions so that we know what to do and we know how to handle life that works well but

the Prejudice comes in when other groups have other behavioral Norms or other prescriptions and they challenge what we feel is our certainty about the prescriptions that we have to represent

that as a picture it's almost exactly the same as teram management Theory except instead of death creeping in it's a big question mark uncertainty about life or the future or what we're

supposed to do or what our purpose is and we only get that certainty from our group but then the other group challenges it so they have to be gotten rid of once the other group is gone or

at least properly denigrated to a point where we no longer feel challenged by them then we feel a bit better about ourselves and these questions disappear is there evidence for subjective uncertainty reduction theory yes there

is research has shown that manipulating levels of certainty through practice trials for example if you have to do a particular activity actually reduces or increases the amount

of Intergroup bias that you demonstrate that works well but then it has kind of the same problem as teror management theory in that some people who criticize these manipulations say that they're

probably manipulating more than just certainty they're manipulating all kinds of feelings and that these feelings including self-esteem feelings which becomes really important a bit later maybe what's actually causing the effect

again I won't go into detail but I have attached a paper that you can read if you'd like to follow up on this more the third theory is more popular than either of the first two and this is social

dominance Theory social dominance theory states something else that human beings have a need for social dominance but this itself is broken up into two ideas one is a need for hierarchy which means

that you need to have groups ordered in terms of someone on the top someone on the bottom so you need men on the top or women on the bottom or women on the top men on the bottom you don't care but you have to have some kind of hierarchy the

second part of social dominance is a need for your group to be on the top so specifically within this hierarchy you want your group to be higher up than other groups and this need for hierarchy

and for dominance is what drives Prejudice if I were to represent that as a picture you'll see the blue and the greens together underneath this red line

they are of equal status but you see the social dominants desire flashing within the blue dots and this makes them want to congregate upwards so that they're now above the Green Dots there's now a

hierarchy and they are now on top that's how social dominance Theory works is there evidence for social dominance theory yes there is people have found that social dominance orientation which

is measured and only marginally correlates with other things like authoritarianism it predicts many kinds of prejudice like sexism racism chauvinism patriotism if you understand

that as a Prejudice and so there is some real reason to believe that social dominance orientation will predict Prejudice Behavior the problems with social dominance orientation however come a bit earlier

they come in the theoretical construct of social dominance orientation while it's easy to understand that people are afraid of death or that people would like to avoid uncertainty it's a bit

less clear that everyone has this Universal need for some dominance or some hierarchy and then to be on top there are other problems at Social dominance orientation as well the problems come in when you measure the

social dominance orientation of low status groups with High status groups it works perfectly well the more social dominance orientation they have the more they want to support these hierarchies the more they want to support Prejudice

that kind of makes sense but why would a low status group have high social dominance orientation and what do you expect when that happens this is when the studies get a bit odd with low

status groups if they support more social dominance orientation then they actually have less ingroup favoritism which is weird that's not supposed to happen and this is explained in one of

many many ways such as they're trying to fight against the system to gain higher status but it does put a really big hole in what social dominance orientation is supposed to represent these have been

handled with various responses but this is a basic idea of what the criticisms are of social dominance orientation the last psychological theory I'm going to talk about is social identity Theory and

I've left this one to the last place for a reason because social identity theory is the largest the most popular and the most widely supported of psychological theories so what does social identity

Theory say it says that we have social identities as well as personal identities you may think of yourself as an individual you may give yourself a name you have a birthplace you have an idea of yourself but you also have an

identity that's rooted in the groups you belong to you may think of yourself as a student of a particular school or of a member of a particular group or of a citizen of a particular country and that

this gives you esteem just like your self-identity gives you esteem this also means that you don't like your social identity to be threatened you would like your social group to be on top and you'd

like to think favorably of your social group and just as in interpersonal things if your social identity feels threatened or if you feel like you're feeling a bit low in your social

identity then you try to bolster that and it's bolstering it that drives that prejudice it's trying to make your group feel a bit better than other groups or seem like a nicer group or a more

popular group or more powerful group than other groups the other thing that social identity theory predicts is that if anyone one challenges your particular social status then you're supposed to

respond with prejudice so it works both ways you use Prejudice to build up your self-esteem and if anyone challenges your self-esteem they get Prejudice in return what would that look like as a

picture now you see the blue dots and the green dots congregated together but they're still individuals social identity theory states that they think of themselves as a group so now you see the blues encased in a circle of blue

and the greens encased in a circle of green and they think blue is good it's good to be blue green is bad or at least not as good as blue because we are not green and it's better for us to be

better than for them to be better if any challenges come up so if the greens begin to suggest that they are better than or equal to the blues then the blues respond with prejudice that either destroys the greens or at least puts

them in a position where it's clear to the blues again that it's better to be a blue than a green as I said before social identity theory is the most widely used and most popular in

supported of the psychological theories that explain Prejudice so there's actually an incredible amount of evidence for it and this includes extensive narrative reviews and metaanalyses which is where you take

several studies and you pile them on top of each other and you analyze the data at once and you see what the data says and these reviews and meta analyses show that yes social identity theory is

widely supported in particular they support the first premise which is that acting in a prejudiced way or displaying Intergroup bias in increases your social identity self-esteem it makes you feel

better about yourself through making you feel better about your group social identity Theory runs into a little bit of a problem with the second premise it's that people have a harder time finding evidence that if you make people

feel bad they respond with prejudice it's not that no Studies have ever done it it's just a lot less well supported than the other one this might be because of the way people have constructed their studies however and it might be because

of the way people are testing it they're not actually testing it very well for a good review of that again I've attached a paper for you to look at that's a general idea of what social identity theory is and how it explains Prejudice

none of these theories are supposed to operate entirely by themselves and they all learn from each other and bounce off each other and grow on each other and to get a good understanding of why people behave in prejudiced ways even when

there's nothing really to gain from doing that at least nothing physical then you should look at all of them and you should try to understand all of them but for now that's a good overview of the current psychological theories on

why we're prejudiced and with that I'm Dr Keon west of The Institute of psychological Sciences at the University of Leeds talking about explanations for prejudice thanks very much