This is a comprehensive summary of all the relevant chapters of the book "Psychology of Prejudice and Discrimination" by Kite and Whitley Jr. (3rd edition). It is written in English and contains all important text from the chapters, presented in a neat and organized manner.
1. Why do we categorize our world?
2. What are the basic social categories we see when we look around ourselves?
3. What are the most recent issues relevant for relationships when we consider different groups
interacting with one another in society?
4. Everyone has experiences of using a stereotype to judge another person. Can you think of an example
as early as possible in your life when you relied on a stereotype to evaluate a person?
5. Have you ever been a target of prejudice? When and by whom? Which other groups in society are
targets of prejudice?
CHAPTER 1
RACE AND CULTURE
Race, gender, and age are primary categories for organizing information about other people. These
characteristics are likely to be the first pieces of information people notice about others. People do this
automatically and often subsequently make (stereotypic) assumptions on the basis of that quick reading.
People can think past those initial stereotypic judgements (see Chapters 3 and 4), but unfortunately, this
doesn’t always happen.
Morning (2011) defines race as “a system for classifying human beings that is grounded in the belief that they
embody inherited and fixed biological characteristics that identify them as members of racial groups”. People
use visible cues such as skin colour and facial features to categorize themselves and others into groups. It is
important to bear in mind that race is a social category, not a biological one.
Cultural beliefs can have an influence on perceptions of and actions toward social groups. Culture is difficult to
define, but in this book, the following definition is followed: culture is “a unique meaning and information
system, shared by a group and transmitted across generations, that allows the group to meet basic needs of
survival, pursue happiness and well-being, and derive meaning from life” (Matsumoto & Juang, 2013).
• Culture influences stereotyping and prejudice because members of a culture hold sets of beliefs in
common, including beliefs about behaviours, values, attitudes, and opinions.
• People operate within their cultural context, but they are often unaware of it. As people grow up in a
culture, they tend to be unaware of its influence on them until something happens that draws some
aspect of their own culture to their attention. However, during times of profound social change,
cultural influences on attitudes and beliefs come into focus.
Group privilege is an unearned favoured state conferred simply because of one’s race, gender, social class, or
sexual orientation. Advantages are granted to people simply because they belong to a particular group. These
advantages are typically invisible to the people who hold them. They are unearned; they are not based on
ability, effort, or past success, but rather are granted solely because one is a member of the privileged group.
At first glance, these advantages may seem small and unimportant. However, these seemingly minor
advantages accumulate and their overall impact can be quite significant. They can impact the individual’s sense
of self.
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,Intergroup Relations 2022/2023
Group privilege makes it easy for Whites to see racism as a problem that belongs to people of colour, or for
men to see sexism as a “woman’s problem”. In essence, the attitude develops that prejudice and discrimination
are someone else’s concern, so members of the privileged groups do not have to do anything about them. This
perspective ignores a critical piece of the prejudice puzzle: Privilege for one group entails loss for other groups.
People are more willing to consider their privileged status if they are reminded that theirs is not the only group
that enjoys unearned advantages. The way in which people think about inequality also influences how they
respond to it. When Whites see racism as a disadvantage for Blacks (as opposed to an advantage for Whites),
they fail to see it as self-relevant and so do not feel guilty. However, when Whites are encouraged to think
about how the group’s advantages perpetuate inequality, they feel collective guilt but, in turn, also report less
racist beliefs.
STEREOTYPES, PREJUDICE, AND DISCRIMINATION
Allport (1954) argued that an adequate definition of prejudice must include two essential elements:
• There must be an attitude of favour or disfavour;
• There must be an overgeneralized, inaccurate belief.
Contemporary psychologists take a more fine-grained approach, separating beliefs, or stereotypes, from the
evaluation component of those beliefs and from the behaviour toward members of the groups about which
beliefs they are held. (Prejudice will be discussed shortly.)
Stereotypes are beliefs and opinions about the characteristics, attributes, and behaviours of members of
various groups. There are several key aspects of stereotypes:
• Stereotypes come from shared beliefs that are an integral part of culture. They may be redefined by
each individual, but there is typically group consensus about the content of those beliefs. People learn
stereotypes from the media, peers, parents, and even sources such as classic and modern literature.
And people gather information about groups simply by observing the world around them.
• Stereotypes can be (somewhat) accurate since they are based to some extent on observations made
about the social world. These accuracies often become exaggerated, though, so very often they are
mainly inaccurate. A stereotype may be accurate for a group taken as a whole, but inaccurate for at
least some members of that group.
• Stereotypes can be both descriptive (describing the characteristics group members are believed to
have) and prescriptive (describing what people believe group members should be like and should do).
The more prescriptive elements a stereotype has, the more they put limits on members of the
stereotyped group.
• Beliefs about social group members can also be positive. These positive beliefs are formed and
maintained by the same psychological processes as negative beliefs and, as such, are subject to the
same biases (see Chapter 3).
o Positive stereotypes can have subtle and unintended costs: they prescribe how targets should
behave and create ‘ought expectancies’ that are inherently evaluative. For example, when a
girl hears comments like “Wow! How did you become so good at math?”, she also receives
the message that it is unusual for girls to excel in that area, and as a result, she may be
discouraged from pursuing careers that emphasize mathematical ability.
o Negative stereotypes tend to be descriptive rather than prescriptive.
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, Intergroup Relations 2022/2023
Prejudice is an attitude directed toward people because they are members of a specific social group. Attitudes
are considered to be evaluations or emotional responses to an entire social group or individuals who are
members of that group.
Evaluations of social group members are more strongly related to how a person treats those group members
than are the beliefs, or stereotypes, the person holds about them. These evaluations may stem from a purely
emotional or gut reaction to a social group as a whole or to an individual member of that group. These
reactions are often automatic, and they can be positive or negative or a mixture of both.
Emotional reactions to social groups can originate from several sources:
• When people perceive that another social group threatens their own group, they may experience fear,
anxiety, or hostility.
• Other groups can be threatening if they are perceived to interfere with the goals of one’s own group,
or simply by having different goals from one’s own social group.
• As will be discussed in Chapter 6, some individuals are chronically intolerant of other groups,
especially those condemned by authority figures or those perceived to violate traditional values. For
these individuals, negative emotional reactions stem from their personality traits rather than
situational factors.
• People’s affective reactions may depend on the contexts in which they deal with members of
stereotyped groups (e.g. reactions to the assertiveness of a woman in a domestic role versus in a
business setting).
Discrimination consists of treating people differently from others based primarily on membership in a social
group. Although people tend to think of discrimination in negative terms, it can also result in someone being
treated more positively than they otherwise would be based on group membership.
Discrimination can manifest itself in many ways, both verbally and behaviourally, and in many settings. It can
also take place in person or in cyberspace. Discrimination occurs at different social levels, from the individual to
the cultural.
There are 4 types of discrimination:
1. Interpersonal discrimination: when one person treats another unfairly because of the person’s group
membership. This unfair treatment occurs at the individual level and may result from stereotypic
beliefs, evaluations of a group, or a combination of both.
o Passive interpersonal discrimination: not doing something (e.g. a White person not sitting
next to a Black person on public transportation).
o Active interpersonal discrimination: doing something (e.g. hostile stares, demeaning
remarks, hate crimes).
2. Organizational discrimination: when the practices, rules, and policies of formal organizations have
discriminatory outcomes. It often manifests itself in the area of racial/ethnic and gender
discrimination that still exists in the workplace.
3. Institutional discrimination: when norms, policies, and practices associated with a social institution
(such as the family, religious institutions, the educational system, and the criminal justice system)
result in different outcomes for members of different groups. It often results from decisions that are
neutral in regard to race, gender, and sexual orientation, but end up having a disparate (Dutch:
‘ongelijksoortig’) impact on members of a group.
4. Cultural discrimination: discrimination and inequality built into our literature, art, music, language,
morals, customs, beliefs, and ideology, to such a degree that they define a generally agreed-upon way
of life.
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