by Sandi Mann
‘The killing of Americans and their civilian and military allies is a religious duty for each and every Muslim… We – with God’s help – call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God’s order to kill Americans and plunder their money whenever and wherever they find it.’
Osama Bin Laden, in a videotaped statement in the autumn of 2001
Stereotypes can thus lead to distortions of reality since they can cause people to exaggerate or even create differences among groups, and they also lead to a tendency to see groups of people as being overly homogenous instead of made up of individuals.
Unfortunately, stereotypes are often quite stable attributions that can be resistant to change. This is because of confirmatory bias: when we encounter someone who conforms to our stereotype, we use that as confirmation of our beliefs – and when we encounter members of the group who do not conform to our stereotypes, we simply discount those as ‘atypical’. We also selectively recall instances that confirm our stereotypes and forget about disconfirming instances.
Spotlight: Stereotype
The term ‘stereotype’ derives from the Greek words stereos (‘firm, solid’) and typos (‘impression’, hence ‘solid impression’).
The term was first adopted in 1798 to describe a printing plate that duplicated any typography. The duplicate printing plate, or the stereotype, is used for printing instead of the original.
Outside printing, the first reference to ‘stereotype’ was in 1850, as a noun that meant ‘image perpetuated without change’. However, it was not until 1922 that ‘stereotype’ was first used in the modern psychological sense by the American journalist Walter Lippmann in his work Public Opinion.
Holding stereotypes, which may result from prejudice, can lead to discrimination. Stereotypes are regarded as the cognitive component and often occurs without conscious awareness, whereas prejudice is the affective component of stereotyping; people are prejudiced when they react in an emotional way to seeing or hearing a group that they hold stereotypes about. Discrimination is the behavioural component of prejudicial reactions and is where we treat people differently simply because they are a member of a particular group. Prejudice, stereotyping and discrimination do often coexist, but it is also possible to have one without the others. For example, an ethnic group might be stereotyped with a neutral or positive attribute such as ‘family-oriented’ and thus might not invoke prejudice and discrimination. Similarly, a generalized prejudice against ‘foreigners’ may not include specific stereotypes or acts of discrimination.
Spotlight: The origins of research into prejudice
According to John Duckitt (1992), psychological research on prejudice first emerged in the 1920s and was based upon American and European race theories that attempted to prove white superiority.
Case study: Blue eyes / brown eyes
On 4 April 1968 the American teacher Jane Elliott (born 1933) learned of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination. This led to a discussion the following day with her class about racism. However, she felt that she was not really getting through to the eight-year-old students, who were, like her, born and raised in the small town of Riceville, Iowa and were not normally exposed to black people. She felt that simply talking about racism would not allow her all-white class to fully comprehend racism’s meaning and effects.
She then devised an exercise, based on eye colour rather than skin colour, to allow the children to feel what it would be like to be treated the way a person of colour is treated in America. She designated the blue-eyed children in the class as the superior group and gave them extra privileges, such as extra helpings at lunch, access to the new playground equipment, and extra playtime at break. The blue-eyed children sat in the front of the classroom, whereas the brown-eyed children were sent to sit at the back. The blue-eyed children were encouraged to play only with other blue-eyed children and to ignore those with brown eyes. Elliott also forbade the brown-eyed and blue-eyed children from drinking from the same water fountain.
At first, the children in the minority group were resistant to the idea that blue-eyed children were better than brown-eyed children. So, Elliott lied to the children by explaining that melanin is responsible for making children blue-eyed and that this was also linked to their higher intelligence and learning ability.
The effect of her intervention was stark. Those who were deemed ‘superior’ became arrogant, bossy and rather nasty to their ‘inferior’ classmates. Their grades were better, and they even completed mathematical and reading tasks that had seemed outside their ability before. The ‘inferior’ classmates also changed – they became more and subservient and did less well in tests.
As news of the exercise spread, Jane began to appear on television shows and started to repeat the exercise in professional training days for adults. In 1971 the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) aired a documentary about her called The Eye of the Storm and made her even more nationally known. Subsequently, William Peters wrote two books – A Class Divided and A Class Divided: Then and Now –about her and the exercise.
A Class Divided was turned into a PBS Frontline documentary in 1985 and included a reunion of the schoolchildren featured in The Eye of the Storm, for which Elliott received The Hillman Prize. A televised edition of the exercise was shown in the United Kingdom on 29 October 2009 on Channel 4 and entitled The Event: How Racist Are You?
Attributional bias
One possible cause of prejudice and stereotyping could be attributional bias, a process that forms many of our perceptions about other people as well as events. People make attributions in order to understand their own experiences and these attributions strongly influence the way we interact with others. We are constantly making attributions, or guesses, regarding the cause of our own and others’ behaviours but these attributions do not always accurately reflect reality. For example, if we perform poorly in a test, we might blame ourselves for not having studied the material well enough, or our teacher for not having taught it well enough. When our friend does well in the same test, we might attribute their superior performance to luck – completely ignoring the fact that they may have worked hard or be very bright.
Attributional bias, then, is a cognitive bias that refers to the systematic errors made when people evaluate or try to find reasons for their own and others’ behaviours; humans are prone to perceptual errors that lead to biased interpretations of their social world.
Research on attribution biases is founded in Attribution Theory, which was proposed to explain why and how we create meaning about others’ and our own behaviour. Attribution Theory focuses on identifying how someone uses information from their social environment in order to create a causal explanation for what has occurred and why. Attribution Theory also provides explanations for why different people can interpret the same event in different ways and what factors contribute to attribution biases.
Attribution Theory proposes that the attributions people make about events and behaviour can be classed as either internal or external. In internal attribution, people infer that a person’s behaviour is due to personal factors such as traits, abilities or feelings. In an external, or situational, attribution, people infer that a person’s behaviour is due to situational factors.
Attributional biases then are the systematic biases people can hold which can lead them to make incorrect guesses about why someone may have acted the way they did. These biases include the fundamental attribution error and the self-serving bias:
• The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to attribute other people’s behaviour to internal factors such as personality traits, abilities and feelings – while ignoring possible external causes. This can lead to blaming of the victim so that, should something bad happen, we look for reasons they may have been responsible – and thus why such a calamity would not happen to us, which can be a self-protecting mechanism. Thus, for example, when we learn that someone has been the victim of a crime, we seek to reas
sure ourselves that we won’t become a victim by blaming them for what they were wearing, the route they took or how ostentatious they were with their possessions.
• The self-serving bias is the tendency to attribute successes to internal factors and failures to situational factors. This allows us to protect our self-esteem. For example, if I do well in a test, it is due to my working hard, but if I do badly, it is because the teacher didn’t teach me well enough. Depressed people may have the reverse bias: they attribute positive events to chance or external help, and negative events to their own character.
Attitudes and attitude change
Our attributional biases contribute to how we understand the social world and our place in it and may lead to prejudice, which is clearly a biased way of thinking. Psychologists have long been interested in how such views of others or of the world, or attitudes, can be changed.
‘[An attitude is] a relatively enduring organization of beliefs, feelings, and behavioral tendencies towards socially significant objects, groups, events or symbols.’
Michael Hogg and Graham Vaughan, Social Psychology (Eaglewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 2005), p. 150
Attitudes are thought to be made up of three components:
• Affective component: this involves a person’s feelings/emotions about the attitude object (e.g. ‘I dislike foreigners’). The affective components are assessed by monitoring physiological signs such as heart rate.
• Behavioural component: the way the attitude we have influences how we act or behave (e.g. ‘I will not employ a foreigner’). Behaviour may be assessed by direct observation.
• Cognitive component: this involves a person’s belief/knowledge about an attitude object (e.g. ‘Foreigners are not trustworthy’). The cognitive aspects of attitude are generally measured by surveys, interviews and other reporting methods.
These three elements do not always concur – it is possible to feel one way about something but act in another. Expressed attitudes do not always reflect behaviour, perhaps because of competing attitudes or because of a need to suppress true views. After all, plenty of people support a particular candidate or political party and yet fail vote for them.
Sometimes, when behaviour does not match attitudes, people may actually change their attitudes to fit with their behaviour. In 1957 the American psychologist Leon Festinger (1919–89) identified the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, in which a person experiences psychological discomfort due to holding beliefs or attitudes that conflict with behaviour; in order to reduce this tension, they may change their attitudes. For example, a heavy smoker holds two conflicting cognitions – that smoking is unhealthy yet they smoke. To reconcile these two conflicting views, they might convince themselves that smoking is not so bad, or that they smoke less harmful brands.
Attitudes can serve various functions for the individual. Daniel Katz (1960) outlined four main functions:
• Knowledge: we all have a need for a world that is consistent and relatively stable so that we can predict, to some extent, what is likely to happen; this gives us some semblance of control. Thus, having an attitude about someone or a group of people gives us knowledge about them that might help us predict how they will behave in a given situation.
• Ego-defensive: the attitudes we express help communicate who we are and may enhance our own self-esteem. This is because our attitudes are shaped by our feelings, beliefs and values.
• Adaptive/adjustment: attitudes can help us fit in and adapt to our social world. We seek out those who share our attitudes and may develop attitudes that are similar to those held by people we like and admire. When we express attitudes that others share, they are likely to reward us with approval and acceptance. We are thus pushed towards holding attitudes that reward us and avoiding those that punish us.
• Utilitarian: people adopt attitudes that are rewarding and that help them avoid punishment. In other words, any attitude that is adopted in a person’s own self-interest is considered to serve a utilitarian function; for example, you may have a particular attitude towards higher taxes because you know your family would be affected.
Attitudes are formed in different ways. Children acquire many of their attitudes by modelling their parents’ attitudes or via classical or operant conditioning (see Chapter 5). Attitudes are also formed through direct experience and are influenced by social norms. Attitudes are not always stable and can be changed; psychologists are particularly interested in how to change attitudes, especially when such attitudes might be harmful or based on prejudice.
Researchers have identified a number of dimensions of an attitude that can effect how stable and resistant to change attitudes are. For example, strong attitudes that are firmly held and that highly influence behaviour are harder to change. Attitudes that are important to a person or in which we have a vested interest tend to be strong. We tend to have stronger, and thus more stable attitudes about things, events, ideas or people we have considerable knowledge and information about. In addition, attitudes that are highly accessible – that is, come to mind more easily – tend to be stronger and more resistant to change.
Attitudes can, of course, be changed, even when they are stable. The Elaboration Likelihood Theory of Attitude Change developed by Richard E. Petty and John Cacioppo in the mid-1970s describes how attitudes form and change. The model explains different ways of processing stimuli, why they are used, and their outcomes on attitude change. The ELM proposes two major routes to persuasion that can lead to changes in attitude or beliefs: the central route and the peripheral route.
When the central route is utilized, persuasion is most likely to occur through careful and thoughtful weighing up of the merits of the information in the persuasive message. Any resulting attitude change will be relatively long lasting, resistant to further attempts to change, and predictive of behaviour in relation to that attitude. The central route is used when the message recipient is motivated to change or to listen to the message and they are able to think about the message and its topic.
Under the peripheral route, however, persuasion results from a person’s association with positive or negative cues in the stimulus or how it makes them feel, rather than deep processing. Thus, factors such as the credibility or attractiveness of the sources of the message, or the quality of the message, can have greater influence than the actual quality of the arguments (as in the central route). The peripheral route is used when the receiver of the message has little or no interest in the subject and/or has less ability to process the message. Advertisers use the ELM to influence people into buying their products either with persuasive arguments or with peripheral factors (such as celebrity endorsements).
Group polarization
Attitudes are an important influence on many processes, one of which is decision-making. And, if attitudes are shaped by other people, then the decision-making process is also greatly influenced by the presence or otherwise of others. Researchers have long been fascinated by the impact that being with other people can have on the quality of decision-making. Until the 1960s it was generally thought that a group opinion corresponded roughly to the average of the opinions of its constituent members. This view was influenced by the research on conformity that suggested that group members were likely to converge on some normative position when asked to make a collective judgement.
However, in 1961 the psychologist James Stoner changed all that. He asked individuals to make some judgements about a number of hypothetical social dilemmas. Each dilemma involved someone having to make the choice between two courses of action, one of which (with the more desirable outcome) involved a higher degree of risk than the other. The individuals were then put into groups and asked to reach a unanimous decision on each of the dilemmas they had considered individually. The group decisions were nearly always riskier on average than the average of the individual group-member pre-discussion decisions (Stoner 1968).
In many studies that followed, it became clear that the so-called ‘sh
ift to risk’ was actually a ‘shift to extremity’. Groups can actually also make more cautious or conservative choices than individuals. Therefore it became better known as a polarization phenomenon. Where pre-discussion decisions are to the left of the notional midpoint of the scale, groups shifted further to the left; where the individuals were initially cautious, the groups shifted even further in that direction.
There are three main explanations for group polarization:
FESTINGER’S SOCIAL COMPARISON THEORY (1954)
Associated with any issue on which a group must make a decision are likely to be a number of social values (e.g. caring for others, being adventurous, not taking risks with one’s health). Taken together, these values will result in an initial social preference towards one decision outcome rather then another. Each person, prior to group discussion, will probably perceive him/herself as being somewhat further towards this socially desirable outcome than their peers. Once the group discussion gets under way – thereby heightening the importance of the relevant social values – some of these individuals realize that there are others who endorse positions further towards the socially valued pole than they do. The outcome of this social comparison is that they will then shift further in that direction in order to present themselves in an even more socially desirable light. The net result is that the collective decision is more extreme than the average of the individual positions.