 This is lecture 13. In this final lecture of the course, we are going to discuss one of the most harmful and at times infuriating social psychological phenomena, prejudice. We will start in this first part by talking about definition of prejudice and also we talk about how we can measure prejudice in people. So, first of all, the definition of prejudice. Well, prejudice is considered a negative or sometimes even hostile approach, attitudes towards people in a distinguishable group, only based on their group membership. So, you approach, you have an attitude towards people simply because they are part of a certain group and prejudice is often times negative. So, prejudice is an attitude and we extensively talked about attitudes in lecture seven. So, hopefully you still remember what an attitude is. An attitude actually consists of three different components. Cognition, affect and behavior. So, it means that with an attitude, you have a cognitive part and that's basically the knowledge you have about this specific subject. We have an affect, so we have a feeling about it and we also show behavior that is often times either approaching this attitude object or avoiding it. So, what does this look like with prejudice? Well, for prejudice, I think you will see some concepts that you recognize. The cognitive part of prejudice is stereotypes. So, stereotypes basically capture all the knowledge that we have about people from a specific group. Then affect means the emotions that people, members of that certain group evoke and discrimination means the behavior that we show towards members of that group because of their group membership. So, these three components altogether basically are captured on the umbrella term of prejudice. So, let's first of all talk about stereotypes, this cognitive part of prejudice. So, stereotypes are basically generalized ideas that we have about some groups and the members of that group, ideas of what the members of this group are like. And sometimes stereotypes can be very helpful. So, let's consider a moment that you are waiting in a restaurant. You are there with some friends and you are very hungry and you want to order food. Then you use your stereotypes about a waiter to figure out who you should ask for to take your order. So, if a person that looks like this approaches your table, you probably use social categorization in order to place this person into a category. And this category is in this case a waitress and you use this information to ask this person, so can I please order some drinks or order some food? So, this is of course very useful. It's great and actually stereotypes are heuristics and we already talked about heuristics. And heuristics are awesome because there are mental shortcuts that we can use to automatically show certain behavior. So, we use our stereotypical knowledge, we see this person walking by our table and we just say, hey, I want to order some food. And that can be good if this is indeed a waitress. Maybe this isn't a waitress at all and then we make a very poor judgment. And that's also, again, the downside of heuristics and also the down times of stereotypes that sometimes our information is incorrect. And sometimes we place people in a certain category that they don't belong in. Or sometimes the stereotypical information is completely off. It's just not correct and we judge people based on information that is not correct. So, I already mentioned that a lot of these stereotypes are negative. We have often times negative ideas about people, especially members from different groups, groups that we are personally not part of. Sometimes parts of these stereotypes are also positive. So, for example, we talked about the halo effect in lecture four. This stereotypical idea that beautiful people also have other good positive qualities. So, in a way, the halo effect, the idea that beautiful people are good is also a stereotype, but also from certain members of groups. For example, the black stereotype is also associated with being very athletic and very sporty, excelling in sport tasks. And the Asian stereotype is related to being good at math and the female stereotype is related to being very good at domestic tasks and caring and doing the household. These are in itself positive traits, positive qualities, but still they are hurtful. And that is because these positive traits, these positive parts of the stereotype are over generalizations. They basically say that if you're part of this category, if you are Asian, then you're probably very smart. Maybe you're not smart and this is actually very bad for your self-esteem. Or you want to be seen as something else than this smart Asian kid. So, you want to distance yourself from that certain stereotype. It denies individuality and that's basically one of the big problems that we have with stereotyping. Also, we know that if people use these positive stereotypes, so, oh, you're a woman, you're probably an excellent cook. Then they also probably endorse negative stereotypes. So, overall, stereotyping is just bad overall, even if it's positive stereotyping. So, the reason why stereotypes are so problematic is also because they have the tendency to stick. So, in the beginning of this course in lecture three, we talked about the many ways in which we try to reaffirm our preexisting beliefs. And this is called confirmation bias, remember? So, if we have a certain idea about a group of people, for example, then we look for information that proves that we are indeed correct. So, if we have an idea that people from a certain outgroup are lazy, for example, we look for evidence that convinces us that we are indeed correct and we are ignoring evidence that's showing that it's not correct. And these beliefs also linger even if we are corrected and even if people tell us this information is incorrect, we have these processes of belief perseverance or the perseverance effect showing that even if the information is later on turned out to be incorrect, these ideas still linger. So, stereotypes are very, very persistent. And one reason why they are also very persistent is because they often entail a lot of emotions. People feel very strongly about people, members of certain groups, not of all groups, but certain groups evoke very strong emotions. For example, the group over here, especially after 9-11 and a lot of terrorist attacks across the globe by Al Qaeda or ISIS, we saw that there was a lot of stereotyping, a lot of discrimination also against young Islamic males and this group was really high in effect. So a lot of people felt very strongly about young males from Islamic countries. They felt scared, so high in anxiety, but also a lot of times high in anger. And if stereotypes evoke a lot of emotions, we also want to hang on to them. So we feel very reluctant to adjust our beliefs. So if we have a certain idea in our mind, we just stick with it. And of course, maybe the biggest problem with stereotypes is the moment that they turn into behavior. And this happens automatically and often without us even realizing that we're doing it. So the moment that stereotypes leak into our behavior, this is called discrimination. So discrimination is the unjustified negative or harmful action towards members of a group simply because they're part of a group. And for a long time, discrimination was legal. So here you see some examples that there were different parts, for example, of a restaurant or of a bus or of a school reserved for whites where people from other skin colors could not take place and also there were different places to drink water for color people and for white people. And luckily, these forms of open discrimination are no longer legal. And I wish to say that this also meant the end of discrimination as it is, but that is unfortunately not the case. There are still many examples even today of discriminatory behavior towards especially minority groups. And this can take form in many different ways. Sometimes very subtly. For example, we know that people tend to distance themselves from people from minority groups. They might be unwilling to work with this group. They might be unwilling to have them as neighbors. But also, for example, in public transportation. And I'm pretty sure you will also recognize this even maybe yourself. At the moment you enter, for example, a train and you look for a place to sit, we tend to want to sit close to people that are part of the majority group, especially if we are also part of the majority group. And we tend to avoid people from minority groups. So we distance ourselves from this group physically. And this is actually already discrimination because you don't want to sit next to them. It's not, you know, calling them names or prohibiting them from coming close to you. But it's still discrimination. It's still very hurtful. Another example of sort of modern discrimination is microaggression. So here you see some examples of people experiencing microaggression. So you're the whitest black person I know. Probably coming from someone that wants to pay this girl compliments. But it's very harmful and it's very offensive. And oftentimes people don't realize it. So, or people in a homosexual relationship or they are asked, so who is the man and who is the woman in the relationship? So very hurtful comments and oftentimes stemming from ignorance that people don't realize that this is actually very offensive behaviors. And this is something that people have to live with if you're part of a minority group daily. And I think it's very important that we are all, if you're part of the majority group, become aware of these offensive behaviors. On a more serious note even, even though this is already pretty serious, we also know that people from minority groups, especially from certain minority groups, are just in danger of their lives more than others because of discrimination. For example, discrimination from the police force. So here you see these are numbers from the United States. The percentage of people that experience a threat of use or use of force by the police when they were most recently approached by the police. And you see that whites just generally have a lower chance of experiencing threat or violence in a sort of a conversation or an interaction with a police officer. And especially blacks are most likely, especially young black males, to experience violence and sometimes even life-threatening situations or lethal situations when they are approached by the cops. And this might give you an idea that maybe the police in the United States are all racist, but it's not as simple as that. It's something that a lot of people, basically maybe even all people can suffer from, that the moment you see a person from a minority group maybe responding or behaving in a bit of an ambiguous way, we use our stereotypes to make judgments, and this leads to discriminatory behavior, as you can see in the following film clip. You see this and you wonder, did he lose his keys or is he blatantly stealing that bike? In broad daylight, he hammers and then saws on the cane. When that doesn't work, he pulls out an industrial-sized bolt cutter and when he's asked, he fesses up. You lost him a lot? No, not exactly. But he's not a real thief, Justin Kelly is an actor and our hidden cameras are rolling. What happened? Nothing, I can't get through the lock. I mean, I know this is weird, but you wouldn't happen to know whose bike this is. Yeah. Good, thank you. It was odd that somebody had all that equipment. But you didn't do anything? No, that's the bottom line. A lot of people stop and stare, a few even question the actor. You don't have to ask, is that your bike? I guess technically no. Okay. Okay, bye. In over an hour, about 100 people pass by. Only George and Arlene try to stop him. Some tell us they plan to call the police later. Others say they're scared. Keep moving. This woman and her friends give our thief the benefit of the doubt. When we ask why, Bisa Washington tells us first impressions matter. I remember thinking young white men don't usually carry burglar tools. So we all make assumptions, huh? I'm thinking maybe he works for the park. We replace our white thief with this young man, Matlock. Remember, both actors dress in a similar way and are about the same age. Is that your bike? Nah. What do you cut the chain for? Right away. Right away somebody yells. Wow. Within seconds, another person confronts our thief. Is that your bike? Technically it's not, but it's going to be mine. More people converge. They don't have a cell phone. Will you call the police? Are you taking that bike? No, it's not, sir. Is this, I mean, is this any of our bikes? Is this your bike? No, but what is it is? It belongs to someone. So who? Well, not to you. And sure enough, one man whips out a cell phone to call 911. Yeah, there's someone not to take any bikes here. Our actor triggers more reaction. Some people are even snapping pictures for evidence. I got you, man. You guys steal the bikes. You bikes over here. These racial stereotypes are infused in all of us. I mean, it's part of our culture. So whether you're black or white, you associate crime with blacks and you associate whites with being good. Jack DeVideo, psychology professor at Yale University. Whether we believe it, whether we notice it, whether we acknowledge it, race is affecting what I see, what I think, what I do. So the problem that is demonstrated in the video clip is that the stereotype blacks is associated with violence and this is steering our social cognition. So this is influencing how we judge behaviors of blacks versus whites. And this is also shown in a lot of studies. For example, studies, a study in which pictures were shown of either a black man or a white man and this person was holding something. And sometimes this was a gun or sometimes it was something else, for example, a tool. And participants were then instructed to play a video game. And the video game was they had to shoot a person that was holding a gun. So basically quite similar to a normal video game. So if you see a bad guy, you shoot him. And when is a person a bad guy, this person is holding a gun. And then you have several different conditions. So you have either a white person, a white man holding a gun or a tool and you have a black man holding a gun and a tool. And you see how many errors people make. And here you see the results and you see that very convincingly most people make errors if a black person, a black man is unarmed. So they mistakenly shoot a man that is actually holding a tool and it's completely innocent. And this is also what is happening in the police and this is also what is happening in these experiments. And this is of course very alarming. And it's just showing that we have this association that the black stereotype is associated with violence, with danger. And that is what is showing here. So if you have to make an automatic decision, you rely on this heuristic and you make mistakes because you perceive them as violent and as having a gun yes or no. And basically everyone has a problem in that sense because this stereotype has been activated. In the Netherlands it's not so much with blacks, it's actually even more with people from Moroccan descent especially young males from Moroccan descent. They have the harshest stereotype here in the Netherlands and we associate, Dutch people associate young Moroccan males also with violence a lot which can also lead to similar problems and behaviors. And even though everyone sort of suffers from this there are some individual differences in the amount of prejudice and the amount of discrimination that people show. And of course researchers, psychologists have been very interested in studying these individual differences and they've tried to do so in different ways. And one way of measuring this prejudice, sort of the hidden prejudices that people have is through the implicit association test. And this implicit association test has been developed because prejudice is actually a very loaded topic of course. And if you ask people so how negative do you think about how negative is your attitude towards young Moroccan males for example some people would say very negative, they would be very open about it but a lot of people would feel like oh this is very social undesirable to say that so they would say something like oh no it's perfectly fine by me but then simultaneously in the back of their minds they think well I don't want anything to do with them. So to get rid of this sort of social desirability in the answering the implicit association test was developed and I will show you a short video fragment in which you see how this test exactly works. Implicit association test or IAT. In a classic version of the IAT research participants are asked to make two types of judgments. The first is whether a face they see on the computer screen is out of a black person or a white person and the second is whether a word they see on the screen is a good word or a bad word. A good word would be like love, joy or honest and a bad word would be like poison, agony to test. The trials with the faces black or white are intermixed with the trials with the words good or bad and participants must use the same two keys on the computer for both judgments. So in one part of the test participants will use one key to indicate black if a black face is shown and use that same key to indicate good if a good word is shown then a different key will be used for white for face trials and bad for word trials. In a different part of the test things are arranged differently. Now participants use one key to indicate black and bad and the other key to indicate white and good. This experiment assesses how easily the participants can manage each of these links. Do they have an easier time putting white and good together and so using the same key to indicate both then putting white and bad together? It turns out that the second combination is easier for white participants and many African American participants as well. This seems to suggest that the participants arrive at the experiment already primed to associate each race with a certain evaluation and respond more slowly when the experiment requires them to break that association. So if you see the outcome of the IET you see that some people have a very strong association between blacks and bads and whites and goods and for a long time researchers thought that this IET outcome captured true discrimination behavior but this is actually no longer a case because a lot of research, follow-up research shows that the outcomes of the IET do not always predict behavior. So if you have a very strong association between blacks and bads it does not necessarily mean that you also behave in a discriminatory way towards blacks. So it's actually measuring something else. What is now the consensus is that it basically measures the strength of the association in the same way as that we associate butter with breath or Ernie with birth. That's just a combination that we're very used to and some people have this association very strongly because they've been washing a lot of Sesame Street for example then you have a very strong association between birth and Ernie, guilty here. So if you've seen for example a lot of media in which politicians, some politicians very openly oftentimes link violence to young Moroccan mills or mills from immigrants, basically young immigrants if you've been exposed to this many many times even though you don't share this political outlook on these mills if this association is strengthened then you might have an IET outcome that is very much in line with young Moroccan mills and bad behavior or in the US blacks and violence but it might not be the case that you actually feel this way. So it's very important to know that it's only measuring associations and it's not actually sort of measuring hidden prejudice or hidden discrimination. So you might be interested in your own IET effect I can imagine and I will upload a link on Canvas where you can personally test your associations towards certain minority groups so you can take that if you're interested.