The Development of Prejudice

Assignment 1

Social psychologists have identified stereotyping and the formation of it as playing an important role in the developing of prejudice. Stereotypes are used throughout society and this essay will show that they can be exceedingly harmful.
Prejudice is a negative attitude people form about others, often a group of people that differ from themselves. Prejudice can be defined as a preconceived opinion or bias. It is possible that a preconceived opinion might be harmless however they are often disparaging and derogatory. An example of a preconceived opinion might also be termed a stereotype. An illustration of a stereotype would be: ‘all French people wear berets’. The stereotypical image of a French person wearing a beret would be common to most people despite it being inaccurate, and if you were to walk along the streets of Paris, the majority of people would look no different to the people walking the streets of London. However this stereotype has become ingrained in many people’s minds and is used in comedy shows and pictures on a regular basis. One definition of stereotyping is defined by Taguiri (1969; cited in Goss 1992, p.482) ‘The general inclination to place a person in categories according to some easily and quickly identifiable characteristics such as age, sex, race, ethnic membership, nationality or occupation, and then to attribute to him qualities believed to be typical to members of that category’. From this quote we can learn that it is easy to stereotype and to put someone in a neat little category. It can often make us feel better about ourselves if we are not part of a particular group and therefore cannot be categorised as ‘one of them’.
There are three perspectives psychologists have when looking at prejudice. One theory is psychoanalytical. This Theory is Freudian and is related to childhood experiences. If a person is brought up being taught stereotypes and sees their parent’s prejudices then they are likely to emulate their elders. If they have a bad experience with someone of a different ethnicity or race or gender then they may well hold a prejudice towards that group of people. For example if they had something stolen by a person of African descent, they may view all black people as dishonest. This is directly correlated with the cognitive perspective of prejudice, or what a person believes to be true. If a person has had a bad experience in childhood then they may believe that this will always be the case with a certain group of people. There are also theories such as the Authoritarian Personality theory developed by Adorno that discusses how people with certain personality traits would make them more susceptible to form prejudices, however according to Brown (1985) norms and cultures that are present in society may be much more important than personality when explaining the reasons behind prejudice and stereotyping. The norms of society influence the way we think and our attitudes. If we live in a society where a certain group is stereotyped and treated negatively it is likely that we would follow the pattern ourselves as we would believe that to be acceptable.
Not all stereotyping is confined to race, Allport (1954) noted that there were many popular stereotypes that are wholly unsubstantiated such as fat people are jolly, red heads have fiery tempers and people who have eyes that are close together are untrustworthy. All these stereotypes are linked in with attitudes that people develop. Attitudes are made up of three components; Affective which comprises of what a person feels, Conative or Behavioural which consists of a person’s behaviours and actions and Cognitive which involves a person’s beliefs. All these attitudes make up prejudice and the reasons for it.
An attitude has been defined by Allport (1935; cited in Goss 1992, p.515) as ‘a mental and neural state of readiness, organised through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individual’s response to all objects and situations with which it is related.’ This means that an attitude is personal, they are formed by experience and we are not born with a certain attitude, we learn them by what we see and hear through the society we live in. The attitude Allport defines is not passive it often links to the stereotypes people form and that can have direct links to the behaviour of a person.
Stereotyping stems very much from the cognitive attitude for example we may believe that all French people wear berets. We have no proof of this, we have not met all the people in France, the person who believes this stereotype probably has never even been to France however this is the belief or idea that they have.
The example of the French stereotype is a fairly harmless one however when stereotypes become more unpleasant they can cause significant harm. On the 22nd April 1993 a black teenager named Stephen Lawrence was murdered by a group of youths motivated by racism. On the BBC it was noted by Christine Stewart a BBC reporter that ‘The officers' prejudice led them to leave Duwayne Brooks, Stephen's friend and the key witness to the crime, "side-lined and ignored". "He was never properly treated as a victim.”’ (1999) What I took from this material and the other well publicised information on the murder of Stephen Lawrence was that due to the colour of Duwayne Brooks he was treated more like a criminal than a victim purely on the stereotypical view held by the police that black youths are more likely to commit crimes and behave violently than white youths. The majority of the officers that dealt with this murder investigation were all white which corresponds to the in-group, out group mentality of humans. Most people belong to certain groups including race, gender, ethnicity etc. An in group bias means they are more likely to favour those who belong to their own group rather than those outside of it. In the case of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry the police directly involved gave preference to the families of the white suspects because they were part of their own social group rather than to the victim’s family as they were black. The in group /out group mentality is shown clearly in the experiment of Jane Elliot in 1968, where she segregated her class of school children according to eye colour. This experiment commonly referred to as the brown eyes, blue eyes exercise showed how quickly in groups are formed and how they assign all the positive attributes to their own group and the negative, to the other group or the out group. The reason for this experiment was to show how racist prejudice can form quickly due to passive attitudes and how unpleasant it feels when you are part of the out group.
It is so important to establish the reasons behind prejudice, how it is formed, how it starts as a seemingly harmless stereotype to how it can progress to being dangerous and fatal to many. Only if society can understand fully why people form these active attitudes towards other groups can we ever hope to put an end to them. There have been solutions suggested for the solving of prejudice forming. One of these is the jigsaw method of Aronson et al (1978) in this exercise children are put in to small ethnically diverse groups in which each student is given material which represents one piece of the lesson they are learning. Each student will then learn their part and teach the rest of the group. This would then increase the students liking for their classmates of a different group as they would be spending time with each other, learning from one another and helping each other. This has been shown to work in small groups and schools and within time may influence more and more people so rather than stereotyping being the norm that promotes prejudice, a mutual cooperation will exist. The jigsaw method is very similar to the contact hypothesis which involves different groups associating and getting to know one another, the theory being that often prejudice is based on fear of the unknown and therefore once we have met and confronted our fears then we will be less afraid of groups we once avoided and may even come to like them. Contact with a single person may change our cognitive attitude as it may contradict a previously held conviction. The more we associate with people who do not fit our stereotypes for example, the more French people we meet who do not wear berets, the more likely it is that we will revise our opinion as the stereotype loses it credibility.
Just from what a single person believes to be true can be very harmful and wasteful to society as a whole. Prejudices have caused wars and holocausts resulting in the deaths of millions. If society can reduce prejudice in its very early stages, stop the forming of stereotypes then we would be a much safer society. This essay shows how passive cognitive attitudes can lead to active demonstrations of prejudice, and it also shows how the attitudes can be prevented therefore decreasing the likelihood of racially motivated crimes in the future.

Reference List

ALLPORT, GW. 1954. The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley
ARONSON ET AL. 1978. The effects of a cooperative classroom structure on student behaviour and attitudes. New York: Wiley
BROWN, H. 1985. People, groups and society. Milton Keynes: Open University Press
GOSS, R. 1992. Psychology: the science of mind and behaviour. 2nd ed. London: Hodder and Stoughton
STEWART, C. 1999. Mets incompetence in Lawrence investigation. BBC News [online newspaper] 24th March. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1//hi/uk/285569.stm (11th October 2012)