prejudice

prejudice

Psychological Theories of Prejudice and
Discrimination
I
Prejudice and Stereotypes
Social perception involves the development of an attitude towards another person or
group of persons. A stereotype is an attitude towards a person or group on the basis
of some physical characteristic or physical fact. A stereotype is an example of an
implicit personality theory. Such theories attribute internal properties to a person,
such as character traits, on the basis of external properties. In a stereotype this
attribution is based on a physical external property, such as skin colour. Other
implicit theories base attributions on, for example, behaviour. For example, a person
could implicit argue about a person, “he is loitering about, therefore, he is deliquent”.
However, a person does not have to be conscious of making the inference. A group
stereotype makes an attribution to a whole group. An anti-semitic person might
argue, “all Jews love money” – it is not an attribution about a particular Jew, but
about all Jews in general. An individual stereotype passes a judgement on an
individual. Making an attribution means making a judgement about someone – that
judgement could be about a whole group, or about an individual.
Individual stereotypes are attitudes towards individual people. Some examples of
these are (1) attributions based on people’s names. Some Christian names and
surnames are associated with heroes, and others with villains: compare the names of
David Copperfield with Uriah Heep. An experiment by Haran & McDavid (1973)
involved giving teachers essays to grade with false names. An essay with an
attractive name was often given 1 grade more than the same essay with an unattractive
name. The effect was more marked with boys’ names than with girls’ names. (2)
Physical appearance is also a basis of individual stereotyping. An experiment by
Gibbins et al (1967) showed that people were willing to infer personality traits of
models based on what...

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