10/2 pg.301-311 PDF - Prejudice and Stereotyping

10/2 pg.301-311 Topic #1: What is Prejudice? pg.301-303 What I learned from the book: In 1971, a white policeman humiliated a black man, Dr. Poussaint, who was a physician. The incident led to feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, and anger, which are the consequences of...

10/2 pg.301-311 Topic #1: What is Prejudice? pg.301-303 What I learned from the book: In 1971, a white policeman humiliated a black man, Dr. Poussaint, who was a physician. The incident led to feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, and anger, which are the consequences of being the constant target of prejudice. Today, people believe that stories like this are old news, and if any white person behaves in a racist or sexist way, the media would be on them in a nanosecond. However, significant changes have taken place in American society in the last few decades, such as legislation forbidding discrimination, increasing access to higher education, and reducing prejudice towards women and minorities. The percentages of people willing to admit their prejudices toward women, blacks, gay men, lesbians, and other minorities have been dropping sharply. Hate crimes and other overt expressions of prejudice still exist, but they linger in various forms, taking a heavy toll on their victims. In 2004, a black firefighter named Tennie Pierce was subjected to a series of humiliating experiences, highlighting the importance of addressing and addressing prejudice in order to create a more inclusive society. Multiple Choice Question: a) b) c) d) Topic #2: What is Prejudice? pg.303-307 What I learned from the book: Prejudice is a hostile or negative attitude towards a distinct group based on generalizations derived from faulty or incomplete information. It consists of a cognitive component (a stereotype and set of beliefs about a group), an emotional component (dislike or active hostility toward the group), and a behavioral component (a predisposition to discriminate against the group whenever possible). Gordon Allport's classic book, The Nature of Prejudice, described the insidious nature of prejudiced reasoning. A deeply prejudiced person is virtually immune to information at variance with their cherished stereotypes. Experimental evidence supports Allport's observations, demonstrating that bombarding people with facts that run counter to their prejudices fails to get them to modify those prejudices. Instead, they typically create a new mental category, such as "aggressive female," "honest lawyer," or "well-educated African American," convincing themselves that what they have learned about the general stereotype may be true but is a rare exception. The nature of prejudice leads us to generalize from individuals to the group as a whole. Multiple Choice Question: a) b) c) d) Topic #3: Feeling v.s Expressing Prejudice What I learned from the book: Prejudice is often avoided due to its perceived bias, but suppressing it can be mentally taxing. When cognitive resources are depleted, prejudice may leak out, as seen in Mel Gibson's drunken tirade against Jews. Unconscious biases can also influence thoughts and behaviors, as seen in the people who wrote captions about black hurricane victims in New Orleans. Christians Crandall and Amy Eshleman suggest that people struggle with the conflict between expressing prejudice and maintaining a positive self-concept. To avoid cognitive dissonance, people are attracted to information that justifies their prejudices. For example, if someone dislikes gay men and lesbians but suppresses their feelings to preserve their self-image as fair-minded, they can use the Bible as a justification for their stance. Multiple Choice Question: a) b) c) d) Topic #4: Stereotypes and Prejudice pt.1 pg 312-313 What I learned from the book: Stereotyping is the generalization of characteristics, motives, or behavior to an entire group of people. It is a process that allows these pictures to dominate our thinking, leading us to assign identical characteristics to any person in a group, regardless of the actual variation among members. Stereotyping is not always intentional or negative, but often serves as a way humans organize and simplify the complexities of our social world. Our brains are wired to categorize people automatically, unconsciously, and implicitly along dimensions such as race, age, and sex. Stereotypes can be adaptive, shorthand ways of dealing with complex events, but if they blind us to individual differences within a class, it can be harmful and potentially dangerous. Stereotypic generalizations are abusive because they rob the person of the right to be perceived and treated as an individual with their own individual traits, whether positive or negative. Stereotypes distort the way we interpret people's behavior, and in turn, we may act on these distorted perceptions, treating the individual in a biased manner. Multiple Choice Question: a) b) c) d) Topic #5: Stereotype and Prejudice pt.314-315 What I learned from the book: Stereotyping can lead to judgments that overlook or give insufficient weight to information that does not fit the stereotype. For example, when parole officers consider factors like the seriousness of a crime, life circumstances, and good behavior while in prison, racial and ethnic stereotypes can outweigh such information. College students who read fictionalized files of prisoners were asked to make a parole decision, and when the crimes were consistent with their stereotypes, they tended to overlook other relevant information and were harsher in their reasons for denying parole. Negative stereotypes can be comforting and help justify an unfair system where some people are on the top and some are on the bottom. However, biased thinking can have harmful consequences in everyday life, as seen in a study comparing the treatment of black versus white patients in a psychiatric hospital run by an all-white staff. The harsher method, physical restraint and sedation, was used against black patients nearly four times as often as against white patients, despite virtually no difference in the number of violent incidents committed by blacks and whites. Multiple Choice Question: a) b) c) d) Critical Thinking #1: Critical Thinking #2: