Lecture 1
• Rwandan genocide occurred in the early 1990s, million tootsies were killed in a 100
days (incredible amount in a short period of time)- hooties killing tootsies with machetes,
they share language, and culture but both groups hated one another
• Indonesian riots late 90s, currency dropped, mass riots in Jacarda, economic problems,
certain stores were robbed more (Chinese Indonesians) thought as being blamed for the
economic problems
• Houston suburb opposes plan for mosque—wanting to make it in a farmland, some
people did not like this, neighbour threatens to hold pig races on Fridays to offend them –
they don’t have issues with muslims apparently, they have issues with drainage problems
and traffic but lets say there was a walmart coming to this same unused area, no one
would have a problem with traffic anymore – symbolic racism/modern racism
• written in the hunger games book that Rue is dark skinned, yet when the movie comes
out and Rue is played by a dark girl (black or south asian) peoples comments were racist
– why does she have to be black, it ruined the movie
- when I found out she was black, her death wasn’t as sad
- awkward moment when Rue is a black girl and not the blonde innocent girl you
picture
- easier to empathise with her if she were white and I were white, but because she’s
back, it’s okay that she died because I couldn’t really relate to her any way (racism)
• when is something prejudice? content: what was said? how was it said? legit
generalization?
• intention: meant to cause harm?
• conviction: does the person truly believe what he/she is saying? or is it just to be
funny?
• context: power between parties (it’s okay for some people to say certain things, but
other people cannot depending on your own identity)
Definitions
• stereotype (cognition): traits associated with people, cognitive schema, preconceived
idea of person based on group, sometimes true, generalization • prejudice: (affect)/emotion to a group, bias based on stereotypes, implicit/explicit
(conscious or not conscious) of it, somewhat changeable
• discrimination (behaviour- actions of--): exclusion, action, acting on prejudice
• history discrimination was seen as abnormal, as though you needed medicine, shocks
• eliminating stereotyping would eliminate our way of making sense of the world, it
helps simplify the way we see the world (not abnormal at all)
• explicit prejudice vs. implicit prejudice – saying that you love this person even
though they are Muslim but inside really not being sure about them at all
• perceiver’s perspective vs target’s perspective- why people categorize other people,
how they judge them, but it’s important to know how it feels to be the victim, how to
be targeted by stereotypes and discrimination, how does it affect your personality, and
behaviours and academics, the way you think. Lecture 2
• black males are quoted more for cars than anyone else, even among women, black
females are quoted more than white females
• true colors movie: glen and jon black and white same job, do everything together yet
the white guy gets all the attention and the black guy doesnt. this is because people
assume black people cant afford anything so salespeople dont help them as much as they
help white people. they think they can make money off white people but not black. black
guy got followed not white
• categorization simplifies our world, essential part of learning, we would have to learn
everything as new again and again, categories occur spontaneously
• despite showing poor memory of who said what, they were right when guessing if a man
or a woman had said it (easy to tell what kind of thing a man would say versus a woman,
and vice versa)
• kernal of truth- bottom up
• stereotypes are overgeneralizations because we always stereotypes groups so we think
every individual is like that when that is indeed not true
• categorization makes things look more different than they are (accentuates intergroup
differences) putting labels does this
• jane creba and shantel dunn, one was white, one was black. both shot in toronto. jane
creba made more news, more people know about her, she was talked about years later
whereas shantel was forgotten
• how often are black people seen as VICTIMS? almost never. they're always seen as the
perpetuator
• perpetrators and victims tend to be of the same race
• most news worthy is when the perpetuator is black and the victim is white • crime portrayals bias our perceptions and amplify our stereotypes
• parents will only influence children who want to be like them otherwise the influence
fades off
did like the parents:
• parent low, child low
• parent high, child high
did not like parents:
• parent low in prej, child was high in prej
• parent high in prej, child was egalitarian
• belong to high status group, now you are motivated to justify your status (because you
did so much work to get there, not that you were born into a rich family)
• belong to a low status group, we will say it is because they are lazy and cant do anything
right (outgroup) but if we are part of the low status then it is because life is too hard
rather than because we are lazy
Lecture 3
• Don Cherry (Hockey night in Canada) is a racist
• Subtyping—liking a person but not liking the group they came from (liking this one
french guy but not liking french people in general)
• subtype category – the category of people that are liked, the french guy that you like but
you are racist against all the rest of the french people)
• so it is possible to vote for obama and hate black people at the same time because he is
‘more than black’
• cognition plays a role in us using stereotypes (saved cognitive resources)- using mental
shortcuts aka stereotypes
• stereotypes allow us to forego effortful individuation- don’t have to individuate the
person, just think of the category and you will find out all the info about the person this
way, its easier on the mind too
• stereotypes make useful predictions- stereotype is usually accurate, know what to do and
when to do it • when people are taxed (tired), they can use these shortcuts to know where they are going
with this
• macrae, milne, bodenhausen study: participants perform two tasks at the same time,
there is a name followed by 10 traits, so you have mary, nigel, Debbie . you learn that
mary is warm, caring, doctor, smart, and nigel is a skinhead, aggressive, bald (these traits
are consistent with skinhead as those are with doctor), their memory is tested later after a
2 min video of indonesia and they are asked, who was warm? they remember who was
what by remembering stereotypes, those who were not given any stereotypes had a harder
time remembering who was what, easier to recall what happened in the Indonesia movie
because their mind was free from remembering so many traits
• we construe people, and think they are the way they are with the things we know. so the
world appears not as much as it is, but as we are. we only think the man is homeless
because we see homeless people around us dressed that way for example
• bruner and goodman: if you do not deviate from the 0, that means it is 0 which means
you are accurate at predicting what it is, you see it for what it is
• size varies with valubilitiy, so I know 25 cents is more than a penny, so I expect the
quarter to be larger in size than the penny
• for poor people, pennies, nickels, quarters have more value than they do to rich people, so
a poor kid will think that the dime is actually larger than it really is (confirmation bias)
• Confirmation Bias when I see someone act the way I always thought they would,
confirms this is really the way they are, tendency of people to favor information that
confirms their beliefs or hypotheses
• facing prejudice prejudiced White saw anger (stereotyped behaviour) appear more
quickly on the face of Blacks (shown black and white person in motion, from anger to
happiness)
• self fulfilling prophecy when outgroups begin to act in the behaviour we act towards
them, just fulfilling our expectations of them
• pygmation in the classroom experiment how can a teachers expectations influence a
student? went to real classroom, administered a test to the kids, the teachers thought it
was real but it wasn’t, then the experimenters would look at the completed tests and tell
the teacher that these kids were very smart and had remarkable potentional do to very
good in the next year, the other class was told that they were average normal students. but
in reality, the two classes were both average. the experimenters came back a year later,
and looked at how the students did, looked at the graders throughout the year, the
students who were told earlier were going to be remarkable at the end of the year actually
were remarkable at the end of the year because of the teacher’s expectations from that
day forward of them,she expected the best so she got the best (the students in this class
were never told they were good, only their teacher was) • do white interviewers treat Black candidates differently? how? interviewees were actors,
and those who were in the study being looked at were the interviewers, they were told to
go inside with a chair because the interviewee was already there, how far away did they
sit from that person? did they make eyecontact? how long did they speak for? when this
happened with a black confederate (actor), the seat was placed further away than with the
white confederate, it was harder to look in the eye of a black confederate.
• second time, the interviewer was the confederate (who was white )and this person
interviewed was also white, the confederate treated this white interviewees as if they
were black, the confederate did all those things above but with a white person. so how
well did the participants do when treated like a white person and when treated like black
person? when interviewers did the things stated above, the interview performance was a
bad one
• so the point is that when these white ppl were being treated as if they were black, their
performance was becoming bad too just like it was when real interviewers treated the
black people that way, this is a self fulfilling prophecy because the white interviewers
behaviour towards these white people was such that they acted just like the blacks earlier
did. its acting the way they want you to act
• People are motivated to have and maintain self-esteem; they want to feel good about self
• When threatened, people motivated to restore self-esteem
• By acting on prejudices, people can reclaim self-esteem
• Looking “down” at someone else, makes you look good in comparison
• Fein & Spencer, 1997àPrejudice make you feel good!
Lecture 4
• stereotypes are efficient, fulfill motivations and automatic but they negatively impact
targets • mental control 3 elementats—goal- don’t think of stereotypes, operate- just not
going to do it, monitor—see if I am reaching my goal, see if there is a goal failure or
not, am I thinking that thought or not? but now you are thinking about it more
because youre thinking about how not to think about it
• wagner’s study two groups, one group told to think about anything except white
bears, second group told to think about everything including white bears, those who
were told not to think of white bears had more ticks on their sheet showing they
thought of white bears the most
• pushing thoughts out of your head takes cognitive energy
• Hypothesis because supressors activate the unwanted stereotype repeatedly
(monitoring process), they will experience ‘rebound effect’(gre
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