PSY220H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Ambivalent Sexism, Gender Role, Fatsuit
Document Summary
Prejudice: negative attitude toward all members of a distinguishable group, based solely on their membership in the group. Partly cognitive (preconceived beliefs), partly emotional (negative feelings), and partle behavioral (behave toward them with bias or hostility) Categorization: the grouping of objects or people by key characteristics, a process fundamental to cognition. The fundamental category for social animals is us or them. By an early age, we can categorie by gender, age, and race. Later we learn to use ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, political ideology, and other less visual but meaningful categories to decide who is an us and who is a them. A stereotype reflects the belief that a particular attribute is characteristic of the group as a whole, regardless of the actual variation among the group"s members. We are cognitive misers who rapidly categorize other people according to what we regard as normative or typical. Carefully controlled experiments confirm this energy-function of stereotypes.
