PREJUDICE, PREJUDGMENT, SOCIAL SOURCES OF PREJUDICE

A  prejudice is a prejudgment, an assumption made about someone or something before having adequate knowledge to be able to do so with guaranteed accuracy. The word prejudice is most commonly used to refer to a preconceived judgment toward a people or a person because of race, social class, gender, ethnicity, age, disability, political beliefs, religion, sexual orientation or other personal characteristics. It also means beliefs without knowledge of the facts and may include "any unreasonable attitude that is unusually resistant to rational influence."

Prejudice, stereotyping, discrimination, racism, sexism: The terms often overlap. Before seeking to understand prejudice, let’s clarify the terms. Each of the situations just described involved a negative evaluation of some group. And that is the essence of prejudice: an unjustifiable negative attitude toward a group and its individual members. Prejudice is prejudgment; it biases us against a person based solely on the person's identification with a particular group.

Prejudice is an attitude. An attitude is a distinct combination of feelings, inclinations to act, and beliefs. This combination we called the ABC of attitudes: affect (feelings), behavior tendency (inclination to act), and cognition (beliefs). A prejudiced person might therefore dislike the Burakumin and behave in a discriminatory manner, believing them ignorant and dangerous.

The negative evaluations that mark prejudice can stern from emotional associations, from the need "to justify behavior, or from negative beliefs, called stereotypes. To stereotype is to generalize. To simplify the world/we generalize all the time: The British are reserved; Americans are outgoing. Professors are absentminded. Women who assume the title of "Ms." are more assertive and ambitious than those who call themselves "Miss" or "Mrs.". Such generalizations can have a germ of truth. 

Prejudice is a negative attitude; discrimination is negative behavior. Discriminatory behavior often, but not always, has its source in prejudicial attitudes. Attitudes and behavior are often loosely linked, partly because our behavior reflects more than our inner convictions. Prejudiced attitudes need not breed hostile acts, nor does all oppression spring from prejudice. Racism and sexism are institutional practices that discriminate, even when there is no prejudicial intent.

Imagine a state police force that set a height requirement of 5 feet, 10 inches, for all its officers. If this requirement were irrelevant to on-the-job effectiveness and tended to exclude Hispanics, Asians, and women, someone might label the requirement racist and sexist. Note that we could make this allegation even if no one intended discrimination. Similarly, if word-of-mouth hiring practices in an all-White business have the effect of excluding non-White employees, the practice could be called racist—even if the open-minded employer intended no discrimination. This chapter explores the roots and fruits of prejudiced attitudes, leaving it to sociologists and political scientists to explore racism and sexism in their institutional forms. 

SOCIAL SOURCES OF PREJUDICE 

 Social Inequalities

• Unequal status 

• Religion 

• Self-fulfilling prophecies 

 In-group/Out-group

• Social identity 

• In-group bias 

• Out-group homogeneity 

 Conformity

 Institutional Support

SOCIAL INEQUALITIES: A principle to remember: Unequal status breeds prejudice. Masters view slaves as lazy, irresponsible, lacking ambition as having just those traits that justify the slavery. Historians debate the forces that create unequal status. But once inequalities exist, prejudice helps justify the economic and social superiority of those who have wealth and power. Thus, prejudice and discrimination support each other: Discrimination breeds prejudice, and prejudice legitimizes discrimination.

Examples: Nineteenth century European politicians and writers justified imperial expansion by describing exploited, colonized people as "inferior," "requiring protection," and a "burden" to be borne altruistically. Four decades ago, sociologist Helen Mayer Hacker (1951) noted how stereotypes of Blacks and women helped rationalize the inferior status of each: Many people thought both groups were mentally slow, emotional and primitive, and "contented" with their subordinate role. Blacks were "inferior"; women were "weak." Blacks were all right in their place; women's place was in the home.

In times of conflict, attitudes easily adjust to behavior. People often view enemies as subhuman and depersonalize them with a label. During World War II, the Japanese people became "the Japs." After the war was over, they became "the intelligent, hardworking Japanese" whom Americans came to admire. When the 1991-1992 recession heightened the sense of economic conflict with Japan, resentment of the Japanese again flared. Attitudes are amazingly adaptable.                                              

RELIGION AND PREJUDICE: Those who benefit from social inequalities yet avow that all-are created equal" need to justify the way things are. And what more powerful justification than to believe God has ordained the existing social order? For all sorts of cruel deeds, noted William James, "Piety is the mask" the mask that sometimes portrays lovely expressions while hiding ugly motives.

In almost every country, leaders invoke religion to sanctify the present order. In a remarkable turnabout. Father George Zabelka (1980), chaplain to the aircrews that bombed Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and other civilian targets in Japan, years later came to regret that he had provided religion's blessing for, these missions of devastation: "The whole structure of the secular, religious, and military society told me clearly that it was all right to 'let the Japs have it.' Cod was on the side of my country."   

The use of religion to justify injustice helps explain a consistent pair of findings concerning Christianity, North America's dominant religion;

(1) Church members express more racial prejudice than nonmembers and

(2) those professing traditional Christian beliefs express more prejudice than those professing less traditional beliefs.

Knowing the correlation between two variables—religion and prejudice—tells us nothing about their causal connection. There might be no connection at all Perhaps people with less education are both more fundamentalist and more prejudiced. Or perhaps prejudice causes religion, by leading people to create religious ideas to support their prejudices. Or perhaps religion causes prejudice, by leading people to believe that because all individuals possess free will, impoverished minorities have no one but themselves to blame for any perceived lack of virtue or achievement.

SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY: Attitudes may coincide with the social order not only as a rationalization for it but also because discrimination affects its victims. "One's reputation," wrote Gordon Allport, "cannot be hammered, hammered, hammered into one's head without doing something to one's character". In his classic book, The Nature of Prejudice, Allport catalogued 15 possible effects of victimization. Allport believed these reactions were reducible to two basic types—those that involve blaming oneself (withdrawal, self-hate, aggression against one's own group) and those that involve blaming external causes (fighting back, suspiciousness, increased group pride). If the net results are negative—say, higher rates of crime—people can use them to justify the discrimination that helps maintain them: "If we let those people in our nice neighborhood, property values will plummet."

Does discrimination affect its victims as this analysis supposes? We must be careful not to overstate the point, lest we feed the idea that the "victims" of prejudice are of necessity socially deficient. The soul and style of Black culture is for many a proud heritage, not just a response to victimization. Cultural differences need not imply social deficits. Nevertheless, social beliefs can be self-confirming.           

IN-GROUP/OUT-GROUP: The social definition of who you are your race, religion, sex, academic major implies a definition of who you are not. The circle that includes “us” (the ingroup) excludes “them” (the outgroup). Thus, the mere experience of peoples being formed into groups may promote ingourp bias. 

Example: Ask children “which are better, the children in your school or the children at (another school nearby)? Virtually all will say their own school has the better children.

Father, Mother, and Me, sister and Auntie say All the people like us are We, and every one else is They. And They live over the sea, while we live over the way. But would your believe it? They look upon we as only sort of They! Rudyard Kipling, 1926 (quoted by Mullen, 1991)

In a series of experiments, British social psychologists Henri Tajfel and Michael Billig (1974; Tajfel, 1970, 1981, 1982) discovered how little it takes to provoke favoritism toward us and unfairness toward them. They found that even when the us-them distinction is trivial, people still favor their own group. 

CONFORMITY: Once established, prejudice is maintained largely by inertia. If prejudice is a social norm, many people will follow the path of least resistance and conform to the fashion. They will act not so much out of a need to hate as from a need to be liked and accepted.

Studies by Thomas Pettiigrew (1985) of Whites in South Africa and the American south revelaed that during the 1950s those who conformed most to other social norms were also most prejudiced; those who were less conforming mirrored less of the surrounding prejudice. The price of nonconformity was painfully clear to the ministers of Little Rock, Arkansas, where the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation decision was implemented. Most ministers favored integration but usually only privately, they feared that advocating it vigorously would lose them members and contributions (Campbell & Pettigrew, 1959), or consider the Indiana steelworkers and West Virginia coal miners of the same era. In the mills and the mines, the workers accepted integration. In the neighborhood, the norm was rid segregation. Prejudice was clearly not a manifestation of sick personalities but simply of the norms that operated in a given situation.

INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORTS: Segregation is one way that social institutions (schools, government, the media) bolster widespread prejudice. Political leaders are another. Leaders may both reflect and reinforce prevailing attitudes. When Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus barred the doors of Central High School in Little Rock, he was doing more than representing his constituents; he was legitimating their views. Schools, too, reinforce dominant cultural attitudes. One analysis of stories in 13 children’s readers written before 1970 found that male characters outnumbered female characters 3 to 1 (women on words and Images, 1972). Who was portrayed as showing initiative, bravery, and competence? Note the answer in this excerpt from the classic “Dick and Jane” children’s reader. Jane, sprawled out on the sidewalk, her roller skates beside her, listens as Mark explains to his mother;

“She cannot skate,” said Mark

“I can help her.

I want to help her

Look at her, mother.

Just look at her.

She’s just like a girl

She gives up.”

Not until the 1970s, when changing ideas about males and females fostered new perceptions of such portrayals, was this blatant stereotyping widely noticed and changes made in the textbooks.