Invitation to Psychology

ChapteR 10 Behavior in Social and Cultural Context 371

a group. Of course, given the many sources and

functions of prejudice, no one method will work

in all circumstances or for all prejudices. But just

as social psychologists investigate the situations

that increase prejudice and animosity between

groups, they have also examined the situations

that might reduce them. Here are four of them

(Allport, 1954/1979; Dovidio & Gaertner, 2010;

Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006):

1

Both sides must have equal legal status, economic

opportunities, and power. This requirement is

the spur behind efforts to change laws that permit

discrimination. Integration of public facilities in

the American South would never have occurred

if civil rights advocates had waited for segrega-

tionists to have a change of heart. Women would

never have gotten the right to vote, attend college,

or do “men’s work” (law, medicine, bartending...)

without persistent challenges to the laws that

barred them from having these rights. But chang-

ing the law is not enough if two groups remain in

competition for jobs or if one group retains power

and dominance over the other.

2

Authorities and community institutions must pro-

vide moral, legal, and economic support for both

sides. Society must establish norms of equality

and support them in the actions of its officials—

teachers, employers, the judicial system, govern-

ment officials, and the police. Where segregation

is official government policy or an unofficial but

established practice, conflict and prejudice not

only will continue but also will seem normal and

justified.

3

Both sides must have many opportunities to work

and socialize together, formally and informally.

According to the contact hypothesis, prejudice de-

clines when people have the chance to get used to

another group’s rules, food, customs, and attitudes,

thereby discovering their shared interests and

shared humanity and learning that “those people”

aren’t, in fact, “all alike.” The contact hypoth-

esis has been supported by many studies in the

laboratory and in the real world: studies of newly

integrated housing projects in the American South

during the 1950s and 1960s; young people’s atti-

tudes toward the elderly; healthy people’s attitudes

toward the mentally ill; nondisabled children’s at-

titudes toward the disabled; and straight people’s

prejudices toward gay men and lesbians (Herek

& Capitanio, 1996; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006;

Wilner, Walkley, & Cook, 1955). Remarkably,

contact actually works best for the most intoler-

ant and mentally rigid people, apparently because

it reduces their feelings of threat and anxiety and

Associations are not necessarily biases: If we
associate the words bread and butter, that doesn’t
mean we like them or will buy either one (Levi-
tin, 2013). Test–retest reliability on the IAT is
low, they maintain, and scores only weakly pre-
dict a person’s discriminatory behavior (Blanton &
Mitchell, 2011; De Houwer et al., 2009). One team
analyzed data on how people who had taken the
IAT acted toward white and black people during
a real conversation. They measured 16 behaviors,
such as laughing, making eye contact, and fidget-
ing. Those who received the highest scores for
“anti-black bias” on the IAT showed no behavioral
bias toward blacks at all. Many who got high “anti-
black” scores actually behaved more compassion-
ately toward blacks, when given the opportunity,
than low scorers (Blanton et al., 2009).
Other critics of the IAT think that the test
simply reflects white subjects’ unfamiliarity with
blacks and the greater salience of white faces to
them, rather than an implicit prejudice (Kinoshita
& Peek-O’Leary, 2005). Words and images that
are unfamiliar take more retrieval and process-
ing time, so naturally people would be slower in
responding to them. Moreover, as we saw previ-
ously, people find familiar names, products, and
even nonsense syllables to be more pleasant than
unfamiliar ones. Two experimenters got an IAT
effect by matching target faces with nonsense
words and neutral words that had no evaluative
connotations at all. They concluded that the IAT
does not measure emotional evaluations of the
target but rather the salience of the word associ-
ated with it—how much it stands out. Negative
words attract more attention in general. When
they corrected for these factors, the presumed
unconscious prejudice faded away (Rothermund
& Wentura, 2004).

Simulate the Experiment Implicit Association

Test: Cats and Dogs at MyPsychLab

As you can see, defining and measuring preju-
dice are not easy. To understand prejudice, we must
distinguish explicit attitudes from unconscious
ones, active hostility from simple discomfort, what
people say from what they feel, and what people
feel from how they actually behave.

reducing Conflict and

Prejudice LO 10.18

The findings that emerge from the study of preju-
dice show us that efforts to reduce prejudice by
appealing to moral or intellectual arguments are
not enough. They must also touch people’s deeper
insecurities, fears, or negative associations with