Prejudice, Stereotypes and Discrimination

1What people say and what people do

In the early 1930s the sociologist Richard LaPiere travelled around the United States with a young Chinese couple, at a time when prejudice against Chinese people was common there. They were served at 250 hotels, camp sites and restaurants and refused only once. Six months later LaPiere wrote to the same businesses asking, "Will you accept members of the Chinese race as guests?" Of the 128 that replied, 92% said no (LaPiere, 1934).

The study has weaknesses: the person who answered the letter was probably not the person who had served the couple, and LaPiere, a white American, was usually with them. Still, it raises the question at the centre of this lesson: how do the beliefs, feelings and actions we have towards groups relate to one another?

21. The three parts of an attitude

The three are linked but do not always move together, as LaPiere found. A person can hold a stereotype without hostility, or feel prejudice but not act on it because the law or social norms forbid it. Discrimination can also happen without personal prejudice, when rules or habits disadvantage a group: this is called institutional (or structural) discrimination. A school building with stairs and no ramp discriminates against wheelchair users even if nobody in the school dislikes them.

32. Where prejudice comes from

• Categorisation. Sorting people into groups is part of normal social cognition (Lesson 1). It brings the out-group homogeneity effect: "they are all alike, but we are all different."
• Social learning. Children pick up stereotypes from parents, peers, songs, jokes and media, often before they meet a member of the group (Bandura's theory, Unit 2).
• Competition for resources. Realistic conflict theory (Muzafer Sherif) holds that hostility grows when groups compete for land, jobs or power (Unit 4).
• Social identity. We boost self-esteem by seeing our own groups as better than others, even when the groups are trivial (Tajfel and Turner, Unit 2).
• Personality. Theodor Adorno and colleagues (1950) proposed an "authoritarian personality", rigid and deferential to authority, measured by the F-scale. The theory has been heavily criticised: every F-scale item was worded so that agreeing scored as authoritarian, and a personality theory cannot explain why whole societies change their prejudices within a few years.
• Scapegoating. When people are frustrated by hardship, hostility can be turned against a weaker group that is blamed for the problem.

43. From words to violence: Allport's scale

Allport (1954) arranged acts of prejudice on a scale of increasing harm (Figure 1). Each step makes the next easier to accept, which is why early steps such as hateful talk must be taken seriously.

54. When stereotypes shape behaviour

Stereotypes can change the behaviour of the people they describe:

• Self-fulfilling prophecy. A false expectation leads people to act in ways that make it come true (Robert Merton, 1948). A teacher who expects little of a pupil may call on her less often and give her less feedback, so she learns less. Later reviews (Jussim and Harber, 2005) found such teacher-expectation effects are real but usually small.
• Stereotype threat. Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson (1995) reported that Black American students did worse on a hard test when it was described as a test of intellectual ability, as if the fear of confirming a stereotype disrupted performance. The idea became famous, but later work found the published effects were inflated by publication bias, and a large pre-registered study of 2,064 Dutch secondary-school pupils found no stereotype-threat effect on girls' mathematics scores (Flore, Mulder and Wicherts, 2018). Treat it as a hypothesis whose size and reach are still disputed.
• Implicit bias. The Implicit Association Test (Greenwald and colleagues, 1998) measures how quickly people pair group names with "good" or "bad" words. It shows that automatic associations exist, but scores change from one testing to the next and predict an individual's actual behaviour only weakly, so the test cannot diagnose whether a particular person will discriminate.

65. Reducing prejudice

Approaches that have evidence behind them include structured contact between groups under fair conditions (Allport's contact hypothesis, Unit 4), cooperative learning in mixed teams, and changing what people believe others in their community think (Lesson 4). Laws set the outer limit: Article 16 of Rwanda's Constitution prohibits discrimination based on, among other grounds, ethnic origin, region, sex, religion and disability. National programmes such as Ndi Umunyarwanda ("I am Rwandan"), started in 2013 by the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission, now part of the Ministry of National Unity and Civic Engagement (MINUBUMWE), promote a shared national identity.