Chapter 11. Responding to and Reducing Prejudice

Introduction

It’s likely we have all perceived some form of prejudice in the course of our lives. You might have overheard someone make a sexist or racist comment, such as suggesting a woman's place is in the kitchen, or making a racial slur. How do you respond in such a situation? Confronting prejudice, dealing with interpersonal encounters where and when instances of prejudice take place, is necessary for real social change. Ways to confront prejudice include speaking up or showing surprise at the comments, or by using humor or sarcasm.

This task is similar to ones done in experiments conducted by Janet Swim and Lauri Hyers (1999).

Instructions

To begin, we will describe the details of a psychological study and ask you to imagine that you are a participant in the study. You will then be asked to answer a couple of questions.

Experiment

Results

Debriefing

The purpose of this task is to demonstrate that the costs associated with confronting prejudice often lead people to behave in ways that they themselves would not predict. The results of actual studies support this. More specifically, people tend to confront sexist comments less frequently in real life than they predict they would. Why would this be?

Costs associated with confronting others make confronting prejudice much more difficult than people often anticipate. When people who do the confronting are members of the prejudiced group, they may be perceived by others in a negative way (Kaiser & Miller, 2001). For example, a Black student who claims his failing grade is the result of prejudice may perceived as complaining, even when evidence supports his claim. Furthermore, while those who are confronted with the possibility that they might be prejudiced do make efforts to correct their bias, they also report feeling anger and dislike toward the individual who confronted them (Czopp, Monteith, & Mark, 2006). When predicting how we would behave when we are faced with prejudice, we often fail to take into account these types of costs.

Although prejudice is not confronted to the same extent that people predict it will be, failing to confront prejudice has serious negative consequences. Research has shown, for example, that White participants become more negative toward an African American who was subjected to a racial slur, despite the fact that the same White participants reported being appalled by the racial slur (Greenberg & Pyszczynski, 1985). Without confronting these types of comments, they are likely to continue. Clearly, confronting prejudice is important, yet costs often prevent it from occurring.

References:

Czopp, A. M., Monteith, M. J., & Mark, A. Y. (2006). Standing up for a change: Reducing bias through interpersonal confrontation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 784-803.

Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (1985). The effects of an overheard ethnic slur on evaluations of the target: How to spread a social disease. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 21, 61-72.

Kaiser, C. R., & Miller, C. T. (2001). Stop complaining: The social costs of making attributions to discrimination. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27, 254-263.

Swim, J. K., & Hyers, L. L. (1999). Excuse me--what did you just say?!: Women's public and private responses to sexist remarks. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 68-88.

Quiz