Prejudice
| For this section you need to be able to:
a Define what is meant by prejudice and discrimination. b Describe and evaluate Tajfel’s (1970) Social Identity Theory as an explanation of prejudice. c Describe and evaluate two studies in detail. One of these studies must be Hofling et al (1966) Study of obedience in nurses and one other study of either obedience or prejudice in the Social Approach. This must be selected from the following: Sherif (1954) Robbers Cave Experiment |
Prejudice is an attitude (usually negative) toward the member of some group solely on their membership in that group.
Discrimination can be seen as the behavioural expression of prejudice.
Tajfel’s Social Identity Theory as an explanation of Prejudice
Psychologists have developed theories to explain why prejudice exists, and then they conduct research studies to test their theories.
Henri Tajfel was a European Jew who suffered prejudice and discrimination during WW2. He looked to social psychology to explain prejudice and developed. Tajfel developed Social Identity Theory which claims that simply perceiving yourself as belonging to a social group would be enough to start feelings of prejudice towards others. He argued that how you feel about yourself, your self-esteem depends on how you feel about the groups you are a member of. To boost your self esteem you automatically improve the status of your group—usually at the expense of another.
Social identity theory claims that prejudice is a natural outcome of social grouping, – it is inevitable, has 3 components and occurs in 3 stages
Social Categorisation states that we all automatically categorise ourselves and others as members of various social groups. Groups we belong to are our in-groups, groups we don’t belong to are out-groups.
Social Identification takes place with our in-group by taking on aspects of the group identity as our own e.g. taking on the group’s norms of behaviour, wearing clothes that fit the group and adopting the opinions and attitudes of the group.
Social Comparison occurs between our group and other groups that share something in common with us, these are the out group – in order to make our in-group seem good, we make unfair negative comparisons to the out group.
Evaluation of Social Identity Theory
Tajfel et al (1970/71) study of minimal groups
The aim of Tajfel’s experiment was to demonstrate that putting people into groups (categorisation) is sufficient for people to discriminate in favour of their own group and against members of the other group.
The study consisted of two laboratory experiments.
In the second experiment the participants were 64 boys, 14 and 15 years old from a comprehensive school in a suburb of Bristol. All of the boys in each of the groups were from the same house in the same form at the school, so that they knew each other well before the experiment.
At first the boys were brought together in a lecture room and were asked their preference of two paintings. The boys thought they were categorised by their preference of paintings by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. In fact half of the participants were assigned at random to the ‘Klee group’ and half to the ‘Kandinsky group’.
The participants were taken to separate cubicles and told which group they were in. The boys were given a booklet of matrices and told that the task would consist of giving to others rewards and penalties in real money. The boys would not know the identity of the individuals to whom they would be assigning these rewards and penalties since everyone would be given a code number.
The value of each point they were rewarding was a tenth of a penny.
Each row of the matrix was labelled “These are reward and penalties for member no. ….. of your group” or “….. of the other group”. The participants had to indicate their choices by ticking one box in each matrix.
Tajfel found that when the boys were choosing between two boys in the same group, choices tended to be made on the basis of maximum fairness.
When the choice was between one boy in their in-group and one boy in their out group the boys discriminated in favour of the in-group.
Interestingly when given the choice of maximising the joint profits for both groups the boys tended to choose the option of maximum difference, whereby they gave fewer points to somebody in their group to ensure that a boy in the other group gained even less points.
Tajfel concluded that inter-group discrimination is easy to trigger off and that the very act of categorisation into groups is enough to produce conflict and discrimination.
Evaluation of Tajfel’s study of minimal groups