Outgroup Perception & Prejudice Intergroup behaviour

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Outgroup Perception Prejudice

• Intergroup behaviour individuals belonging to
  one group interact (collectively or individually)
  with another group or its members in terms of
  their group identification.
• Outgroups large groups OR social categories.
• Prejudice/discrimination attitude/behaviour

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3. Intergroup perspectives

• Social Identity perspective Analysis of
  prejudice based on social identity theory and
  self-categorisation theory.
• Emphasis on
• social context within which groups interact
• nature of power/status differentials which
  historically exist between groups.
• Processes of categorizing and stereotyping are
  functional not because they simplify reduce
  information, but because they enrich and
  elaborate our perception of the social
  environment and our place within it.
• These cognitive processes orient us to the
  actualities of social life and the nature of
  group relations that exist at any one time.

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Discontinuity hypothesis

• A psychological discontinuity between people
  acting as individuals and people acting as group
  members (Asch, 1952 Sherif, 1967 Tajfel
  Turner, 1979).
• Self-categorization can occur
• as an individual in contrast to other
  individuals (personal identity)
• as a member of a social category in contrast to
  other categories (social identity).

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• When social identity salient (i.e.,
  psychologically operative) this is associated
  with an accentuation of
• perceptual similarities within the in-group
• accentuation of perceptual differences between
  groups.
• also qualitative change in the content of the
  self depersonalization that makes collective
  behaviour (e.g., prejudice, discrimination,
  cohesion, co-operation and mutual influence)
  possible.

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• Therefore, not possible to extrapolate directly
  from individual processes to explain prejudice.
• a psychologically rational and valid product of
  the perceived social structure of intergroup
  relations.
• arising from, and reflecting, the
  subjectively-apprehended relationships between
  groups in society.
• (Asch, 1952 Sherif, 1967 Tajfel, 1969 Tajfel
  Turner, 1979).

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Reasons for intergroup bias

• Cognitive general biases in cognitive
  processing.
• Motivational Social Identity theory Tajfel 1982
  
• social categorization initiates basic
  motivational processes in individuals that induce
  intergroup competition.
• Key assumption People are motivated to
  establish and maintain self-esteem.
• As various group memberships have esteem
  implications, one should affiliate with
  attractive groups and view ones own as
  positively as possible.

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Real groups Realistic group conflict (Sherif
Sherif) 

• Intergroup boundaries distinction between
  us/them more salient.
• Individual usually has knowledge about in/out
  groups and enduring feelings of identification
  with in-group.
• History of highly emotional interactions and in
  some cases conflict.
• Real groups have salient cues for social
  categorization.
• May be segregated in space, have different
  cultural norms.
• Added to learned biases and stereotypes acquired
  through socialization.

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Outgroup homogeneity

• Outgroup perceived as more homogenous (vs.
  ingroup variability)
• Why?
• Limited contact
• Memory

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Biased explanation for positive and negative
behaviours

• Attributions made for in-group behaviour.
• Opportunity effect for out-group behaviour.
• Ultimate attribution error (Pettigrew 1979) for
  out-group members.
• Maas et al. 1989 Linguistic Intergroup Bias Effect

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• Intergroup rather than interpersonal responding
• How to change?
• Discourage use of categories and encourage
  diversity which sharpens boundaries
• which encourages perception of difference ...

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Distinct stages of theoretical empirical
development

• each influenced by the social and political
  milieu of the time
• white superiority and minority backwardness
• individual personality structures
• unconscious psychological defences
• human irrational and faulty cognitive processes
  and
• expressions of group interests and intergroup
  relations
• Historical analysis shows not only the role
  psychology has played in aiding our understanding
  of prejudice
• but also how as a discipline, psychology has
  contributed to and reproduced racist theory and
  practice.

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Changing nature of racism prejudice

• Old-fashioned or blatant racism based on notions
  of racial superiority
• Symbolic or modern racism based on wider
  ideological values, e.g., work ethic,
  individualism, and self-reliance.
• subtle, covert, contradictory ambivalent.
• Variability in expression of racism and prejudice
• - means insidious and resilient to change
• - also suggests a dynamic process is in
  operation.

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http//www.paveepoint.ie/pav_irerac_3.html

• Denial of Racism
• willingness to acknowledge widespread prejudice
  discrimination towards Travellers in Irish
  society, yet still strong resistance among the
  Irish public, to calling the treatment of
  Travellers racist. The reasons for this denial of
  racism are complex and varied.
• e.g., a tendency to see racism only in relation
  to skin colour. so Travellers cannot experience
  racism because they are white, are not 'a
  different race' nor a different nationality.
• This denial, confusion, as well as a tendency to
  blame the victim is evident in this excerpt
• "Ireland is a racially homogenous country with no
  ethnic minority groups. As a consequence there
  are no racial problems of the kind experienced in
  countries with such groups. Neither is there a
  large presence of foreigners. . . the position
  could alter if the influx became sustained. . .
  there is however a minority group of travelling
  people giving rise to some of the problems
  associated with racism.
• submission by Irish MEP to the Committee of
  Inquiry into Racism Xenophobia 1990

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• The mistaken tendency to equate 'race' with
  colour has been refuted by many academics such as
  Charles Husband, who refers to this quote from
  Charles Kingsley's correspondence about his visit
  to Ireland in 1860
• ... "I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw
  along that hundred miles of horrible country ...
  to see white chimpanzees is dreadful if they
  were black, one would not feel it so much, but
  their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are
  as white as ours".
• This quotation reflects the racialisation process
  whereby members of a group, in this instance the
  (white) Irish, are identified as belonging to a
  'race' category on the basis of fixed
  characteristics which they are assumed to
  possess. Central to such race-thinking are
  notions of superiority and inferiority, and of
  purity and pollution.
• Racism is more than a prejudicial attitude
  involves a pattern of social relations,
  structures and an ideological discourse which
  reflects unequal power between groups.

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Role of the media in racialisation process and in
reproduction of racism towards Travellers.

• Newspaper accounts illustrate how the negative
  portrayal of Irish Travellers contributes to the
  ideological racist discourse.
• A headline in crime section Time To Get Tough On
  Tinker Terror 'Culture'. According to the article
  by, Gardai believe that Travellers are
  responsible for over 90 of attacks on the rural
  elderly. The writer states that Traveller culture
  ... "is a life of appetite ungoverned by
  intellect ..... It is a life worse than the life
  of beasts, for beasts at least are guided by
  wholesome instinct. Traveller life is without the
  ennobling intellect of man or the steadying
  instinct of animals. This tinker "culture" is
  without achievement, discipline, reason or
  intellectual ambition. It is a morass. And one of
  the surprising things about it is that not every
  individual bred in this swamp turns out bad. Some
  individuals among the tinkers find the will not
  to become evil". (Sunday Independent 28/1/1996
  Mary Ellen Synon)
• Another sensational headline Patience Runs Thin
  When Uncivilised Travellers Spill Blood. The
  writer gave a detailed account of the feud in a
  cemetery and concluded that "It just doesn't
  happen in a civilised society". He then went on
  to justify his use of the term "knacker" "Where
  I come from the word "knacker" doesn't mean
  someone of any specific socio-economic or ethnic
  background. It means someone who behaves in a way
  that society abhors. And that's what the people
  who desecrated a Tuam graveyard last June were,
  knackers and scumbags". The same journalist
  insists on using similar language in other
  reports, and the sub-editor used the offensive
  term in the headline. "Good relations knackered
  (Sunday Independent 25/5/1997, Brendan O'Connor )
• The conflict is not between settled and
  Traveller. It's between decent people and
  'knackers'.(Sunday Independent 31 August 1996)

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• The anti-Traveller discourse features frequently
  in both national and especially local newspapers
  and radio. Very often, as in the following, local
  politicians are being quoted
• "They are dirty and unclean. Travelling people
  have no respect for themselves and their
  children". (County Councillor quoted in Irish
  Times, 13th March, 1991)
• "These people have been a constant headache for
  towns and cities throughout the country". (County
  Councillor quoted in Cork Examiner, 13th June,
  1990)
• "Killarney is literally infested by these
  people". (County Councillor quoted in Cork
  Examiner, 18th July, 1989)
• "They are a constant problem, moving from one
  open area to another and creating problems".
  (County Councillor quoted in Cork Examiner, 13th
  June, 1990)
• "Deasy suggests birth control to limit traveller
  numbers" (Headline in Irish Times, Friday, June
  14, 1996.)
• In the Dail Report column referring to remarks by
  Mr. Austin Deasy, T.D. Fine Gael, the deputy is
  reported as saying that the problem of Travellers
  would not be solved by providing more halting
  sites but by ensuring that Travellers' numbers be
  contained by birth control and assimilation into
  existing housing estates.
• "Traveller tradition not a divine right. Brendan
  O'Connor applauds Councillor Ann Devitt for
  suggesting that Traveller culture is not
  sacrosanct, and that the time has come for them
  to change their way of life. "(Sunday Independent
  June 15 1997)
• "The sooner the shotguns are at the ready and
  these travelling people are put out of our county
  the better. They are not our people, they aren't
  natives." Remarks of a Fianna Fail Councillor at
  a Waterford County Council meeting. (Sunday
  Independent, 14 April 1996)

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• These samples show how Travellers are perceived
  treated in Irish society. Such coverage and the
  social relations associated with it constitutes a
  form of racism.
• "the powerful discourses of the press contribute
  to the creation of an ideological context which
  legitimates coercive state policies, everyday
  discriminatory practices, and ultimately violence
  against Travellers" (Helleiner, 1994).
• According to Helleiner
• "While press reports of the 1960's and much of
  the 1970's, were explicit in their portrayal of
  the Travellers and the travelling way of life as
  problematic, during the 1980's overtly racist
  discourses were increasingly replaced by more
  sophisticated discourses of exclusion."

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• this claim of a shift from overt to more covert
  racism was not borne out in the 1990's coverage.
• "Irish people's prejudice against Travellers is
  one of caste-like apartheid." (McGrath 1996)
• Kenny in her investigation into the interaction
  between Traveller ethnic identity and schooling
  concludes that "dominant sedentary society and
  its institutions remain the instigators and
  maintainers of institutional and interpersonal
  racism and exclusion, which has pressured
  Travellers over a long time-span into distorted
  performances"(Kenny, 1997).
• Quite clearly, a racialisation process inferring
  the inferiority of Travellers is the outcome of
  media and political discourse.

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• Moral, psychological and cultural approaches tend
  to depoliticise the issue of racism by focusing
  almost exclusively on individual attitudes and
  behaviours dislocated from their social,
  political, economical, and historical contexts.
• The psychological approach is a necessary but not
  sufficient tool for understanding the phenomenon
  of racism
• "Racism, far from being the simple delusion of a
  bigoted and ignorant minority, is a set of
  beliefs whose structure arises from the deepest
  levels of our lives - from the fabric of
  assumptions we make about the world, ourselves,
  and others, and from the patterns of our
  fundamental social activities."
• "Racist psychology is a prerequisite of racial
  institutions, and racist institutions engender a
  racist psychology." (Kovel, 1971)
• Anti-racism does not mean a denial of differences
  but does challenge the social meanings and
  interpretations attributed to them.

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4. Institutional levels What does critical
social psychology have to say?

• Prejudices are acquired and shared within the
  dominant group through everyday conversation
  institutional text and talk discourse.
• This discourse serves to express, convey,
  legitimate or indeed to conceal and deny negative
  ethnic attitudes.
• Not a form of individual discourse but social
  group discourse Expresses not individual
  opinion but socially shared representations.

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Critical discursive understanding of racism vs.
positivist understanding

• How to understand
• stable attitudes amenable to measurement by
  questionnaire scales
• study of discourse/everyday talk to understand
  the implications of particular ways of talking
• Location
• intrapsychic vs. social
• cognitive processes vs. language practices,
  ideologies, social practices
• Psychological interior vs. public display

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Discourse

• A group of statements which provide a language
  for talking about a topic and a way of producing
  a particular kind of knowledge about a topic.
  Thus the term refers both to the production of
  knowledge through language and representation and
  the way that knowledge is institutionalized,
  shaping social practices and setting new
  practices into play
• (du Gay 199643).

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Discourse analytical approach

• Reconstructs the social cognitions we hold about
  other groups, e.g.,
• Positive self-presentation and negative other-
  presentation
• Group membership, in-group allegiances
• Various conditions for the reproduction of the
  dominant group and their dominance in virtually
  all social, political and cultural domains.

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Attention to significant structuring effects of
language

• Analyses what people actually say in everyday
  communication.
• Highly critical of individualistic and social
  cognitive accounts of prejudice and racism
• By viewing prejudice as the natural and
  inevitable result of cognition (that is
  perception, thought, group categorization),
  prejudice itself becomes natural and inevitable
  (Billig 1985).
• Locates racism within dominant institutional
  practices and discourses within a society.

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Social categorization and stereotyping?

• Not fixed and preformed cognitive structures
  located in people's heads, nor internal cognitive
  processes.
• Rather discursive practices flexibly articulated
  within particular social contexts to do certain
  things, (e.g., to blame, accuse, excuse,
  persuade, justify).
• Something we do in talk in order to accomplish
  social actions.
• Fine-grained analysis of what is actually said in
  everyday talk and interaction. The identification
  of discursive repertoires and resources used in
  race talk has found that the language of
  contemporary racism is flexible, ambivalent and
  contradictory.

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• Stresses the particulars of particular racisms.
• (the racism of Thatcher is not the racism of a
  skinhead stereotype)
• Stress difference, e.g., between US and Dutch
  conceptualisations, (e.g., see Essed 1991,
  Understanding Everyday Racism An
  Interdisciplinary Study, London Sage.
• Work in less well-researched locations, (e.g.,
  Wetherell Potters (1992) discourse analysis of
  racism in New Zealand, work in Australia by
  Augoustinos and LeCouteur 2001)
• Useful for exposing the passing reasonableness of
  racist rhetoric, the way it features all the
  complex, meandering and self-referential
  qualities of any talk.

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• Explore discourse in the broadest sense
• not just racism the product but also racism the
  production,
• i.e., how is it built into education systems,
  cultural forms (films, novels, television).
• Tourism is a prime site of racist production,
  (airport souvenirs).

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Reading

• Required
• Hogg Vaughan Chapters 10 11
• Tuffin, K. (2005) Understanding Critical Social
  Psychology. Sage. Chapter 5 on Prejudice. Also
  Chapter 4 for Discursive work.
• Pheonix, A. (2007) Chapter 6 Intragroup
  processes Social Identity Theory. In D.
  Langdridge S. Taylor (Eds.). Critical Readings
  in Social Psychology. OUP.