In an intergroup context, examine the role of social stereotypes in prejudice and discrimination.

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-Social Psychology                                   Krystal WONG (404896)

                                                                       

In an intergroup context, examine the role of social stereotypes in prejudice and discrimination.

  Among all of the social cognition, stereotyping is the most obvious effect in intergroup behaviour. Intergroup behaviour is the behaviour among individuals that is regulated by those individuals’ awareness of and identification with different social groups. Social influence and group processes are normally occurring within groups, but wherever there is a group to which people belong(i.e. ingroup), there are other groups to which those people do not belong (i.e. outgroup). (Hogg, 2005) In the ingroup differentiations hypothesis, people tend to perceive members of an outgroup as highly similar to each other whereas they tend to see all kinds of individual differences among members of their own groups. (Linville et al, 1989). The following essay will be focus on stereotyping, following by describing different kinds of stereotypes and how it leads to prejudices and discriminations. Apart from that, how does it exist in an intergroup and how it is affecting.

  First of all, what is stereotype? Stereotype is a shared belief about personality traits and behaviours of group members. According to Allport and Brislin, stereotypes are ‘categories about people’. (Allport, 1854; Brislin, 1981) It is including gender, religion, race, and perceptions of specific individuals will be influenced by what people think they know about the group as a whole. (Cleveland, Stockdale, & Murphy, 2000) For example, people X meet a friend which is a BBC (British Born Chinese), but this BBC was actually a thief and has been stealing so many things from X and keeps on lying. People X may then concluded that all BBC are thieves and are bad friends. However, stereotypes are not necessary a bad attitude, it can be positive as well. Taking the same example, if people X meet a BBC friend who is very friendly, warm and kind, there is a higher chance that people X will rate all BBC are nice people and worth to be friend with.

   Stereotypes are usually based on the visual differences between groups. It is, however, slow to change. For example, in sexism, women are defined in holding less powerful positions in business, government and employment. Although there are some women taking powerful positions in an employment, it doesn’t change their stereotyping at all. Sexism is still occurring and women are still being labelled as less powerful in positions. Most of the research on sexism focuses on women, Fiske (1998) stated that ‘The typical woman is seen as nice but incompetent, the typical man as competent but maybe not so nice.’

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   According to Brislin, stereotypes should not be viewed as a sign of abnormality (Brislin, 1993), however, stereotypes can also lead to prejudice and discrimination. Prejudice is a negative attitude toward a social group and discrimination is a negative action toward another individual based on their membership of a particular social group.

   The following parts are going to describe how prejudices appear in an intergroup and are going to mention different kinds of prejudices and discriminations.

   In the Minimal Group Paradigm, which is carried out by Tajfel et al. (1971), took British schoolboys ...

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