In the second chapter of the book, Whistling Vivaldi, the author, Claude M. Steele, makes a number of fair assessments on how people’s prejudices and preconceived notions can interfere with someone’s ability to live up to their full potential. Even those who don’t notices these preconceptions can be unintentionally placing them on others, unwittingly experiencing them, or both. There are several key points that Steele raises in his writings which reinforce the aforementioned thoughts, one being that the students are unconsciously aware of the biases they place on themselves, another element is that when students feel bigotry being placed upon them, they oftentimes underperform, and lastly the lack of balance which can be found in experiments.
Throughout the history of the United States, prejudice has always been creeping around the dark corners at night, and even during the day time at the local grocery store. Prejudice is a negative attitude toward members of a group. This is heavily ingrained into our society. In fact, within the article from The New York Times, How Kids Learn Prejudice, by Katherine D. Kinzler, depicts how children soak up any information given to them, especially from parents. Prejudice leaves America wondering how can we improve our own humanity, involving how to decrease the level of prejudice that wanders around our cities and towns.
While the research found that White individuals did rate White targets as more similar to themselves, participants who exhibited a lower prejudice score rated Mexican-American targets as friendlier than White targets, therefore supporting the interaction in our second analysis (Goebel & Cole, 1975). This research is consistent with our study as White participants rated Black targets as significantly more likeable compared to when Black participants rated White targets. While we did not test for prejudice in our study, students in Liberal Arts institutions may be more socially aware and possibly lack prejudice especially at Mount Holyoke, which has a diverse campus. Moreover, other research examining facial exposure White individuals showed higher likeability of other-race faces more than their own-race faces, if previously exposed to those other-race faces. In this study, the other-race faces were images of Black and Korean targets (Zebrowitz, White & Wieneke, 2008).
Spread of negative stereotypes Negative stereotypes have been created by us, as a society, we have allowed ourselves to live with this misconceptions that impact all of us in a certain way. We have contributed to those beliefs that say that social status, income class and ethnicity define our identity. In fact, we have been and also have prejudged others at a certain point in our lives, we prejudge people we don’t know and also the ones we think we know like our own family members. In “The Achievement of Desire” by Richard Rodriguez he discusses his personal experience on how he stereotyped himself and also his family.
Even in interracial environments such as schools, that interracial contact with whites did not negatively affect Blacks’ self-esteem. The above findings are especially pertinent to the study of African American women and self-esteem. Black women were once predicted to have low self-esteem because scholars thought they internalized demeaning messages of themselves and measured themselves against a white
One would think prejudice is a thing of the past. Unfortunately, that is not the case, prejudice is still a common factor in todays society. Vincent N. Parrillo’s essay “Causes of Prejudice,” helped me to understand how we are affected not just psychologically but in a sociological way as well, as John A. Camacho explains in his A Few Bad Apples opinion piece published in the Pacific Daily News. Both forms of prejudice are continued to be explained through Stud Turkel’s “C.P Ellis,” he gives us an understanding of psychological and sociological prejudice through C.P Ellis’own experiences. This furthers our understanding on how we can be affected by both psychological and sociological prejudices.
Baron et al. (2006) examined the relationship between implicit race preferences and explicit race attitudes at various ages (6, 10 and adulthood) to understand the origins of implicit racial preferences. They found that implicit Pro-White Anti-Black preferences develop as early as age six and their explicit racial attitudes correlate accordingly. It was also concluded that all age groups exhibited an implicit preference towards the expected bias, but, by the age of 10 and onwards, participants expressed a more egalitarian attitude when
In Eugene V. Debs’ speech, he asserts that nurturing his fellow man is a moral obligation because he would be overcome by guilt if he ignored suffering. The fault in his argument lies in the concept of universal obligation caused by guilt. A sense of ethical duty is shaped by personal experiences, so an altruistic inclination is not a universal value. Because moral obligation changes from person to person based on their personal experiences and values, self-sacrifice is not a universal trait. Some groups feel as though sacrificing one’s own priorities for the less fortunate is negligent, to one’s family, self, or society.
During this course, we have discussed at length about how stereotypes affect a racial group. Most of the time, stereotyping a racial group causes tension and brings about negative and damaging effects. Almost all Americans have heard the stereotype “all Asian Americans are smart”. The model minority stereotype is the cultural expectation placed on Asian Americans as group to be smart (naturally good at science and math), wealthy, and hardworking”.
Hopefully, as time goes on, more books and interesting curriculum will be written for the anti-bias education programs. With a wider availability of curriculum , perhaps more bias issues will be reduce and the world will become more
The purpose of the article by Wells and Olson (2001) was to investigate research on the other-race effect and its causes as well as propose possible reforms to the justice system to deal with problems caused by the other-race effect. This article is relevant to the fields of law and psychology because cross-racial identification happens often in the justice system and can result in wrongful conviction. The other-race effect is not an absolute, other facts determined by many factors such the eyewitness’ experience with face from a different race, how distinctive the facial features are, delay between encoding of the face and recognition, among others. However there are some concerns with the design of many of the experiments used to test the
Social categorization theory developed by Turner (1978) describes the categorization of people based on salient attributes like gender, ethnicity or age, resulting in stereotyping on the basis of these differences. Social categorization theory posits that similarities and dissimilarities of demographics can lead formation of different group with resulting effects on member of in-group favorably themselves to the detriment of members of out-groups social (Turner, Brown & Tajfel, 1979). Self-categorization theory explains when individuals categorize themselves by assigning to themselves the manners, actions and other characteristics they link with association within a specific group (Schmitt, Branscombe, Silvia, Garcia, & Spears. 2016). By means of self-categorization and membership of a group, people cultivate a social identity that functions as a social-cognitive scheme (customs, standards and attitudes) for their group associated action. The tendency is for the perceiver to consider these attributes as vital to his or her own personality and thus use these attributes to label others (Hoffman Harburg, & Maier, 2014).
A broad topic of study focuses on the attitudes of ethnic minority adolescents toward racial and/or ethnic groups other than their own, particularly relating to stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination. Many people agree with the fact that ethnic identity development is “as fundamental to the establishment of an adult’s healthy self-concept
In fact, African Americans are believed to have, albeit an extremely basic, awareness of racial discrimination as early as in the third grade (Rowley, Burchinal, Roberts, & Zeizel, 2008). It appears that this developmental age is the most vulnerable time for the children to learn about racism, as the third grade group scored higher on expecting racial discrimination in their life than that of the fifth grade group. However, an interesting find was that the children believed that having more African American friends put them at a higher risk of facing discrimination. (Rowley, et al. 2008) This can cause a child to feel the need to limit the amount of African American friends they have while simultaneously preferring to make friends of other races.
Previous studies have shown its implication to the phenomenon of self-serving bias. Showing that cultural differences, degree of relationship, protection of individual’s self-esteem, role of individual, academic achievement, and expectancy are factors that is affected and can affect an individual’s behavior. However, in addressing the question on the explanations of why people display self-serving bias. Some researchers suggest that self-serving bias is driven by their motivation process or they are driven by the manner on how they make judgments (Anderson & Slusher, 1986; Tetlock & Levy, 1982).
