Nowadays, the world is becoming more globalized, interconnected and heterogeneous. People can no longer interact just with their own type or race, but, on the contrary, must embrace the diversity that surrounds them.
However, as human beings live in groups and act all together as a group, this life style also develops an alternative side of stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination. Stereotypes are related to the cognitive aspect of perception over people, thus defined as beliefs and conceptions on the behavior of different groups.
This paper will evaluate and discuss methods through which an individual person can reduce prejudice and discrimination in society. It will offer theoretical background and empirical evidence, along with certain limitations that restrain the reduction methods.
Introduction
Nowadays, the world is becoming more globalized, interconnected and heterogeneous. People can no longer interact just with their own type or race, but, on the contrary, must embrace the diversity that surrounds them. However, as human beings live in groups and act all together as a group, this life style also develops an alternative side of stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination. Stereotypes are related to the cognitive aspect of perception over people, thus defined as beliefs and conceptions on the behavior of different groups (Hilton & von Hippel, 1996). Prejudice, as Rupert Brown describes it, is a phenomenon established as a consequence of group processes, a socially shared orientation shaped by intergroup relations (Brown, 2010). Lastly, discrimination is more related to behavioral aspects, defined as the different treatment of people based on group affiliation (Sue, 2003). Trying to reduce or even mitigate these constructs is crucial to the 21st century, in order to collaborate and contribute to a better world. Reducing discrimination can be done both on individual and group levels. This paper will evaluate and discuss methods through which an individual person can reduce prejudice and discrimination in society. It will offer theoretical background and empirical evidence, along with certain limitations that restrain the reduction methods.
Two scholars in the field of prejudice and discrimination, Whitley and Kite, offer and overview of solutions that the individual can exert in order to reduce prejudice. Since individuals are part of the society, these solutions help them reduce prejudice in society overall, thorugh every person’s actions. But what they argue, firstly, is that this reduction cannot occur unless the individual recognizes his discriminative behavior. Solutions and theories to reduce discrimnation at the individual level are based on emotional and cognitive processes that results in “changes in intergroup attitudes” (Whitley & Kite, 2009). These processes are stereotype suppression and self-regulation.
Stereotype Suppression
This process describes the situation when the desire to avoid biased responses makes the individual to push the unwanted, generally-discriminating thoughts out of his/her mind and replace them with other, non-stereotypic, individuating thoughts (Monteith et al., 2010). The theoretical background on stereotype suppression started in the early 1990s with the famous Skinhead study of Macrae and colleagues (1995). Participants were divided in two groups, one of them being told to suppress stereotypes on writing about the life of a “skinhead” person and the other one receiving no special instructions. Obviously, the people writing under no instructions showed more stereotypic evidence in their writings. However, with this experiment, they also showed the drawback of stereotype suppression. After having to write another passage on a skinhead, without any special instructions, the participants who previously suppressed their thoughts manifested much higher rates of stereotyping than the other group. This finding suggests the presence of an enhanced return of suppressed thoughts, called rebound effect (Whitley & Kite, 2009). They even extended this consequence from the cognitive aspects to the behavioral aspects, through their second essay, involving the same manipulation, except for telling participants they would sit in the same room with a skinhead. The suppression condition participants sat farther away from the skinhead male (Monteith, Arthur, & McQueary, 2010).
There are multiple explanations why rebounds occur. The first one, proposed by Daniel Wegner, implies the existence of two levels of thought suppression: the conscious attempt to reject thoughts and the unconscious monitoring process that keeps the thought from breaking in the conscious level. When suppression is ended in the conscious level, the thought kept at the unconscious level bounces even stronger, producing higher levels of discrimination. The second explanation is related to the cognitive effort of self-control. The repeated efforts to suppress the stereotype eventually depletes the cognitive resource, failing the control (Whitley & Kite, 2009). However, the limitation of the Macrae study is that the chosen outgroup did not reflect any strong social norms on the undesirability of discriminating it (skinhead). With a more sensitive group (blacks), some scholars would say there would have been smaller rebound effects (Brown, 2010).
The positive part is that the rebound effect can be omitted. Monteith and colleagues proved that this happens when the suppressor is low in prejudice, because of low probabilities of stereotype activation (Monteith, Arthur, & McQueary, 2010). Even highly prejudiced people can have low rebound effects when the social norm against acting in a discriminative way is strong (Whitley & Kite, 2009). Although Monteith promises no long-term change in the behavior of the suppressors, one might still agree that stereotype suppression is an efficient individual process of prejudice reduction, especially when it is accompanied by a low level of prejudice, as the researcher proved.
Self-Regulation Model (SRM)
It is perhaps the most important process of reducing discrimination as more scholars assign it a long-term effect. This model was proposed by Monteith and colleagues in 1993 and explains how people who consider themselves unprejudiced get habituated to the situations when they might use a stereotype and through self-regulatory acts stop the stereotypes and replace them with unprejudiced responses (Monteith et al., 2010). The graphical interpretation of this model (see Appendix) describes two main branches of whether the person possesses or not the control cues for regulating the stereotype.
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- Citation du texte
- Vlad Popa-Florea (Auteur), 2012, How to reduce discrimination and prejudice in society?, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/313911
