Prejudice is an affective feeling towards a person or group member based solely on that person's group membership. The word is often used to refer to preconceived, usually unfavourable, feelings towards people or a person because of their political affiliation, sex, gender, beliefs, values, social class, age, disability, religion, sexuality, race/ethnicity, language, nationality, beauty, occupation, education, criminality, sport team affiliation or other personal characteristics. In this case, it refers to a positive or negative evaluation of another person based on that person's perceived group membership.
Group dynamics is a system of behaviors and psychological processes occurring within a social group, or between social groups. The study of group dynamics can be useful in understanding decision-making behaviour, tracking the spread of diseases in society, creating effective therapy techniques, and following the emergence and popularity of new ideas and technologies. Group dynamics are at the core of understanding racism, sexism, and other forms of social prejudice and discrimination. These applications of the field are studied in psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, epidemiology, education, social work, business, and communication studies.
The out-group homogeneity effect is one's perception of out-group members as more similar to one another than are in-group members, e.g. "they are alike; we are diverse". The term "outgroup homogeneity effect", "outgroup homogeneity bias" or "relative outgroup homogeneity" has been explicitly contrasted with "outgroup homogeneity" in general, the latter referring to perceived outgroup variability unrelated to perceptions of the ingroup.
In-group favoritism, sometimes known as in-group–out-group bias, in-group bias, or intergroup bias, is a pattern of favoring members of one's in-group over out-group members. This can be expressed in evaluation of others, in allocation of resources, and in many other ways.
In sociology and social psychology, an ingroup is a social group to which a person psychologically identifies as being a member. By contrast, an outgroup is a social group with which an individual does not identify. For example, people may find it psychologically meaningful to view themselves according to their race, culture, gender, age, or religion. It has been found that the psychological membership of social groups and categories is associated with a wide variety of phenomena.
System justification theory (SJT) is a theory within social psychology that system-justifying beliefs serve a psychologically palliative function. It proposes that people have several underlying needs, which vary from individual to individual, that can be satisfied by the defense and justification of the status quo, even when the system may be disadvantageous to certain people. People have epistemic, existential, and relational needs that are met by and manifest as ideological support for the prevailing structure of social, economic, and political norms. Need for order and stability, and thus resistance to change or alternatives, for example, can be a motivator for individuals to see the status quo as good, legitimate, and even desirable.
The minimal group paradigm is a methodology employed in social psychology. Although it may be used for a variety of purposes, it is most well known as a method for investigating the minimal conditions required for discrimination to occur between groups. Experiments using this approach have revealed that even arbitrary distinctions between groups, such as preferences for certain paintings or the color of their shirts, can trigger a tendency to favor one's own group at the expense of others, even when it means sacrificing in-group gain.
Group conflict, or hostilities between different groups, is a feature common to all forms of human social organization, and also occurs in social animals. Although group conflict is one of the most complex phenomena studied by social scientists, the history of the human race evidences a series of group-level conflicts that have gained notoriety over the years. For example, from 1820 to 1945, it has been estimated that at least 59 million persons were killed during conflicts between groups of one type or another. Literature suggests that the number of fatalities nearly doubled between the years 1914 to 1964 as a result of further group conflict.
Social dominance theory (SDT) is a theory of intergroup relations that focuses on the maintenance and stability of group-based social hierarchies. According to the theory, group-based inequalities are maintained through three primary intergroup behaviors—specifically institutional discrimination, aggregated individual discrimination, and behavioral asymmetry. SDT proposes that widely shared cultural ideologies provide the moral and intellectual justification for these intergroup behaviors.
Social identity is the portion of an individual's self-concept derived from perceived membership in a relevant social group. As originally formulated by social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner in the 1970s and the 1980s, social identity theory introduced the concept of a social identity as a way in which to explain intergroup behaviour.
In the English language, black sheep is an idiom used to describe an odd or disreputable member of a group, especially within a family. The term stems from the genetic effect in sheep whereby a recessive gene occasionally manifests in the birth of a sheep with black rather than white coloring; these sheep stand out in the flock and their wool was traditionally considered less valuable.
In social psychology, social value orientation (SVO) is a person's preference about how to allocate resources between the self and another person. SVO corresponds to how much weight a person attaches to the welfare of others in relation to the own. Since people are assumed to vary in the weight they attach to other peoples' outcomes in relation to their own, SVO is an individual difference variable. The general concept underlying SVO has become widely studied in a variety of different scientific disciplines, such as economics, sociology, and biology under a multitude of different names.
Optimal distinctiveness is a social psychological theory seeking to understand ingroup–outgroup differences. It asserts that individuals desire to attain an optimal balance of inclusion and distinctiveness within and between social groups and situations. These two motives are in constant opposition with each other; when there is too much of one motive, the other must increase in order to counterbalance it and vice versa. The theory of optimal distinctiveness was first proposed by Dr. Marilynn B. Brewer in 1991 and extensively reviewed in 2010 by Drs. Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Cynthia L. Pickett, and Marilynn Brewer.
Collective narcissism extends the concept of individual narcissism onto the social level of self. It is a tendency to exaggerate the positive image and importance of a group the individual belongs to – i.e. the ingroup. While the classic definition of narcissism focuses on the individual, collective narcissism asserts that one can have a similar excessively high opinion of a group, and that a group can function as a narcissistic entity. Collective narcissism is related to ethnocentrism. However, ethnocentrism primarily focuses on self-centeredness at an ethnic or cultural level, while collective narcissism is extended to any type of ingroup, beyond just cultures and ethnicities. While ethnocentrism is an assertion of the ingroup's supremacy, collective narcissism is a self-defensive tendency to invest unfulfilled self-entitlement into a belief about ingroup's uniqueness and greatness. Thus, the ingroup is expected to become a vehicle of actualisation of frustrated self-entitlement. When applied to a national group, collective narcissism is similar to nationalism: a desire for national supremacy. Positive overlap between ingroup satisfaction and collective narcissism suppresses collective narcissistic intergroup hostility.
The common ingroup identity model is a theoretical model proposed by Samuel L. Gaertner and John F. Dovidio that outlines the processes through which intergroup bias may be reduced. Intergroup bias is a preference for one's in-group over the out-group. Derived from the social identity approach to intergroup behaviour, the common ingroup identity model is rooted in the process of social categorization, or how people conceive of group boundaries. The model describes how intergroup bias can be reduced if members of different groups can be induced to conceive of themselves to be part of the same group, then they would develop more positive attitudes of the former outgroup members. An individual will change the way they view the out-group through a social categorization process called recategorization where former out-group members become incorporated into individual's representations of the in-group.
There is a great deal of research on the factors that lead to the formation of prejudiced attitudes and beliefs. There is also a lot of research on the consequences of holding prejudiced beliefs and being the target of such beliefs. It is true that advances have been made in understanding the nature of prejudice. A consensus on how to end prejudice has yet to be established, but there are a number of scientifically examined strategies that have been developed in attempt to solve this social issue.
The male warrior hypothesis (MWH) is an evolutionary psychology hypothesis by Professor Mark van Vugt which argues that human psychology has been shaped by between-group competition and conflict. Specifically, the evolutionary history of coalitional aggression between groups of men may have resulted in sex-specific differences in the way outgroups are perceived, creating ingroup vs. outgroup tendencies that are still observable today.
Intergroup relations refers to interactions between individuals in different social groups, and to interactions taking place between the groups themselves collectively. It has long been a subject of research in social psychology, political psychology, and organizational behavior.
In social psychology, a metastereotype is a stereotype that members of one group have about the way in which they are stereotypically viewed by members of another group. In other words, it is a stereotype about a stereotype. They have been shown to have adverse effects on individuals that hold them, including on their levels of anxiety in interracial conversations. Meta-stereotypes held by African Americans regarding the stereotypes White Americans have about them have been found to be largely both negative and accurate. People portray meta-stereotypes of their ingroup more positively when talking to a member of an outgroup than to a fellow member of their ingroup.
