The unintended consequences of reducing prejudice
Prejudice and social cognition
Hey all,
Welcome to Human Nature, the illustrated psychology newsletter.
Today’s post is a week early as next week marks the start of the winter holidays for many of us. So this is the final article in the prejudice series, and the last article of the year! Thank you for being here.
Our topic today is the unintended consequences of reducing prejudice.
The unintended consequences of reducing prejudice
So far, we have been looking at ways of reducing prejudice, specifically the contact hypothesis—although there are others (e.g. stereotype disconfirming information, extended contact, perspective taking). The main reason for studying prejudice reduction is the hope that less prejudice and discrimination will eventually lead to more equal societies. However, this doesn’t always seem to be the outcome.
Disadvantaged groups are the principal actors in bringing about social change. But ironically, being less prejudiced towards the advantaged group can lead to the disadvantaged group becoming less aware of social inequalities. A 2009 study by Saguy and colleagues demonstrated this effect experimentally with undergraduate students. Half the students were placed in “advantaged” groups, as they got to decide how to divide the 10 credits earned from the study between themselves and another “disadvantaged” group, who just got to decide how to distribute 10 marbles. In one condition, the disadvantaged and advantaged groups were asked to discuss ways in which their tasks were similar (commonality-focused contact), while in the other condition they talked about what made their tasks different (difference-focused contact). As expected, students in the commonality-focused contact condition were less aware of the inequalities between their groups. What’s more, the disadvantaged groups in this condition expected the advantaged groups to give them more credits compared to those who were in the difference-focused condition. But there was no significant difference in the way the advantaged groups distributed the credits between the two contact conditions, in which they displayed significant ingroup bias.
So although reduced prejudiced leads to more positive attitudes towards the outgroup, this does not always translate to action. Dixon, Durrheim and Tredoux (2007) named this phenomenon the principle-implementation gap, whereby acceptance of intergroup equality by the advantaged group is accompanied by opposition to interventions that would actually bring about such equality.
This brings us to the end of our series on prejudice and social cognition. The motivation behind this choice of topic was to try and bring some clarity to the increasingly divided and conflict-ridden world we find ourselves in today. Now that we’ve reached the end, I feel like I have barely scratched the surface and am left with more questions than when I started. It seems that understanding the nature of prejudice and ways of reducing it is only the starting point in explaining the conflicts and divisions of today’s world. All I can hope for is that the articles in this series helped you make a little more sense of the prejudice you encounter in your own life and made you reflect on ways you can help reduce it.
Thank you for reading, see you in the next year.
Sources:
It seems as if no matter how much progress is made on the path towards equality and tolerance, prejudice and discrimination stubbornly persist all across the world. However, in order to combat prejudice, we must first understand how it works. In this series of Human Nature, we explore the mechanisms behind prejudiced thinking and behaviour through the lens of social psychology.