Understanding Sexism, Prejudice, and Social Bias
Sexism or gender discrimination is prejudice or discrimination based on a person’s sex or gender.
Key Concepts in Prejudice and Discrimination
- In-group: A social group to which a person psychologically identifies as being a member.
- Out-group: A social group with which an individual does not identify.
- Cultural Stereotypes: Collective views of social groups.
- Social Categorization: Classifying people into groups based on similar characteristics.
- Primary Social Categories: Close-knit groups, typically small scale, including intimate relationships, and usually long-lasting.
Automatic Categorization and Bias
- Solo Status: Women and men expecting to perform a task as part of a group report very different concerns when they anticipate solo status.
- Stereotype: A thought that can be adopted about specific types of individuals or certain ways of doing things.
- Just World Belief: People’s tendency to believe that the world is just and that people get what they deserve.
- Illusory Correlation: Perceiving a relationship between variables (typically people, events, or behaviors) even when no such relationship exists.
- Subtyping: A type B is a subtype of A if every function that can be invoked on an object of type A can also be invoked on an object of type B.
- Homogeneity Effect (Out-group): One’s perception of out-group members as more similar to one another than are in-group members.
- Ultimate Attribution Error: A group-level attribution error that offers an explanation for how one person views different causes of negative and positive behavior in in-group and out-group members.
- Hypo-descent: Children of a mixed union or mating between members of different socioeconomic groups or ethnic groups are assigned to the subordinate group.
- Model Minority: Members are most often perceived to achieve a higher degree of socioeconomic success than the population average.
Forms of Prejudice and Discrimination
- Prejudice: Prejudgment, or forming an opinion before becoming aware of the relevant facts of a case.
- Right-Wing Authoritarianism: A personality trait conceived by psychologist Bob Altemeyer.
- Social Dominance Orientation (SDO): A personality trait which predicts social and political attitudes, and is a widely used social psychological scale.
- Social Identity Theory: A person’s sense of who they are based on their group membership.
- In-group Bias: A pattern of favoring members of one’s in-group over out-group members.
- Backlash: A strong reaction by a large number of people, especially to a social or political development.
- Relative Deprivation: Being deprived of something to which one believes to be entitled.
- Realistic Group Conflict Theory (RCT): A social psychological model of intergroup conflict. The theory explains how intergroup hostility can arise as a result of conflicting goals and competition over limited resources.
- Terror Management Theory (TMT): Proposes a basic psychological conflict that results from having a desire to live, but realizing that death is inevitable.
- Modern Prejudice: Refers to the subtle negative attitudes that are directed toward stigmatized groups such as African-Americans and gay men and lesbian women.
- Hate Crime: A hate crime (also known as a bias-motivated crime) is a prejudice-motivated crime, often violent, which occurs when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her membership.