Different forms of prejudice
Equality and Diversity Forum Seminar Series
Summary note of event
Welcome by Sarah Spencer, Chair of the Equality and Diversity Forum
Welcome to the second in our seminar series looking at the fundamental causes of discrimination and inequality and some of the possible policies to address it. We are doing this in the context of the two reviews, the Cabinet Office Review that Trevor Phillips is chairing and the Department of Trade and Industry’s Discrimination Law Review, and in order to enable us all to think through some of the underlying issues and get an opportunity to discuss them. I am delighted that Jenny Watson, the new chair of the EOC is chairing the seminar for us.
Introduction by Jenny Watson, Seminar Chair and Chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission
Thank you Sarah. First I want to welcome our two speakers Miles Hewstone and Liz Kelly. Miles will talk first, and then Liz. Then we will have time for discussion. But what I want to do is to follow on from Sarah – obviously these seminars are part of what we might call an opportunity for us to do ‘blue sky’ thinking; the kind of thing we don't always get time to do in the day-to-day rush of responding to this or putting in a response to that. The topic for today is a fascinating one around different forms of prejudice. And looking at prejudice, and hatred and stigma, which obviously form some of the key causes of discrimination, looking at how good our understanding is of the forms which those take, do they operate in similar ways across different equality ‘strands’ – to use that rather technical phrase? Are some people more likely to have particular prejudices than others? What do we know about how prejudice and hatred can be tackled and what gets in the way of us asking the right questions about prejudice and hatred?
It's obviously pertinent to ask that in the context of recent events where we have seen a young black man in Liverpool, Anthony Walker, killed because of the colour of his skin, yet another young black man killed. There is the launch of a campaign this month, which Liz has been involved in and may talk more about, against violence against women as rape convictions are at an all time low. There is the shocking Amnesty International research which shows that many people blame women when rape does happen and with domestic violence one of the most common causes of death and serious injury for women. We have seen a gay man killed on Clapham Common from a homophobic murder and we have seen vitriolic campaigns against Gypsies and travellers particularly around the election campaign when there was particularly nasty media coverage. That's just the tip of the iceberg, examples of some of the prejudice and hatred that's out there. I hope this seminar will give us an opportunity to have our thinking challenged and to have a discussion and perhaps answer some of those questions as Sarah says against the backdrop of the two reviews that are currently taking place. It would be remiss of me to go further without first of all thanking Simmons & Simmons who provided the venue and refreshments.
Welcome by Janet Gaymer, Simmons & Simmons
Briefly I would like to welcome you. We are delighted to be able to play a very small part in the review and contribute to the thinking and I'm sure we are all interested in the answers. It is good to see you here. Thank you.
Professor Miles Hewstone (see accompanying Powerpoint presentation)
Thank you very much for inviting me. I will say almost nothing about Northern Ireland because I have learnt from horrible experience that most people over here, aren't very interested in life over there! So, that wasn't in my thinking today, though if anyone would like to ask me about that specifically please do. I have prepared a handout which shows all the slides from my talk I will therefore zip through some of the topics. I really had no idea what would be useful to you. It's a very different kind of talk than what I normally give. I will zip through things and give you a chance to ask me questions about what seems possibly useful, interesting or even wrong to you at the end of the talk.
Starting with a brief overview of what I will try to cover, a little bit of clearing up of the terminology we use when we talk about this. ‘Forms of prejudice’ was the topic of the seminar. I want to spend most of the time talking about that and to show you what contemporary social psychologists are up to, what ways they have of conceptualising prejudice today. That is obviously related to how on earth you measure prejudice – if you have a different conception you have to come up with a different way to measure it. I hope that I might be telling you new things about different forms of prejudice that characterise our thinking today and how we think you have to measure it. My real passion in all this is eradicating prejudice and for about 20 years I have worked on this idea of the contact hypothesis – the circumstances under which contact between members of two groups who are normally in conflict or have an antagonistic relationship can be made to view each other more positively. Finally encouraged by the notion of blue skies thinking, I will talk to you about the idea of prejudice in the brain. There is media furore whenever one of these studies is published and it's normally misinterpreted and presented in factually incorrect ways – it might be useful to have a few words from me on that.
So, terminology. When I talk about prejudice, I'm talking about an attitude, when I talk about stereotypes it's beliefs and when I talk about discrimination, it's behaviour. Those are the distinctions we make in modern conceptions of prejudice. Perhaps the current idea that is most different from the way we studied prejudice when I was an undergraduate is people now study prejudice as an emotion. They are interested in the whole variety of emotions that might characterise prejudice and it might be characterised by a mix of emotions which is a rather interesting new idea. The stereotype content model from Susan Fiske and her colleagues is another interesting example which suggests there are two fundamental dimensions that underlie stereotypical thinking. One is to the extents to which we view groups as competent and other groups as warm. And those relations are not necessarily positively correlated they are often negatively correlated. Many of you have probably come across distinctions of blatant and subtle prejudice and I understand in the terms of the Review you are working on, one of the interesting questions will be the extent to which you can come up with any accurate characterisation of contemporary prejudice by focussing only on blatant measures. Are we getting at true prejudice with the measures we use? And that takes us into the distinction between so-called explicit and implicit measures of prejudice. I will talk about the kind of measures that you are all familiar with, people ask you a direct question about how you feel about members of some out-groups and groups which you don't belong to and so-called implicit measures where people measure something which we say with great caution, since we don't believe much of what Freud wrote any more but he wrote extensively about the unconscious and we believe we have modern scientific methods of getting at parts of the unconscious. And I will also introduce you to this notion of aversive racism which may characterise the kind of prejudice that is to be found among modern day prejudice persons.
Prejudice as emotion. The main idea here is that instead of thinking about prejudice as being a single rating scale for example that goes from ‘like very much’ to ‘do not like at all’, or possibly even ‘hate’, at one extreme, people have recently argued that prejudice is actually characterised by a variety of emotional reactions and the big five in this area are the emotions of fear, disgust, contempt, anger and jealousy, according to some perspectives.
And why are these emotions important? They are argued to be important because they provide a more differentiated view of out-group attitudes instead of attitudes of prejudice being a matter of like or dislike. it's a matter of how do you view certain aspects of this target out-group and how do you perceive them in terms of specific emotions and what implications do those emotions have for your actions towards members of those groups? I understand that you have a variety of interests here, and all sorts of what we call target groups of interest, they might be race groups, gender groups, Gypsies, or sex discrimination that you are interested in. Some examples from the literature, of prominent emotions with regard to a target group are fear and disgust. They primarily imply a response, a behavioural action tendency of avoidance. If, however, your reactions are more in terms of contempt and anger, they imply something more negative, movement against, often aggression towards the out-group.
The examples of some of the links between emotions and actions. An out-group that violates in group norms may elicit disgust and avoidance and an out-group seen as benefiting unjustly from Government programmes and not through paying taxes may elicit resentment and actions aimed at reducing benefits. An out-group seen as threatening elicits fear and hostile actions. If you want to understand the implied behavioural reactions towards the group, this approach says you first have to understand what specific emotions are experienced in response to members of that group.
The content model, as I mentioned, places an emphasis on warmth and competence. There are some groups which we see as both warm and competent and they tend to be our own groups not groups to which we don't belong. The out-groups, sometimes in worst cases, are characterised by entirely negative stereotypes, low on warmth and low on competence. And examples there from studies all over the world include welfare recipients, homeless people, uniformly negative reactions. In some cases I think the most interesting outcomes are where warmth and competence are negatively correlated. We have a mixed emotional response.
You might think that stereotypes with a mixed content would be rare, but in fact they are great common and they take two main forms that we have identified so far, the first are paternalistic stereotypes, high on warmth, low on competence. This is the way that people typically stereotype the elderly, disabled, and some gender stereotypes – so-called benevolent sexism as opposed to hostile. And envious stereotypes where we have an out-group which we admit is highly competent but we own up to having a low feeling of warmth towards that group, and that is a stereotype that characterises some people's views of Asians and Jews as out-groups.
These four different combinations of warmth and competence are associated again, with different intergroup emotions. So for example, low on competence and warmth, a view of contempt. That's the way people view Gypsies, poor people, welfare recipients. High on warmth that evokes the emotion of pity how some people feel towards older people, disabled people and so on. I won't go through every example on every slide you have these in front of you. Pettigrew & Meertens made this distinction between blatant and subtle prejudice. Blatant prejudice items are the ones that you or I or the people we hang around with would not admit to. People have come up with these slightly more subtle versions which are probably also ones that people like you and I would not admit to but some of our friends would. The question is are these really two types of prejudice and types of prejudice that you should know about for your review, and the answer to the latter is yes. But the answer to the former is that they are probably not different types of prejudice still quite highly correlated. There's a big debate in the literature about whether they are really all part of one particular measure namely prejudice. I think this is less interesting as a measure of prejudice than some of the other things I will show you.
I will move now to the question of whether prejudice may have moved out of sight but it's still maybe in people's minds. This is the distinction between explicit prejudice which is prejudice in the conscious mode, and is what is measures by traditional self-report measures. It can be contrasted with implicit prejudice, prejudice taking the form of automatic activation of negative traits in memory. By that, I mean a target group word is flashed up on a computer screen and that might be Gypsy, Asian, gay, Professor, Scot, Irish, whatever you are interested in. That will automatically make you activate certain traits in your long-term memory. You will respond much faster to questions about those traits. So this is really delving into your unconscious. Without your intention, without your awareness. So, many of us who would like to believe that we are completely unprejudiced and perhaps even don't even hold anything like prejudice associates in our mind can visit the Harvard website of Professor Banaji (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/) and try out some of these tests yourself and get a horrible shock! Most people do. The question then is are these measures of prejudice? If we score highly we don't want to believe they are measures of prejudice you will see that for yourself.
The suggestion here is that this matters because whilst explicit displays of prejudice may be less prevalent, implicit prejudice may be alive and well. One of the paradigms that's used to look at this is called priming which involves putting your participants in front of a PC like this one and in the screen you present briefly, can you pull up a phrase of an ethnic out-group member or target word, the group name of the target group, and then you follow it with a trait. You have to do some kind of task which asks you a question about the trait. Some of those words are words like ‘tree’ they can never be true of the group and other ones are true test questions. What people are interested in using categories, such as black and white, young and old, all sorts of examples of this have been used, using traits that are positive or negative. What people are interested in is the speed with which you can make a response about that target word. In other words, this paradigm is assessing the degree of association between the out-group label, and these trait words in your long-term memory, in your unconscious. If they are already associated in your unconscious, you should be able to make faster decisions about them.