The concept of prejudice has profoundly influenced how we have investigated, explained and tried to change intergroup relations of discrimination and inequality. But what has this concept contributed ...to our knowledge of relations between groups and what has it obscured or misrepresented? How has it expanded or narrowed the horizons of psychological inquiry? How effective or ineffective has it been in guiding our attempts to transform social relations and institutions? In this book, a team of internationally renowned psychologists re-evaluate the concept of prejudice, in an attempt to move beyond conventional approaches to the subject and to help the reader gain a clearer understanding of relations within and between groups. This fresh look at prejudice will appeal to scholars and students of social psychology, sociology, political science and peace studies.
In the last two decades, the study of social stereotypes and prejudice has become one of the central interests in social psychology in particular. One reflection of this growing interest is the focus ...on shared stereotypes and prejudices. The primary reason for this development is the recognition that stereotypes and prejudice play a determinative role in shaping intergroup relations. In situations of conflict, they are simultaneously outcomes of the accumulated animosity between the involved groups and also feed on the continuation of the conflict by furnishing the cognitive-affective basis for the experienced mistrust by the parties. In spite of this recognition, no systematic analysis of the stereotypes and prejudice was carried out in real situations. This book tries to rectify this by applying a general and universal conceptual framework to the study of the acquisition and development of stereotypes and prejudice in a society involved in an intractable conflict.
Are Racists Crazy? Gilman, Sander L; Thomas, James
2016, 2016-12-20, Volume:
11
eBook
The connection and science behind race, racism, and mental illness
In 2012, an interdisciplinary team of scientists at the University of Oxford reported that - based on their clinical experiment - ...the beta-blocker drug, Propranolol, could reduce implicit racial bias among its users. Shortly after the experiment, an article in Time Magazine cited the study, posing the question: Is racism becoming a mental illness? In Are Racists Crazy? Sander Gilman and James Thomas trace the idea of race and racism as psychopathological categories., from mid-19th century Europe, to contemporary America, up to the aforementioned clinical experiment at the University of Oxford, and ask a slightly different question than that posed by Time : How did racism become a mental illness? Using historical, archival, and content analysis, the authors provide a rich account of how the 19th century ‘Sciences of Man’ - including anthropology, medicine, and biology - used race as a means of defining psychopathology and how assertions about race and madness became embedded within disciplines that deal with mental health and illness.
An illuminating and riveting history of the discourse on racism, antisemitism, and psychopathology, Are Racists Crazy? connects past and present claims about race and racism, showing the dangerous implications of this specious line of thought for today.
The never-before-told true story of Jane Elliott
and the "Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes Experiment" she made world-famous,
using eye color to simulate racism. The day after Martin
Luther King, Jr.'s ...assassination in 1968, Jane Elliott, a
schoolteacher in rural Iowa, introduced to her all-white
third-grade class a shocking experiment to demonstrate the
scorching impact of racism. Elliott separated students into two
groups. She instructed the brown-eyed children to heckle and berate
the blue-eyed students, even to start fights with them. Without
telling the children the experiment's purpose, Elliott demonstrated
how easy it was to create abhorrent racist behavior based on
students' eye color, not skin color. As a result, Elliott would go
on to appear on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show , followed by
a stormy White House conference, The Oprah Winfrey Show ,
and thousands of media events and diversity-training sessions
worldwide, during which she employed the provocative experiment to
induce racism. Was the experiment benign? Or was it a cruel,
self-serving exercise in sadism? Did it work? Blue Eyes, Brown
Eyes is a meticulously researched book that details for the
first time Jane Elliott's jagged rise to stardom. It is an
unflinching assessment of the incendiary experiment forever
associated with Elliott, even though she was not the first to try
it out. Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes offers an intimate portrait
of the insular community where Elliott grew up and conducted the
experiment on the town's children for more than a decade. The
searing story is a cautionary tale that examines power and
privilege in and out of the classroom. It also documents small-town
White America's reflex reaction to the Civil Rights Movement of the
1970s and 1980s, as well as the subsequent meteoric rise of
diversity training that flourishes today. All the while, Blue
Eyes, Brown Eyes reveals the struggles that tormented a
determined and righteous woman, today referred to as the "Mother of
Diversity Training," who was driven against all odds to succeed.
From its largest cities to deep within its heartland, from its heavily trafficked airways to its meandering country byways, America has become a nation racked by anxiety about terrorism and national ...security. In response to the fears prompted by the tragedy of September 11th, the country has changed in countless ways. Airline security has tightened, mail service is closely examined, and restrictions on civil liberties are more readily imposed by the government and accepted by a wary public.The altered American landscape, however, includes more than security measures and ID cards. The country's desperate quest for security is visible in many less obvious, yet more insidious ways. In Scapegoats of September 11th, criminologist Michael Welch argues that the "war on terror" is a political charade that delivers illusory comfort, stokes fear, and produces scapegoats used as emotional relief. Regrettably, much of the outrage that resulted from 9/11 has been targeted at those not involved in the attacks on the Pentagon or the Twin Towers. As this book explains, those people have become the scapegoats of September 11th. Welch takes on the uneasy task of sorting out the various manifestations of displaced aggression, most notably the hate crimes and state crimes that have become embarrassing hallmarks both at home and abroad.Drawing on topics such as ethnic profiling, the Abu Ghraib scandal, Guantanamo Bay, and the controversial Patriot Act, Welch looks at the significance of knowledge, language, and emotion in a post-9/11 world. In the face of popular and political cheerleading in the war on terror, this book presents a careful and sober assessment, reminding us that sound counterterrorism policies must rise above, rather than participate in, the propagation of bigotry and victimization.
We assessed evidence for a contextual effect of positive intergroup contact, whereby the effect of intergroup contact between social contexts (the between-level effect) on outgroup prejudice is ...greater than the effect of individual-level contact within contexts (the within-level effect). Across seven large-scale surveys (five cross-sectional and two longitudinal), using multilevel analyses, we found a reliable contextual effect. This effect was found in multiple countries, operationalizing context at multiple levels (regions, districts, and neighborhoods), and with and without controlling for a range of demographic and context variables. In four studies (three cross-sectional and one longitudinal) we showed that the association between context-level contact and prejudice was largely mediated by more tolerant norms. In social contexts where positive contact with outgroups was more commonplace, norms supported such positive interactions between members of different groups. Thus, positive contact reduces prejudice on a macrolevel, whereby people are influenced by the behavior of others in their social context, not merely on a microscale, via individuals' direct experience of positive contact with outgroup members. These findings reinforce the view that contact has a significant role to play in prejudice reduction, and has great policy potential as a means to improve intergroup relations, because it can simultaneously impact large numbers of people.
Decades of research in social and political psychology have demonstrated that political conservatives appear more intolerant toward a variety of groups than do political liberals. Recent work from ...our three independent labs has challenged this conventional wisdom by suggesting that some of the psychological underpinnings of intolerance are not exclusive to people on either end of the political spectrum. These studies have demonstrated that liberals and conservatives express similar levels of intolerance toward ideologically dissimilar and threatening groups. We suggest directions for future research and discuss the psychological and political implications of our conclusions.
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