Social Bias and Stereotypes - Essay Example

? Social Bias Social Bias Introduction Social bias is like an illusory perception that one tends to think of others. Social bias creates an impression. Social bias could make one blind and even judgmental especially in taking its kind which includes prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination. These kinds of social bias will be defined in the present paper. Moreover, comparisons of blatant and subtle bias will also be tackled, as well as the impact of bias to one’s life. In addition, the present paper will contribute in explaining how psychological strategies will be effective to overcome one’s social bias to others. With this, comparisons to conformity and obedience with its effect on oneself and factors relative to individual and society will be explored in the present paper as it could be related to the deviance of one’s group norms. A1. Prejudice, Stereotyping, and Discrimination Prejudice is a term used to denote a description in a particular group. According to Dovidio, Hewstone, Glick, and Esses (2010), prejudice has three components: “affective, cognitive, and conative.” Affective component could be used when a person would use his emotional unlikeness to a certain group. Cognitive component could also be used when a person would use his perspective or belief based on a group. Conative component involves how one would treat the members of a group negatively (Dovidio et al., 2010). Prejudice could be psychologically termed or sociologically based. For the former, prejudice could be accounted to the attitude of an individual who presupposes to see how he or she would tend to view a group in a positive or in a negative way (Dovidio et al., 2010). For the latter, prejudice is sociologically used especially when making a race bias towards a group. According to Blumer (1958), this term is often called as a “race prejudice” wherein one would see other group’s weakness to maintain the reputation of the image or reputation of one’s own group (as cited in Dovidio et al. 2010, p. 6). Stereotyping is a term that could be accounted to how one would associate or attribute a term to a group. It is a matter of how one would give a description to others. According to Hilton and Hippel (1996), stereotypes are apparently formed in the cognitive maps of the minds which refer to “schemas” (as cited in Dovidio et al. 2010, p. 7). Stereotypes could refer to the qualities that could be used as something to describe someone or a particular group especially its own coordinating members. According to Fiske, Cuddy, and Glick (2002), there are two main components or dimensions of stereotype especially when referring to the Stereotype Content Model (as cited in Dovidio et al. 2010, p. 7). These components include warmth and competence. Warmth is used to appreciate and give attention to the “cooperating groups” compared to one’s opponent's group while competence refers to one’s association of words to groups with high status compared to the low status groups (Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2002 as cited in Dovidio et al. 2010., p. 7). Discrimination is used to reject people who may not use the standards with the laws and policies of a group or an organization. According to Dovidio et al. (2010), this could be termed as institutional discrimination. Cultural discrimination is different from institutional discrimination, which may refer to how one foresees and judges the misconducts of others in contrast to the cultural values in a society. According to Dovidio et al. (2010), cultural discrimination is usually practiced by the people who belong to a dominant group in a society who would usually guard or monitor the weakness and wrongness of people, especially to those people who do not belong to their group. A2. Differences between Subtle and Blatant Bias Subtle biases are hidden. It means that a person may agree to terms, conditions, descriptions, and may give consideration to a person or thing. These kinds of biases usually become unobvious because a person may be bias but does not portray it to mean to a certain person or object that he or she may find undesirable or unpreferable to his or her standards (Fiske, 2010 as cited in Keene 2011, p. 2). Accordingly, an exact example of this kind of bias could be like the way on how there were Americans who would agree to the integration of Blacks and Whites to be together in a school setting; however, these Americans could somehow be too critical when it comes to racial-mixed marriages of Blacks and Whites (Keene, 2011). Therefore, subtle bias could be more common to people who are highly perceived in a society in which like the American society, Whites are more common to have a pretentious and concealed manner of being bias to the Blacks whose race and color could still be secretly unacceptable to them up to now. On the other hand, blatant biases are the opposite of substantial, which is a direct manner of showing unpleasant behavior to an individual or a certain group. According to Sritharan and Gawronski (2010), blatant biases are “undeniable” (as cited in Keene 2011, p. 2). Fiske (2010), identified this term with regard to how one would let others force to believe one’s own belief in a society (as cited in Keene 2011, p. 2). This could mean that in order to view others as normal, one would tend to force the other to follow what is normal and proper based on the rules, standards, and culture (as cited in Keene 2011, p. 2). Accordingly, an example of this could be when a person will be bullied or will be hurt especially when they are of a different race, sexual identity like the Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and Transgenders (LGBT), and low economic status. A3. Impact of Bias The impact of biases could take effect on psychological disturbances and constraints of an individual, especially for a person who becomes the victim of harsh words and violence of the discriminators, stereotypical, and prejudicial people. However, according to Rivers, Poteat, Noreat, and Ashurst (2009), biases will also affect the people who serve to commit a mistake to the victims of biases as well as those who witness how these victims would be maltreated (as cited in Keene, 2011, p. 2). Consequently, victims of prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination tend to become “depressive, socially withdrawn, low self-worth, nervous breakdowns” (Sinclair & Kunda 1999 as cited in Keene 2011, p. 2). Witnesses may also feel the imbalance to oneself as superego of conscientiousness may weigh higher in their balance selves as they could have the tendency to feel guilty for what the aggressor could do and to feel pity for the victim. However, biases could continually mislead the aggressor of bias conduct with the inability of the suspect or fault person to control oneself. However, the lighter side effect of bias is when a victim would learn how to stand for oneself (Sinclair & Kunda, 1999 as cited in Keene 2011, p. 2). Therefore, a person who is resilient enough to defeat the one who discriminates will be psychologically motivated to prove the negative commentators, critics, and the bashers that they are incorrectly justifiable. According to Fiske (2010), people who are bias must be proven wrong so long as the victim knows that she is right, and there is nothing wrong to be herself, to be unique, and to be different from what others believe (as cited in Keene 2011, p. 2). In this manner, a victim who has the courage to voice out her rights to the misjudgments, prejudices, stereotypes, and discrimination of others will become hardy enough to prove how his identity and personality could be incomparable to others. A4. Comparisons of Two Social Psychological Strategies to Overcome Social Biases Keene (2011) has been literary prominent in emphasizing how one could conquer one’s attitude of social biases. This study suggested the importance of one’s knowledge to know the meaning of stereotypes, discrimination, and prejudices as well as its causes and effects to a person. According to Fowers and Richardson (1996), taking time with one whom a person is stereotyping could mitigate one’s social biases (as cited in Keene, 2011, p. 3). This could imply that the person would know more the personality of someone whom he or she tends to be biased with, and that would lead to how the person could comprehend and confirm to the verification of his or her mental judgments and views to that someone. This could lead the person to change his or her attitude to that someone. Hernandez and Preston (2012) claimed how a confirmation bias could be changed after a personal analysis of how accurate one’s views and perceptions to others. Although, Hernandez and Preston (2012) may have studied a different kind of bias (confirmation), their analogy on its ways of reducing such could be applicable to social bias of prejudice, discrimination, and stereotypes. The suggested findings of the study based on confirmation bias (one’s seeking of information or people congruent to one’s own ideas and perspective) could not become a leeway to how social biases could be overcome. In fact, the information on processing oneself and analyzing one’s confirmation biases based on its accuracy could be almost the same on how one could have the possibility to realize the dark side of prejudice, discrimination, and stereotypes. Hence, regardless of how confirmation bias (one’s own views and beliefs to oneself) could be different to the mentioned social bias of prejudice, discrimination, and stereotypes (views to others in a group), their ways of overcoming the biases through “cognitive restructuring” are the same with the presentation of important aids or information to fully change the false accounts of people to their social mankind beings (Hernandez & Preston, 2012). The ways of Keene (2011) and Hernandez and Preston’s (2012) proposals are both useful and advisable for those who wanted to see the difference to others as apathetically indifferent, and equal no matter how race, gender, nationality, age, and economic status could have great discrepancies of different individuals. B1. Comparisons of Conformity and Obedience Sanderson (2010) mentioned that conformity and obedience are both part of social norms. Accordingly, conformity makes one change his own behavior, decisions, and opinions based on the standards and likeness of one’s group. On the other hand, obedience is described as behavior that one tends to act or say based on the appropriate manners of the laws on the authority or in the community. Conformity and obedience are the same in terms of how the culture of individualist and collectivist countries could affect the behaviors of the people (Sanderson, 2010). Accordingly, conformity is more common to collectivists compared to individualists (who see conforming is a weakness). On the other hand, obedience is more common to individualist compared to collectivists, who sometimes refuse to inappropriate orders or commands because they tend to conform on the laws of their society. Therefore, conformity and obedience are the same to how the nature of the culture affects the way people will go along to the will and pleasures of the society or one’s own community (Sanderson, 2010). However, compliance and obedience could also differ in the number of factors that could affect them. Conformity is usually influenced with the kind of information and norms that people could be impacted with especially when they hear that the number of group size is big and that they tend to belong into a certain demographic group (Sanderson, 2010). Contrastingly, obedience of a person depends on the factors where a participant lives or belongs to a community with rules and roles of the authority figures. Hence, conformity and obedience could be different in terms of how conformity lies on the decision or choice of an individual without taking the dilemma of following the rules like what is required in the obedience term. B2. Classical Study and Contemporary Study of Group Influence on the Self One of the factors that could affect the behavior of a person is termed as social facilitation, which means that people would do more in a task or action every time they go along with others instead of doing the task alone by themselves (Sanderson, 2010). One of the best classical studies relative to social facilitation is the study of Middlemist, Knowles, and Matter (1976) who investigated the behaviors of men based on how much time of seconds they would spend in urinating alone and with others (as cited in Sanderson, 2010, p. 291). Accordingly, the findings of their study found that men tend to urinate longer with others (8.9 seconds average) compared to how they would urinate just by themselves (4.9 seconds). This would mean that others’ presence would have an impact to the way individual executes a performance or action. However, recent studies have improved and explored how social facilitation could influence one’s performance in combination to one’s personality orientation, whether positive (one who is described as extravert with self-worthiness) or negative (one who is described as neurotically anxious with low self-worth) (Uziel, 2007). The findings of the study suggest that individual’s performance would be affected or be impacted on the presence of others regardless of how different their personality could either be negative or positive. However, this study is a way different compared to the mentioned study of Middlemist et al. (1976 as cited in Sanderson, 2010, p. 291) because Uziel’s (2007) study involved the personality orientation of individuals which could act as “moderator”. Albeit, the two studies (the classical and contemporary) are both the same in terms of how the latter consistently supported the former study based on how the performance of an individual would be inclined to the state of others’ existence. Therefore, one could account themselves to be inspired in the things that they do when others are presently around. B3. Individual and Societal influences to Deviance of Dominant Group Norms Rothwell (2009) have identified factors pertaining to individualism and socialism that could affect the deviance of a person to group norms. Individually, one’s ideas to culture could influence their deviance to another culture or perhaps to their own especially when they view the norms as undesirable to oneself and to the community. Regardless of how the study has been limited in finding out clearly how individualism could affect one’s deviance, the study has still found an overlapping evidence of societal influences, which may hamper the effect or results of individualism. These societal influences include one’s peer relationship and scientific worldview which could lead a person to conform on the ideas of these factors based on cultural standards and norms (Rothwell, 2009). Conclusion Social bias is broad. Prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination are all examples and concepts of social bias that leads one to make it blatant or subtle. Indeed, social bias could affect one’s psychological aspect negatively like withdrawal to social interests, especially when the person is harmed compared to the person who is an offender. In order to lessen and mitigate the offender of social bias, the offender must know, learn, and study the concepts and terms of social bias especially with regard to its impact to the psychological well-being of a person. One’s social bias could be influenced with one’s group members in whom one would tend to conform to the belief and perspective of the group. With this, when one conforms, one could also have the tendency to obey what has been regulated and mandated in a group. However, when one finds it undesirable to obey the rules from the group, one could have the tendency to be deviant from the group norms as one could be pressured with environmental factors. Ergo, one could be socially biased in conforming and obeying the perspective of the society or group norms, and one could still be socially biased with deviance in not following a certain group, especially when one views the group’s perspective to be unconceivable. References Dovidio, J. F., Hewstone, M., Glick, P., & Esses, V. M. (2010). The Sage handbook of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination. London: Sage Publications. Hernandez, I., & Preston, J. L. (2012). Disfluency disrupts the confirmation bias. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1-5. Keene, S. (2011). Social bias: Prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination. The Journal of Law Enforcement, 1 (3), 1-5. Rothwell, V. L. (2009). The relationship between attitudes toward deviance and deviant behavior: The influence of Science, individualism, social bonds, and deviant peers. Retrieved from http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/ available/etd-09152009-092751/unrestricted/Rothwell_VL_D_2009.pdf Sanderson, C. A. (2010). Social psychology. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Uziel, L. (2007). Individual difference in the social facilitation effect: A review and meta-analysis. Journal of Research in Personality, 41, 579-601. Read More