Social Inequalities -> just-world phenomenon =
the tendency for people to believe that the
world is just and that people therefore get what
they deserve and deserve what they get
"the good is rewarded and the evil is punished"
short leap to assume that those who succeed
must be good and those who do not must be
bad
us and them: ingroup and outgroup
dividing the world into "us and them" entails prejudice
and war, but it also provides the benefits of communal
solidarity
through our social identities we associate
ourselves with certain groups and contrast
ourselves with others
emotional roots
to boost our own status when
we're down, it helps to have others
to denigrate
by contrast, those made to feel loved and
supported have become more open to and
accepting of others who differ
negative emotions nourish prejudice
the few individuals that lack fear and its associated activity in the brain's
emotion-processing amygdala also display a notable lack of racial stereotypes and
prejudice
cognitive roots - stereotyped beliefs are a
by-product of how we cognitively simplify the
world
in categorizing people into groups, we often stereotype them
we recognize how greatly we differ from others in our
OWN groups, but we overestimate the homogeneity of
other groups
our greater recognition for individual own-face-races-- called the
other-race effect-- emerges during infancy, between 3 to 9 months
of age
with effort and experience, people get
better at recognizing individual faces from
another group
to those in one ethnic group, members of
another often seem more alike than they really
are in attitudes, personality, and appearence
we often judge the frequency of events by instances that readily come to mind
vivid (violent) cases are more readily available to our
memory and feed our stereotypes
believing the world is just
"they should have known better" (blaming the victim also
serves to reassure people that it couldn't happen to them)
Hindsight Bias
people have the tendency to justify their culture's social systems
we are inclined to see the way things
are as they way they ought to be
this natural conservatism makes it difficult to legislate
major social changes, such as health care or
climate-change policies. Once such policies are in place,
our "system justification" tends to preserve them