Chapter 7: Attitude, Prejudice and Stereotype
On the morning of 5 April 1968, a schoolteacher named Jane Elliott walked into her third-grade classroom in the small town of Riceville, Iowa. The day before, the civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed, and her young students were full of questions about a hatred they could not understand. So Elliott tried something bold.
She told the class that blue-eyed children were smarter, cleaner and better than brown-eyed children. The blue-eyed pupils were given extra playtime and front-row seats; the brown-eyed pupils were made to wear cloth collars and were corrected more often. Within hours, the change was startling. The “superior” children grew confident, and at times unkind, while the “inferior” children became quiet, unsure, and began stumbling over work they had done easily the day before.
The next day, Elliott reversed the rule — now brown eyes were “better” — and the whole pattern flipped.
Nothing about the children had changed. Only a label had. Yet a single, meaningless line drawn between “us” and “them” had produced beliefs, feelings and unfair treatment in one afternoon. Elliott’s classroom showed, in miniature, how quickly attitudes form, how easily they harden into prejudice, and how powerfully they shape the way we treat one another.
Diagram
Fig. 7.0-1 – a classroom divided by a chalk line into two groups; one group at the front, upright and confident, the other at the back, wearing cloth collars and looking withdrawn — conveying how an arbitrary “us versus them” label creates unequal beliefs, feelings and treatment
This chapter will answer each of these questions as you go through it.
7.1 Attitude: Meaning and Structure
You probably like cricket but dislike traffic, trust one shopkeeper but not another, and feel warmly towards one neighbour while keeping your distance from the next. Each of these is an evaluation — a settled sense of “for” or “against” that you carry with you. Psychologists call such evaluations attitudes.
In the classroom you read about at the start of this chapter, a single label reshaped how the children evaluated one another almost overnight. That is exactly what an attitude is: a leaning, favourable or unfavourable, towards some object in our world. This section looks at what an attitude actually is, and at the three parts that every attitude is built from.
7.1.1 What Is an Attitude?
An attitude is a learned tendency to evaluate a particular object, person, group or situation in a favourable or unfavourable way. It is, in short, our readiness to respond positively or negatively to something.
The “something” that an attitude is directed at is called the attitude object. It can be almost anything — a food, a film star, a school subject, a community, a political party, or even oneself. Every attitude is about some attitude object; there is no such thing as an attitude about nothing.
One of the most widely used definitions comes from the psychologist Gordon Allport, who studied attitudes in the 1930s.
Three features in this definition are worth holding on to. First, an attitude is learned through experience, not something we are born with. Second, it is a state of readiness — a preparation to respond, which may or may not show up in actual behaviour. Third, it directs our response, tilting us towards approach or avoidance before we have even thought carefully about the object.
Attitudes are also fairly lasting. Once formed, an attitude tends to hold for a considerable time and does not usually flip from one day to the next, though it can be changed, as we shall see later in the chapter.
When Feelings Pull Both Ways
Not every attitude is simply “for” or “against”. Sometimes our evaluation of the same object contains both positive and negative elements at once. This mixed state is called ambivalence. For instance, you may look forward to a long holiday for its excitement, yet dread the cost and the crowded travel. The attitude is real, but it pulls in two directions.
Our attitudes also grow out of the way we perceive the object. Perception is the process of taking in and making sense of the world around us. If a person perceives strangers as generally friendly, their attitude towards new people tends to be warm; if they perceive the world as hostile, their attitudes turn guarded. Perception supplies the raw picture; the attitude is the evaluation we finally settle on.
7.1.2 The A-B-C Components of Attitude
Look closely at any attitude and you will find it has three parts working together: what you think, what you feel, and what you tend to do. Psychologists call these the cognitive, affective and behavioural components. Together they form the A-B-C model of attitude.
The cognitive component is the set of thoughts and beliefs a person holds about the attitude object. It is the “what I believe” part — for example, believing that a particular cricket team is skilful and well disciplined.
The affective component is the feeling or emotion attached to the attitude object. It is the “what I feel” part — the pride and excitement that rise when your team walks onto the field. These feelings, pleasant or unpleasant, give an attitude much of its force.
The behavioural component is the readiness to act towards the attitude object in a particular way. It is the “what I do” part — following every match, wearing the team’s jersey, or defending the team in an argument. A favourable attitude leans towards approach; an unfavourable one leans towards avoidance.
Diagram
Fig. 7.1-1 – three linked boxes, Cognitive (what you believe), Affective (what you feel) and Behavioural (what you tend to do), all feeding into a central label “ATTITUDE”, showing that the three components combine into one overall evaluation
These three components usually point the same way, so that positive beliefs go with positive feelings and supportive actions. But they need not always agree.
How Attitudes Differ
Attitudes are not all alike in strength or shape. Two properties are especially useful for telling them apart. Valence refers to the direction of an attitude — whether it is positive or negative. Intensity refers to its strength — how mildly or how strongly the person holds it. A person may hold two negative attitudes, yet feel one far more fiercely than the other. A further property, centrality, describes how important an attitude is within the person’s wider system of attitudes; a central attitude, once touched, tends to pull many others along with it.
7.2 How Attitudes Are Formed
No one is born liking or disliking a political party, a food or a community. Attitudes are learned, built up gradually out of the experiences a person collects over a lifetime. This raises an interesting question: exactly how does an attitude get into us?
Psychologists have traced several routes. Most of them run through learning and the influence of other people; a few run through our culture, our inherited temperament and the flow of information around us. These routes are shown in Fig. 7.2-1, and we take them up one by one.
Diagram
Fig. 7.2-1 – six labelled arrows — association, reward and punishment, observation, cultural norms, genetic predisposition, and exposure to information — all feeding into a central box marked “ATTITUDE”, showing the many routes by which an attitude is learned
7.2.1 Formation through Learning
Most of our attitudes are acquired through social learning — that is, by interacting with, observing and imitating the people around us. Three learning routes matter most.
Learning by Association
The first route works through classical conditioning, a form of learning in which we come to link, or associate, two things that repeatedly occur together. When an attitude object is paired again and again with something pleasant or unpleasant, the feeling gradually transfers to the object itself. This transfer is what we mean by association.
Suppose a child repeatedly sees a particular festival celebrated with warmth, sweets and family joy. The good feelings attach themselves to the festival, and a positive attitude forms — not through argument, but through pairing.
Learning by Reward and Punishment
The second route works through operant conditioning, a form of learning in which behaviour is shaped by its consequences. Here an attitude is strengthened when expressing it brings approval, and weakened when it brings disapproval. Approval that increases a response is called reinforcement.
A teenager who voices a certain opinion in a friends’ group, and is met with agreement and “likes”, feels rewarded and holds that attitude more firmly. Had the same opinion drawn ridicule, it would likely have been dropped or hidden.
Learning by Observation
The third route is observational learning, also called modelling — acquiring an attitude simply by watching another person hold it. This learning is strongest when the model is powerful, admired or warmly regarded, such as a parent, an elder sibling, a teacher or a film star.
7.2.2 Cultural Norms, Genetic Factors and Exposure to Information
Beyond direct learning, three further sources quietly shape our attitudes.
Cultural Norms
Every society passes down cultural norms — shared, largely unspoken rules about what is proper, valued or expected. Growing up inside a culture, we absorb its attitudes towards elders, food, dress, work and outsiders, often without ever being taught them explicitly.
Genetic Factors
Genes do not carry ready-made attitudes. What they shape is temperament — the inborn emotional style a person brings into the world — and temperament can tilt a person towards certain attitudes. Someone naturally drawn to novelty and risk may lean towards a favourable attitude to adventure sports, while a more cautious temperament leans the other way.
Exposure to Information
Finally, attitudes form through sheer exposure to information. We read, watch and hear a great deal about people, places and issues we have never met face to face, and out of that stream of information an attitude quietly takes shape.
This is how a student can hold a firm attitude towards a distant country, a community or a public figure without any direct contact at all. It also warns us of a danger: if the information is one-sided, the attitude it builds will be lopsided too — a point that returns when we study how prejudice is learned.
7.3 How Attitudes Change
Attitudes are fairly stable, but they are not fixed for ever. A person who once disliked a food, a place or an idea can come to accept it, and sometimes even to champion it. What makes an attitude shift?
Two broad forces are at work. One comes from outside: other people deliberately try to change our attitudes through what they say. The other comes from inside: we feel an uncomfortable clash within ourselves and change an attitude to settle it. The first is called persuasion; the second, cognitive dissonance.
7.3.1 Persuasion
Persuasion is the deliberate effort to change a person’s attitude through messages, appeals and arguments. It is at work in every advertisement, election speech and health campaign we meet.
Any act of persuasion involves three elements. There is the communicator, the source who delivers the message; the message itself, the content and its appeals; and the audience, the person or group whose attitude is the target. How well persuasion works depends on all three.
The Communicator
A source is more persuasive when it seems credible — expert, trustworthy and confident. We are readier to change our views when the person speaking clearly knows the subject and appears to have nothing to gain by misleading us. Attractive and likeable communicators also persuade more, which is why advertisers hire admired figures to endorse products.
The Message
The wording of a message matters as much as its source. Messages that stir emotion, especially a moderate amount of fear, can be effective. When the audience already leans against the idea, a two-sided message — one that admits the other side’s points before answering them — tends to work better than a one-sided pitch. Curiously, a message that does not seem designed to persuade is often the most persuasive of all, because it lowers the listener’s guard.
The Audience
The listener is not a blank slate. Well-informed, confident people tend to resist persuasion, because they scrutinise the argument. A distracted or hurried audience, by contrast, is often swayed more easily, since it cannot examine the message closely.
Two Routes to Persuasion
Modern accounts of persuasion, above all the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), explain these patterns with a single idea: a message can reach us by two different routes.
The central route is taken when the audience is both motivated and able to think hard about the message. Here people weigh the actual arguments, and strong arguments win while weak ones fail. Because the listener has genuinely thought it through, the resulting change in attitude is deep and lasting.
The peripheral route is taken when the audience is unmotivated, rushed, distracted or short of knowledge. Here people lean on surface cues — the speaker’s confidence or good looks, or simply the number of arguments offered — rather than on their quality. This is quicker, but the attitude change it produces is shallow and short-lived.
Diagram
Fig. 7.3-1 – a persuasive message splitting into two paths: Central route (motivated, thoughtful audience → high effort, evaluates arguments → lasting attitude change) and Peripheral route (unmotivated, distracted audience → low effort, relies on mental shortcuts → temporary attitude change)
7.3.2 Cognitive Dissonance
Sometimes attitudes change not because someone pushes them, but because of a tension inside us. We often find ourselves saying or doing things that clash with what we truly think, and that clash is uncomfortable.
Psychologists call this discomfort cognitive dissonance — the unpleasant tension a person feels on holding two inconsistent thoughts, or on acting against their own attitude. The theory was proposed by Leon Festinger in 1957.
Consider someone who deeply values protecting the environment, yet finds themselves using single-use plastic every day. The gap between the attitude (“plastic harms the planet”) and the behaviour (“I keep using it”) produces dissonance. Because that tension is unpleasant, the person is driven to reduce it.
There are several ways to do so. One can change the attitude to fit the behaviour (“a little plastic hardly matters”); change the behaviour to fit the attitude (switch to a cloth bag); add new justifying thoughts (“I recycle, so I balance it out”); or simply play down the whole issue, a move called trivialisation. Whichever path is taken, the aim is to restore a sense of consistency.
The Less-Leads-to-More Effect
One striking prediction of the theory is the less-leads-to-more effect: the weaker the outside reason for acting against your attitude, the stronger the dissonance, and so the larger the attitude change. When there is a strong reason — a big reward or a serious threat — you can justify your action easily, dissonance stays low, and your attitude barely moves. When the reason is flimsy, the only way to feel consistent is to change the attitude itself.
Diagram
Fig. 7.3-2 – two paths: “Strong reason for acting against one’s attitude → dissonance is weak → attitude change is small” and “Weak reason for acting against one’s attitude → dissonance is strong → attitude change is large”
7.4 Prejudice, Stereotype and Discrimination
So far we have treated attitudes as ordinary evaluations of everyday objects. But one kind of attitude does far more damage than the rest: the negative attitude a person holds towards a whole group of people. This is where the study of attitudes turns into the study of prejudice.
The word looks daunting, but the three terms at the heart of it — prejudice, stereotype and discrimination — are simply the three components of attitude you already know, now aimed at a social group.
7.4.1 What Is Prejudice?
The word prejudice means, quite literally, a “pre-judgement” — a judgement made in advance, before the facts are in. In psychology it has a sharper meaning.
Prejudice is a preconceived, usually negative attitude towards the members of a group, held simply because they belong to that group. The prejudiced person judges someone not as an individual, but as a specimen of a category — “one of them”.
Two points give prejudice its sting. First, it is directed at people, and grades them down before they have said or done anything. Second, it is the affective — the feeling — component of an attitude towards a group. It is what the prejudiced person feels.
Prejudice is not always visible. Because of law, social pressure and the wish to keep good relations, people often keep their prejudices hidden behind polite behaviour. A prejudice can therefore sit quietly in the mind, unspoken, and still shape how a person leans.
7.4.2 Stereotype and Discrimination
If prejudice is the feeling about a group, it rests on a belief about that group and can spill over into unfair action. These are the other two components.
A stereotype is a fixed, oversimplified set of beliefs that all members of a group share certain traits. It is the cognitive component of a group attitude. Stereotypes assume that people can be read off from their category — that knowing the group tells you the person. They may contain a grain of truth or none at all, and they are mostly negative. “Teenagers are reckless” or “engineers are dull” are everyday stereotypes: they iron out all the differences between individuals into one flat picture.
Discrimination is unfair, less favourable treatment of people because of their group membership. It is the behavioural component — prejudice turned into action. An employer who rejects a well-qualified applicant purely because of the community they come from is discriminating: a private feeling has become a public harm.
Diagram
Fig. 7.4-1 – a triangle with its three corners labelled Stereotype (cognitive – “what I believe”), Prejudice (affective – “how I feel”) and Discrimination (behavioural – “how I act”); the centre reads “attitude towards a social group”, showing the three map onto the A-B-C components
7.5 Causes of Prejudice
Where does prejudice come from? It is not something people are born with; it is built up through psychological, social and cultural processes. Researchers have identified four main causes: prejudice is learned from others, it grows out of competition between groups, it springs from the way we categorise people, and it is sustained by the stereotypes we carry. We take these in turn.
7.5.2 Realistic Competition
A second cause lies in real conflict over scarce things. When two groups must compete for limited resources — jobs, land, admissions, opportunities — each begins to see the other as a rival standing in its way. Rivalry hardens into hostility, and hostility into prejudice. This explanation is known as realistic conflict theory.
The shared goals that finally united Sherif’s two groups are called superordinate goals — aims so large that no single group can reach them alone. We return to their power when we look at how prejudice can be reduced.
7.5.4 Stereotyping
The fourth cause is the stereotype itself. Once a person holds a stereotype about a group, it acts as a mental filter that shapes how new information is handled. Facts that fit the stereotype are noticed and remembered easily; facts that clash with it are overlooked or explained away.
Because of this filtering, stereotypes tend to confirm themselves and grow more rigid over time, resisting the very evidence that could correct them. A hardened stereotype then feeds a steady supply of prejudice against the group it describes.
7.6 Ways of Resisting Prejudice
If prejudice were fixed and inborn, there would be little we could do about it. But we have seen that prejudice is learned — and what is learned can be unlearned. Over decades, psychologists have tested several ways of reducing prejudice. Five of them stand out.
7.6.1 Direct Intergroup Contact
The oldest and best-studied idea is simple: bring the groups together. When members of different groups actually meet, they discover shared interests and personal likeness, and the rigid belief that “they are all the same” begins to crack. This is the contact hypothesis, put forward by Gordon Allport.
But contact alone is not enough — indeed, the wrong kind of contact can make things worse. Prejudice falls only when the meeting meets certain conditions.
- Equal status — the groups meet as equals, not as superior and inferior.
- Cooperation, not competition — they work together towards something, rather than against each other.
- Common goals — shared aims that each group needs the other to reach.
- Support from authorities — laws, institutions or leaders that back the contact and fair treatment.
- Room to become acquainted — enough closeness for people to know each other as individuals, not as faceless members of a category.
These are exactly the conditions that finally united Sherif’s two warring camp groups: only when they had to cooperate as equals on shared goals did the hostility melt.
Contact even works at a distance. The extended contact hypothesis holds that simply knowing that someone in your own group has a close friend in the other group can lower prejudice — the benefit spreads without your having to meet the out-group yourself.
7.6.2 Recategorisation
Since prejudice starts with drawing a line between “us” and “them”, one cure is to redraw that line. Recategorisation means shifting the boundary so that former out-group members are folded into a single, larger in-group — a shared “we”.
Diagram
Fig. 7.6-1 – two separate circles labelled “US” and “THEM” merging into one larger circle labelled “WE”, showing how redrawing the boundary turns a former out-group into part of a shared, larger in-group
Think of an inter-house sports match, where you cheer for your own house and feel a spark of rivalry against the others. But when the best players from every house are chosen for one school team, the old rivals are suddenly on your side, and you cheer for them too. The “enemy” has been recategorised as one of “us”. The same move works on a larger scale — seeing past region or language to “we Indians”, and ultimately to “we human beings”.
7.6.3 Breaking the Cycle of Hate
Because prejudice is handed down, generation after generation, from elders to children, one of the surest ways to resist it is to break that chain — to consciously choose not to pass hatred on.
When parents, teachers and elders refuse to voice biased views, and instead model respect towards other groups, children grow up without inheriting the prejudice. Many adults who recognise their own prejudices decide, deliberately, to raise the next generation differently. This “learning not to hate” ensures that a bias which took root in one generation does not automatically flower in the next.
7.6.4 Developing Positive Values
Resisting prejudice is not only about stopping the bad; it is also about building the good. Developing positive values means actively cultivating fairness, equality, empathy and respect for every person as an individual.
When people genuinely hold equality as a value, prejudice starts to clash with their own image of themselves as fair-minded, and they work to bring their attitudes into line. A key habit here is perspective-taking — the effort to imagine the world from another group’s point of view, which quietly dissolves the sense of “them” as strange or lesser.
7.6.5 Reducing Stereotype Vulnerability
The last method protects the targets of prejudice. When people know that a negative stereotype hangs over their group, the fear of confirming it can create anxiety that actually undermines them. This fear is called stereotype threat, and the anxious, self-doubting state it produces is stereotype vulnerability.
Stereotype vulnerability can be reduced by building an inclusive, non-judgemental environment; by offering successful role models from the stereotyped group; by encouraging a growth mindset, which credits effort over fixed ability and treats skill as something that can be improved; by emphasising each person’s own identity rather than their group; and by teaching people, openly, how stereotypes work in the first place.
7.7 Summary
An attitude is a learned, fairly lasting tendency to evaluate an object, person, group or situation favourably or unfavourably. Every attitude is directed at some attitude object.
Attitudes have three components — the A-B-C model: cognitive (what we believe), affective (what we feel) and behavioural (what we tend to do). The three usually agree, but when they clash they create discomfort.
Attitudes differ in valence (their direction, positive or negative) and intensity (their strength). A belief becomes an attitude only when feeling and motivation attach to it.
Attitudes are formed, never inborn. The syllabus routes are learning by association (classical conditioning), learning by reward and punishment (operant conditioning), learning by observation (modelling), cultural norms, inherited temperament (genetic factors), and exposure to information.
Observation and exposure to information explain how firm attitudes can form towards things a person has never directly experienced.
Attitudes change through two processes. Persuasion is an outside effort to change attitudes through messages, working through the communicator, the message and the audience.
The Elaboration Likelihood Model describes two routes to persuasion: the central route (careful thought about strong arguments) gives lasting change, while the peripheral route (surface cues and mental shortcuts) gives only temporary change.
Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort of holding two inconsistent thoughts, or acting against one’s attitude. To ease it, people change the attitude, change the behaviour, add justifications, or play the clash down.
The less-leads-to-more effect: the weaker the outside reason for acting against one’s attitude, the greater the dissonance, and so the larger the attitude change — shown by Festinger and Carlsmith’s boring-task study.
Prejudice, stereotype and discrimination are the three components of an attitude towards a group. A stereotype is the belief (cognitive), prejudice is the negative feeling (affective), and discrimination is the unfair action (behavioural).
Prejudice can exist without discrimination, because law and social pressure often hold the action back even when the feeling remains.
Prejudice has four causes. It is learned through social learning; it grows out of realistic competition for scarce resources (realistic conflict theory, shown by Sherif’s Robbers Cave study); it springs from social categorisation into in-group and out-group, which produces in-group bias even on trivial grounds (shown by Tajfel’s minimal group studies); and it is sustained by stereotyping, which filters information so the stereotype confirms itself.
Because prejudice is learned, it can be reduced. The syllabus lists five ways: direct intergroup contact under the right conditions (contact hypothesis), recategorisation into a shared larger “we”, breaking the cycle of hate by not passing prejudice to children, developing positive values such as fairness and empathy, and reducing stereotype vulnerability by easing the anxiety of stereotype threat.
7.8 Key Terms
A-B-C model — the view that every attitude is made of three components: affective (feeling), behavioural (action) and cognitive (belief).
Affective component — the feeling or emotion attached to an attitude object; the “what I feel” part of an attitude.
Ambivalence — an attitude that contains both positive and negative elements towards the same object at the same time.
Association — the linking of an attitude object with something pleasant or unpleasant, so that the feeling transfers to the object (as in classical conditioning).
Attitude — a learned, fairly lasting tendency to evaluate an object, person, group or situation favourably or unfavourably.
Attitude object — the thing, person, group or situation that an attitude is directed at.
Audience — the person or group whose attitude a persuasive message is trying to change.
Behavioural component — the readiness to act in a particular way towards an attitude object; the “what I do” part of an attitude.
Belief — an idea a person holds to be true, with or without proof; the cognitive basis on which attitudes rest.
Central route — the persuasion route taken when the audience thinks hard about the actual arguments, producing lasting attitude change.
Classical conditioning — learning by association, in which two things that repeatedly occur together come to be linked in the mind.
Cognitive component — the thoughts and beliefs a person holds about an attitude object; the “what I believe” part of an attitude.
Cognitive dissonance — the uncomfortable tension felt when a person holds two inconsistent thoughts, or acts against their own attitude.
Communicator — the source who delivers a persuasive message.
Contact hypothesis — the idea that direct contact between groups reduces prejudice, but only under conditions such as equal status and cooperation.
Cultural norms — the shared, largely unspoken rules of a society about what is proper, valued or expected, which shape attitudes.
Discrimination — unfair, less favourable treatment of people because of their group membership; the behavioural component of a group attitude.
Elaboration Likelihood Model — a model of persuasion holding that messages change attitudes by a thoughtful central route or a shortcut-based peripheral route.
Exposure to information — the forming of attitudes through the information we read, watch and hear, even without direct contact with the object.
Extended contact hypothesis — the idea that merely knowing an in-group member has a friend in the out-group can reduce prejudice.
Growth mindset — the belief that ability can be improved through effort, used to protect people from stereotype-based anxiety.
In-group — the group a person sees themselves as belonging to (“us”).
In-group bias — the tendency to view one’s own group more favourably than an out-group.
Intensity — the strength of an attitude, that is, how mildly or strongly it is held.
Less-leads-to-more effect — the finding that a weaker outside reason for acting against one’s attitude produces greater dissonance and so larger attitude change.
Message — the content and appeals of a persuasive communication.
Observational learning — acquiring an attitude by watching and copying another person (a model); also called modelling.
Operant conditioning — learning in which behaviour is shaped by its consequences, that is, by reward and punishment.
Out-group — any group a person places outside their own (“them”).
Peripheral route — the persuasion route taken when the audience relies on surface cues rather than argument, producing only temporary change.
Persuasion — a deliberate effort to change a person’s attitude through messages, appeals and arguments.
Prejudice — a preconceived, usually negative attitude towards members of a group, based only on their group membership.
Realistic conflict theory — the view that prejudice grows out of genuine competition between groups for limited resources.
Recategorisation — redrawing the boundary between “us” and “them” so that a former out-group becomes part of a shared, larger in-group.
Reinforcement — a consequence, such as approval, that strengthens the response it follows.
Social categorisation — the mind’s automatic sorting of people into an in-group and an out-group.
Social learning — the acquiring of attitudes by interacting with, observing and imitating other people.
Stereotype — a fixed, oversimplified belief that all members of a group share certain traits; the cognitive component of a group attitude.
Stereotype threat — the anxiety of possibly confirming a negative stereotype about one’s group, which can itself lower performance.
Stereotype vulnerability — the anxious, self-doubting state that stereotype threat produces in the person it targets.
Superordinate goals — aims so large that no single group can reach them alone, so that groups must cooperate.
Ultimate attribution error — the tendency to credit good acts by one’s own group to character, but good acts by an out-group to luck or trickery (and the reverse for bad acts).
Valence — the direction of an attitude, that is, whether it is positive or negative.
7.9 Points to Ponder
If our attitudes do not always show up in our behaviour, is it fairer to judge a person by what they say they believe, or only by what they actually do?
If the mind sorts people into “us” and “them” almost automatically, can prejudice ever be fully removed — or can it only ever be redirected towards a larger “us”?
A stereotype quietly screens out the very evidence that could disprove it. Given that, how could you ever tell which of your own firm beliefs about a group are stereotypes?
Advertising, election speeches and even public-health campaigns all rely on persuasion. Where does helping people make up their minds end, and manipulating them begin?
We already know several ways to reduce prejudice, yet it survives almost everywhere. Is prejudice mainly a problem of not knowing the cure, or of not being willing to apply it?
7.10 Objective Questions
- The cognitive component of an attitude refers to — [1 mark]
- what a person feels about the object
- what a person believes about the object
- how a person acts towards the object
- how strongly the attitude is held
- Attitude change that is deep and lasting is most likely to occur through the — [1 mark]
- peripheral route
- central route
- use of attractive communicators
- use of mental shortcuts
- The idea that prejudice grows out of competition between groups for scarce resources is central to — [1 mark]
- the contact hypothesis
- the Elaboration Likelihood Model
- realistic conflict theory
- cognitive dissonance theory
- Which of the following is NOT listed as a cause of prejudice? [1 mark]
- social learning
- social categorisation
- persuasion
- stereotyping
- Which of the following is NOT a way of resisting prejudice? [1 mark]
- recategorisation
- direct intergroup contact
- social categorisation
- developing positive values
- Discrimination is best described as the ______ component of an attitude towards a group. [1 mark]
- cognitive
- affective
- behavioural
- genetic
- The less-leads-to-more effect was demonstrated in an experiment by — [1 mark]
- Sherif
- Tajfel
- Allport
- Festinger and Carlsmith
- Assertion (A): The central route produces more lasting attitude change than the peripheral route. Reason (R): In the central route, the audience carefully weighs the strength of the actual arguments. [1 mark]
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true.
- Assertion (A): Prejudice is an attitude, while discrimination is a behaviour. Reason (R): Every prejudiced person always discriminates against the group they dislike. [1 mark]
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true.
- Assertion (A): Merely sorting people into groups can produce in-group bias. Reason (R): Tajfel’s minimal group experiments found favouritism towards one’s own group even without any competition. [1 mark]
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true.
- Assertion (A): According to the less-leads-to-more effect, a large reward for acting against one’s attitude produces the greatest attitude change. Reason (R): A large reward gives ample justification for the action, which lowers dissonance. [1 mark]
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true.
- Match each psychologist in Column I with the contribution in Column II. [1 mark]
| Column I | Column II |
|---|---|
| a. Leon Festinger | i. contact hypothesis |
| b. Gordon Allport | ii. minimal group experiments |
| c. Muzafer Sherif | iii. cognitive dissonance |
| d. Henri Tajfel | iv. realistic conflict theory |
- Match each term in Column I with the component of attitude in Column II. [1 mark]
| Column I | Column II |
|---|---|
| a. stereotype | i. affective |
| b. prejudice | ii. behavioural |
| c. discrimination | iii. cognitive |
Fill in the blank: The direction of an attitude — whether it is positive or negative — is called its __________. [1 mark]
Fill in the blank: Aims so large that no single group can reach them alone, forcing groups to cooperate, are called __________. [1 mark]
Fill in the blank: The uncomfortable tension felt on holding two inconsistent thoughts, or on acting against one’s own attitude, is called __________. [1 mark]
State whether True or False: A stereotype is the behavioural component of an attitude towards a group. [1 mark]
State whether True or False: Any contact between two groups will reduce prejudice, whatever the conditions. [1 mark]
7.11 Check Your Concepts
Define attitude and name its three components. [2 marks] (about 30 words)
What is an attitude object? Give one example. [2 marks] (about 30 words)
Define cognitive dissonance. [2 marks] (about 30 words)
State any two conditions under which intergroup contact is likely to reduce prejudice. [2 marks] (about 30 words)
Differentiate between prejudice and discrimination. [3 marks] (about 60 words)
Differentiate between the central and peripheral routes to persuasion. [3 marks] (about 60 words)
Give reasons why stereotypes are so hard to change, even when a person meets people who do not fit them. [3 marks] (about 60 words)
Explain, with an example, how an attitude can be formed through observational learning. [3 marks] (about 60 words)
Explain, with an example, how classical conditioning forms an attitude. [4 marks] (about 100 words)
Describe the less-leads-to-more effect and explain why it occurs. [4 marks] (about 100 words)
Evaluate the claim that “any contact between groups reduces prejudice.” [4 marks] (about 100 words)
Explain how social categorisation can lead to prejudice, referring to the in-group, the out-group and in-group bias. [4 marks] (about 100 words)
Describe the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion, including both routes, its supporting evidence, and one limitation. [6 marks] (about 150 words)
Explain cognitive dissonance theory — what dissonance is, the ways in which people reduce it, the evidence that supports the theory, and one limitation. [6 marks] (about 150 words)
Discuss the four causes of prejudice. [6 marks] (about 150 words)
Discuss the ways in which prejudice can be resisted. [6 marks] (about 150 words)
7.12 Case-Based Questions
- Meera has never watched a street play, but her elder sister, whom she admires, often calls them boring and old-fashioned. Meera now believes street plays are dull, feels reluctant whenever one is mentioned, and quietly avoids joining the school drama club. [5 marks]
- Identify the three components of Meera’s attitude towards street plays.
- Which route of attitude formation best explains how she formed this attitude without ever seeing a street play?
- Suggest one way in which her attitude might be changed.
- A health worker wants to persuade a village to boil its drinking water. She is choosing between two plans: a talk by a trusted local doctor who explains the clear evidence, or a catchy jingle sung by a popular film star. [6 marks]
- Name the two routes to persuasion that these two plans rely on.
- Which plan is likely to produce more lasting change in the villagers’ attitude, and why?
- Suggest one feature the health worker could add to her message to make it more persuasive.
- Two neighbourhoods have long distrusted each other after years of quarrelling over a shared water tank. A local project now brings together young people from both areas to jointly design, build and manage a new tank that both neighbourhoods will depend on. [6 marks]
- Which cause of prejudice best explains the original distrust between the two neighbourhoods?
- Which method of resisting prejudice does the joint project use, and which conditions make it effective?
- Explain how this project might change how each side sees “us” and “them”.
- Ananya scores consistently well in her mathematics practice tests. Before an important exam, a relative jokingly remarks that “girls are just not good at maths.” In the exam, Ananya feels unusually anxious and scores well below her practice level. [5 marks]
- Name and explain the process most likely at work in Ananya’s exam performance.
- Suggest two ways in which her stereotype vulnerability could be reduced.
7.5.1 Social Learning
The first and simplest cause is that prejudice, like any other attitude, is learned. Children pick up prejudiced views from parents, teachers, friends and the wider community, in exactly the ways we studied under attitude formation — by observation, by association, and by being rewarded for expressing the “right” opinions.
A child who is praised, or simply approved of, for repeating a family’s low opinion of another group learns that the opinion is welcome, and holds it more firmly. The prejudice was never reasoned out; it was absorbed and reinforced.
Films, news and social media are powerful teachers of prejudice. When a particular community is shown again and again in a negative light — always the villain, always the problem — audiences slowly take on that slant as if it were plain fact. The very same channels, used differently, can teach acceptance just as powerfully.