Prejudice, In-Group/Out-Group

Gordon Allport published the text first in 1954, which would seem to make it dated, but like a lot of classic works, it is still the basis for many current and modern theories on Racism and Discrimination. With a background in Psychology he focused a lot on how thinking and emotional reactions are formed and come into play, but he also was very aware of social context and the variety of communal responses that varied over time and circumstances, making his work very relevant to Sociologists. Much of what he theorized was later confirmed by empirical studies in situation that did not even exist when he was writing, in which he presaged a lot of more recent events and can provide some effective guides to public policy if applied properly.

Last week we discussed how Race and Ethnicity are defined variably across communities, times, and contexts. He will cover some of that more in next week’s readings. In the first part of his book he discusses more the basic aspects of how we cognitively and affectively internalize social categories as a part of our being. Much of this will be discussed later in more depth as we consider how they are formed and learned, but for now we want to consider the basic elements of racial/ethnic thinking. His work made a basic distinction that is now common place in studies on Racism, as well as Sexism, Ageism, Classism, and all social categories based forms of prejudice and discrimination. At root we break these forms into three categories of the Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral.

The Cognitive is how we think or put expectations on categories. Usually this is referred to as Stereotypes. As a part our basic mental make up, we categorize the world into categories that are labeled, hence the names for things. In putting a labor or name to things are defining the category that is characterized by certain defining traits and it is assumed that everything that fits in the category has these defining, as well as associated, traits. This is true for inanimate objects as much as animate objects. Hence rocks, water, chairs, pens, stoves, etc. are all categories of inanimate objects that we assume to have certain properties. Animate categories such as dogs, cats, birds, fish, etc. also have this nature. People is a category, and every sub-category of people has this same nature. Hence Sex or Gender are labels and categories with defining and associated traits. People from Hawaii or people from Japan, similar have defining and associated traits. Even people of a certain age, or from a certain neighborhood, or a certain occupation, have their own category and assumed defining and associated traits that they are all assumed to share. Some people will claim they do not stereotype, but his is false. We all utilize stereotypes as they are one of the most basic tools we use to make sense of the world and try to plan our actions/reactions accordingly. When we meet people we immediately try to figure out what categories they fit into, as this gives us some assumed traits we believe they have, that allow us to guess how they will behave and react to things, and we pattern our own choices on how to act towards them based on this. Have you ever met someone who you could not categorize and it left you uncomfortable because you cannot anticipate how they are likely to act or react to things? When we meet someone for the first time, or are about to meet someone, we usually try to gather as much demographic information we can about them as our starting point to be able to figure out how they will act and how we should act. We usually try to guess their age (tells us what events they likely have lived through that might shape their attitudes and actions), gender (tells us many of the roles they are likely to claim and which they are unlikely to claim), race/ethnicity (an idea of how they identify themselves and how they are likely to identify us), social class (from clothing, appearance and manner, provides a sense of their likely expectations and biases), as a baseline. In interacting we often try to confirm our initial impressions or guesses as we use these to anticipate their actions/reactions as a basis for our own actions. Locally we often want to know what school they went to, as that often tells us more about neighborhood, likely cultural influences and social class referents. We do this with everything we encounter, not just people. How much do we do the same kind of mental screening and sorting into sub-categories when we meet a dog for the first time? How much do we do the same kind of mental screening the first time we go to a new restaurant to try and figure out what is appropriate and what we can expect in that restaurant. We all use stereotypes all of the time. What distinguishes the close minded from the open minded is not whether we utilize stereotypes, but how willing you are to abandon them, create new assumptions based on categories, or are willing to create whole new categories when faced with new or conflicting evidence. The close minded cling to their assumptions and categorizations regardless of how much evidence might suggest they are wrong. Open minded amend their categories, put new meanings to their categories, or create whole new categories to integrate and accept varying evidence.

The Affective component is our emotional and affective response to categories. Just as some of us have a fear of heights, or a fear of dogs, or love apple pie or love sitting by a fireplace, we have emotional/affective responses to everything as much as we have cognitive responses. Again this is true for all things, not just people, but it does include people. Some people we have personal responses to, but even people we have never met we respond to based on the categories we believe them to belong to. Hence we have an emotional reaction to rich people, to athletes, to musicians, to old people, to babies, etc. as categories. Even people we know well personally, a lot of our responses to them is still based on their categories, we simply know better which categories and sub-categories they fit into and how relevant those are to their actions in different situations. In many cases our affective response to a person is based not only on who they are (categories they fit) but the situation that makes some categories more salient or relevant in that situation. Once a police officer gave me a ticket for driving half a block at night without my headlights on (very well lighted street and I did not notice my lights were not on till I got to the intersection and realized no reflection from street signs, at which point I turned on my lights) and he was very formal and authoritative. I was more embarrassed than anything. A couple weeks later I ran into him in a bowling alley where he was bowling with his friends and I was with mine, and we all knew each other, and he apologized for giving me the ticket, explaining that he felt he had to as he had a brand new rookie in the car with him and had to strictly follow procedures. I told him not to worry about it, I recognized it was my own mistake, but he was feeling very guilty. How much of our emotional reaction to people is affected by the circumstances and how they seem to constrain our choices and actions? As such our emotional/affective responses to categories of people by social categories is Prejudice, which comes from the notion of pre-judging as it is assumed that emotional/affective responses come from moral judgements about a person’s value or worth. Again this can apply to any social category, race, ethnicity, gender, age, social class, occupation, physical attractiveness, etc. How many people have an emotional reaction to police officers? Or to someone who is mentally ill? Or to someone who is physically disabled? Or to someone who is elderly? We all tend to have an emotional reaction to all social categories, even if it is not obvious, and we may not even be consciously aware of it ourselves.

The Behavioral component is Discrimination. We tend to associate discrimination with negative treatment of a social category, but keep in mind we discriminate in positive ways as well. One of the more interesting criminology studies I read found that physically attractive people get shorter incarceration sentences in all categories of crime except for fraud, for fraud they get longer sentences. It seems with fraud they are seen as taking advantage of their attractiveness to defraud people and hence are punished more harshly, but for other crimes the Halo Effect comes into play and they are seen as less bad people as we associate the attractive with being good. Sometimes the categories people are in causes us to apply stereotypes and assume they have traits relevant to the situation and we respond based on these assumed traits. Sometimes their social category triggers a prejudice and the emotional response on our part affects how we act towards them. Sometimes we treat certain categories differently, not because of our own personal stereotypes or prejudices, but because we believe it is a social norm and expected of us by the community standards in that setting. This is the source of many forms of institutional discrimination in which the apparent policies call of differential treatment. It is often assumed that these policies have a rational basis and are based on relevant facts/evidence, but this is often not the case. It is often a matter of personal judgement how relevant certain traits might be. Sometimes the policies may not seem to be directly category relevant, but are indirectly. As an example many large and prestigious universities have legacy programs, in which prospective students get bonus points towards their applications for admission if they have a close relative who is an alumnus of the school. This does not seem racist on the face of it, but when you consider that these schools were almost all all-White in the past, it is primarily White prospective students who will benefit from this program disadvantaging non-White students applying for admission. When Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus, triggering the boycotts in the deep South at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, it was argued the bus driver was simply enforcing the bus companies rules at the time, and this was not evidence of his personal choice to discriminate. The same category may trigger negative forms of discrimination in some people and simultaneously trigger positive forms of discrimination in others. When I went to graduate school at Indiana University it quickly became obvious to me that the faculty (all White) were applying stereotype about Japanese Americans to me (good in Math-I had a degree in Math which made it worse, and that I would be studious, quiet and obedient, while being a high achiever). I could tell it shocked many of them when I turned out to be one of the more vocal critics of the program (in a polite and appropriate manner) and hence I was never invited to the reception to welcome new incoming graduate students (some of my friends and I had our own reception for them so we could give them some hints on how to survive the program).

It should be kept in mind that there are no laws about stereotypes and discrimination. Freedom includes the right to have our own beliefs and opinions. Discrimination on the other hand is in many ways illegal, even though it still gets practiced in many ways. While in the mid-west my friends and I were once denied service in a restaurant because we were a mixed race group, the servers refused to even recognize our presence, and this was backed up by the other customers. Technically this was illegal, but we also knew that a small town Sheriff was not likely enforce this law and face the wrath of the town folk, so we just left peacefully.

We all belong to social categories. The tendency is to think more positively and react more positively to the groups we belong to, hence In-groups. Now days people sometimes associate the term In-group with the popular or high status group, but that is not how Allport uses it. For him it is the groups/categories that we belong to and hence feel an affinity to. It should be kept in mind that his is only a tendency and there are exceptions. In graduate school I knew a Black graduate student from the deep South who totally rejected the identity of a Black student from the South and its associate stereotypes to the point that he refused to eat fried chicken or watermelon (both closely tied into the stereotype of Blacks from the South). I understood his feelings and position, felt sorry that he could not enjoy foods most of like regardless of social category. Almost all of us attended schools that had an internal structure of cliques of students forming their own in-groups based on some shared trait/characteristic/identity. Some can even be based on the shared characteristic of being the frequent targets of discrimination by other groups. Hence most Americans cheered for the athletes representing the United States at the Olympics even though we know none of them personally. Sharing citizenship can be enough. If we are not cheering for the representatives of our country, we will often cheer for the representatives of countries seen as our traditional allies, such as Great Britain or Canada. Which categories are seen as part of our In-group can be very flexible and situational. When I was at IU when it was time for the national tournaments we would cheer for the other Big Ten Conference Teams when in almost any other circumstance we would cheer against them. In California there is a growing Pan-Asian political movement in which many categories of Asian Americans are finding it useful to band together. The movement has gotten no traction here in Hawaii where many of the Asian American groups are major powers in their own right and see no need to join together. Until the 1960 Native Americans did not identify with each other, they only utilized their individual tribal identities, until the growing Civil Rights Movement showed them the advantages of banding together. Hence, who is in your In-group can vary by time, place, and circumstance.

Implied in the notion of In-group is the notion of Out-group. Most simply the Out-group is usually everyone not in the In-group. Sometimes the Out-group is more specific and targeted. While we may consider some countries allies now, what about the past? In 1924 and international arms agreement severely limited the number of warships Japan could have, more limiting than those imposed on Germany, even though this was soon after WWI in which Germany had been the foe and Japan an ally. The western powers saw the growing modernization and industrialization of Japan as a threat and responded, not only by engineering this international arms agreement, but also the US, Great Britain, Australia, and the Dutch entered into a secret agreement forming joint war plans on how to fight a war cooperatively with Japan. These countries controlled much of the vital economic resources in the Pacific and were purposefully limiting Japan’s access to slow down their growth and knew Japan would eventually have to respond militarily. Hence the concept of the “sneak attack” on Pearl Harbor was largely a falsehood. Most people know the bulk of the US Pacific Fleet was at Pearly Harbor and most of the battleships sunk in the attack, but no one seems to question why the fleet was forward deployed to Pearl Harbor in the first place, given Hawaii was not a state then. They were there to be a rapid response force to attacks in Malaysia, the Philipinnes, and the South Pacific. Some out-groups are more foes than others.

We tend to apply more positive stereotypes and emotional reactions to groups we associate ourselves with (in-groups) and more negative stereotypes and emotional reactions to groups we identify as out-groups who are contrasted and considered opposed to our own groups.

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