By the Task Force on Diversity Issues at the Precollege and Undergraduate Levels of Education in Psychology

Although students are sometimes wary of talking about the role of prejudice in their own lives, the topic provides many opportunities to show psychology?s relevance to personal, social and political issues.

In introductory and other psychology courses, applying psychological findings and principles to the problem of prejudice demonstrates to students the power and importance of psychological research. Moreover, such discussions help students to think critically about how categorizing people can lead to unwarranted judgments about their positive or negative worth.

By discussing how basic psychological processes help explain the ways in which people develop prejudices, educators can teach students about prejudice and help them better understand the basic principles of psychology.

The following examples provide some starting points for psychology educators to incorporate the topic of prejudice in their introductory psychology courses.

1. Classical conditioning. Psychological research has shown that when target words are paired with negative or positive terms, people perceive the target words as negative or positive because of higher-order conditioning. Arthur and Carolyn Staats found that when the target words are ethnic, nation or religious labels?such as ?Mexican? or ?Irish? or ?Jew??the result is more negative or positive feelings toward those groups.

An exercise that illustrates this principle repeats one of the Staats? earlier studies. The instructor presents a list of nonsense syllables paired with positive words such as ?baby? or negative words such as ?slime.? Later, students evaluate the nonsense syllables on a good-bad dimension. Those syllables paired with negative words are apt to get more negative evaluations than those paired with positive words.

Many questions for class discussion can emerge from this activity:

? How might certain groups become paired with positive or negative descriptions?

? Where in the community might this occur?

? Who might be the target of such pairings?

? How could such conditioning be reversed?

2. Memory. Since the pioneering work of Frederick Bartlett, PhD, in the 1930s, hundreds of studies have shown that memory is reconstructive and that people often distort information to fit assumptions and cultural expectations. Our schema influence what we recall about members of particular groups. Gordon Allport, PhD, and Leo Postman?s, PhD, study on rumors in the 1940s found a razor held by a white workman seemed to transfer to the hand of a well-dressed black as a picture description was passed from person to person.

Teachers can use these results to launch a discussion of how our prejudices influence what we remember about people and events that we see or hear about. How does this tendency to remember or forget things systematically help or hinder our encounters with others?

Discussions about prejudice help students to think critically about how categorizing people can lead to unwarranted judgments about their positive or egative worth.

3. Social perception. We evaluate events differently depending on what we consider to be appropriate behavior for an individual from a given group. For example, Linda Carli, PhD, and her colleagues have shown that people often evaluate the same assertive nonverbal behavior differently depending on whether the actor is a man or a woman. Another example of social perceptions comes from the way in which a person dresses. People interpret behaviors differently when they see individuals dressed in a wealthy or poor manner.

As an out-of-class exercise, ask students to go to a fashionable shop where they are not known, dressed in a well- to-do manner or in dressed-down manner. Students should try to behave in the same way on both occasions. Then they should be prepared to discuss:

? What do they find with regards to service and attention?

? How do they think they are perceived by the store personnel?

? How might different expectations of age groups, ethnic groups, physically disabled and genders affect the attitudes and responses of people in general?

4. Development. People learn early in their social development to recognize and interpret differences among groups. In class discussions, teachers can ask students questions regarding:

? When did students started to note differences between boys and girls and between ethnic groups?

? What are the stereotypes that are commonly learned about the different groups?

? How central is this group differentiation to their own identity and their families? consideration of others?

One exercise for examining students? attitudes toward given groups uses Bogardus? Social Distance Scale, which asks people to rate individuals on the following scale: 1) would be willing to marry, 2) would have as regular friends, 3) would work beside in an office, 4) would live in same neighborhood, 5) would have as speaking acquaintance, 6) would bar from neighborhood and 7) would bar from the country.

In the exercise, instructors give students a questionnaire asking them to rate certain groups of people?for example blacks, Asians, those with disabilities?on the scale. Students are asked to indicate where they might fall on the scale, as well as where their parents and grandparents would fall.

The instructor then collects the papers and hands them back to students randomly and divides the room into the seven areas reflecting the categories of the social distance scale. Students are asked to stand in the area that reflects the questionnaire they now hold in their hands. Because the students do not have their own questionnaires, anonymity is preserved. (The instructor should tell the students not to admit if they do have their own sheets.)

The class should then discuss how they feel about their placement. Ultimately, the goal is to challenge students to think about the diverse world they live in and the assumptions they may have taken for granted about that world. Instructors should ask them to consider:

? In what ways is the development of group distinctions helpful or harmful?

? How might we work on going beyond the categories we learn early in life?

? How do we work on improving our cognitive capacities to deal with the complexity and diversity of the modern social world?

This article is the second in a series by the Board of Educational Affair?s Task Force on Diversity Issues at the Precollege and Undergraduate Levels of Education in Psychology. The group is working to promote the teaching of psychology as a more inclusive discipline. The task force seeks to find constructive ways of supporting teachers? efforts to convey research findings on diverse groups and address such issues as gender, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation and disability.

Further references

Devine, P., Monteith, M., Zuwerink, J., & Elliot, A. (1991). Prejudice with and without compunction, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 60, p. 817?830.

Duckit, J. (1992). ?Psychology and prejudice: a historical analysis and integrative framework,? American Psychologist, Vol. 47, p. 1182?1193.

Gaertner, S., & Dovidio, J., ?Prejudice, Discrimination and Racism,? (Academic Press, 1986).