Editing Sidanius Pratto 1999 (section)

==Chapter 1: Theoretical Background==
Problem: While various work has been done to understand aspects of intergroup hostility (e.g., race, class, gender discrimination), little work has been done to analyze these factors as a whole. 
===Psychological Theories===
*These models focus on:
**Personality dynamics
**Values of individuals, anxieties, and beliefs
**Information processing of individuals
*All have been influenced by Freud and his insight that people are driven by subconscious and nonrational drives
Implication: scholars began to think about stereotypes as manifestations of motivations rather than rationally held political beliefs.
====The Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis====
*Aggression (the intention to harm others purposefully) happens because people are frustrated that they have not achieved their goals
*Being aggressive at the source of the problem is dangerous because it is usually more powerful than us (your boss who just fired you; the state for taxing you). We instead direct our anger at subordinate groups.
**Ex. periodic increases in lynchings of U.S. Black people followed periods of economic stress in the South
* '''However, more work suggests discrimination happens all the time and is not solely linked to frustration.'''
*Moreover, the F-A Hypothesis assumes that aggression is unusual rather than a normal part of social life.
====Authoritarian Personality Theory (APT)====
*Posits authoritarianism is a personality syndrome that happens when children are mistreated and must be completely obedient to receive any affection from their parents
*This environment made people dislike the weak, think of relationships as dominance and submission, and glorify the strong
*Findings:
**Those who were prejudiced against one ethnic minority tended to be prejudiced against others
**Authoritarians tended to have conservative political-economic views and high levels of ethnocentrism
* '''This theory has been criticized! 1) Measurement problem: people may show agreement bias and agree with whatever question you give them; 2) Only picks up conservative authoritarianism, not liberal authoritarianism'''
* To correct for 2), the '''dogmatism''' scale was invented. With this scale, it still shows that people on the right have higher levels of authoritarianism than people on the left.
*'''APT claims authoritarianism is a personality syndrome, but connections between childrearing practices and the actual syndrome are scarce. There is also no evidence that authoritarians are more psychologically encumbered than others.'''
====Psychological Uncertainty and Anxiety Models====
*“Fear of uncertainty is the central psychological motivation underlying conservatism” (Sidanius and Pratto, Chapter 1).
*'''Terror management theory:''' because human beings can anticipate the fact that they will die, they experience existential terror and ennui. To fight against this, they create worldviews to tell themselves they are meaningful (ex. Self-esteem is a buffer against anxiety).
**Minority groups have a harder time bolstering themselves against existential ennui than majority groups (PD: Is this true? Think of Durkheim study of suicides in France).
*TMT predicts that encountering someone with a different worldview threatens our buffer against existentialism around death. We become anxious, needing to convert them, exterminate them or assimilate to them.
====Value and Value Conflict Theories====
*Realized that there was little cross-cultural consensus on what liberal and conservative meant
*Tried to map these beliefs on more general values; classified beliefs as a '''tradeoff between equality and freedom'''
**'''New iteration focused on tradeoff between humanitarianism/egalitarianism and individualism/Protestant work ethic'''
*Argued most White Americans are ambivalent towards Black Americans. Black Americans are “good targets for humanitarianism but bad examples of individual achievement” (Sidanius and Pratto, Chapter 1).
**Showed that Pro-Black scale correlated positively with the Humanitarian Scale but negatively with Protestant Ethic (PE) scale
**Anti-Black scale correlated positively with PE scale but negatively with Humanitarian scale
====Social-Cognitive Approach to Stereotyping====
*Social stereotypes are a result of “normal” information processing
**Humans have a predisposition to seek patterns in events
*People perceive unusual or negative traits and unusual people (to them, ethnicities different than them) as going together
====The Facile Activation of Social Stereotypes====
*Once learned, stereotypes are easily '''facilely activated'''
**Learning someone’s gender leads people to assume things about their hobbies and profession
====Stereotypes as Causal Explanations====
*When people ask themselves “who would perform X role?” they are likely to use a stereotype they already know as a causal explanation
*When members of a group disproportionately fill a role or have a trait, individuals assume ''all'' members of that group have that trait or role
====The Contextual Sensitivity of Stereotypes====
*How likely someone is to develop stereotypes is context dependent
**Ex. Those in power (more likely to be dominants) are less likely to have to pay attention to subordinates and even more likely to stereotype
====The Tenacity and Self-Fulfilling Character of Social Stereotypes====
*Stereotypes are resistant to attempts to change them and last a long time
*Providing counter examples (ex. token women engineer) can cause more stereotyping, not less. People are more likely to attribute that token’s success to their individual meritorious qualities in spite of group identity
*Being a token can result in underperformance of the token because of self-consciousness 
*Stereotypes can bias memory so one recalls stereotype-confirming information or filter new information intake to only stereotype-confirming information
* '''Critique: research has done little to figure out how institutional discrimination occurs by focusing on individual cognitive processes'''
===Social-Psychological Theories===
*Focus on the individual in the context of their group and social community, the norms they have learned through dominant cultural narratives, and someone’s desire to fit in as a member of a group.
====Socialization and Social Learning Theories====
*Assumes the reason people are racist or otherwise discriminatory is because they have been taught to act this way since they were children
====Modern Racism Theories====
*Asserts blatant and extreme forms of racism against Black Americans happened in the past (and largely do not happen now). Now, more subtle and indirect forms are used.
*These subtle forms are called '''residual racism''':
**Learned emotional antipathy towards Black Americans
**Cognitively driven stereotyping
**Old fashioned racism has been replaced by symbolic racism
*'''Principle-implementation gap:''' contradiction between whites’ support for racial equality as a principle but opposition to policies that would increase racial equality
*'''Critiques:'''
**'''Symbolic racism is just measuring political ideology'''
**'''Symbolic racism is old-fashioned racism in disguise'''
**'''Overlap between symbolic racism and the attitudes it is purported to predict'''
====Realistic Group Conflict Theory====
*Intergroup discrimination and conflict results from groups being locked in real conflict over resources that are material or symbolic. This conflict is imagined to be zero-sum.
* '''Makes two assumptions the authors criticize:'''
**'''Real groups actually exist, and have a shared history and fate'''
**'''Groups truly believe themselves to be in a zero-sum game'''
*Authors argue that these conditions are sufficient to produce discrimination but not necessary
====Social Identity Theory (SIT)====
*Humans have a desire for positive social identity. Even if it unclear what membership means or what the group is (such as the imagined groupings in Tafjel’s lab experiments), people will make up meanings to signal their group’s superiority (and therefore, their superiority). They allocate more to people in their groups than outgroups.
*The more stable boundaries between groups are, the more discrimination happens between groups.
*'''Four problems with SIT'''
**'''Views social identity as the motivator for intergroup discrimination'''
***'''Implies those who strongly identify with their ingroup are most likely to discriminate in favor of their group (contested findings in the literature)'''
**'''Does not address differential social power between groups'''
**'''Does not address outgroup favoritism'''
***'''Members of low-status groups sometimes prefer high-status outgroups'''
**'''Primarily focuses on preference towards the ingroup rather than denigration of the outgroup, even though many historical examples focus on harming other groups as opposed to lifting up one’s own.'''
===Social-Structured and Elite Theories===
*Elite theories believe societies are hierarchical and ''oligarchically'' organized
====Group Position Theory====
* When groups fight, the dominant group will seek to maintain power over the subordinate group(s). They do this by promoting policies and changing (or maintaining) public opinion to support them.
====Marxism====
*If you want a refresher on Marx, there are better online sources than this article (not to cast aspersions --- the article just assumes you’re familiar with Marx).
*Capitalist societies are hierarchically organized:
**Those who have power over the means of production take control (economically, socially) over those who actually labor to produce things of value. Those in power are always able to construct trades such that they will benefit at the expense of those who work for them.
**The economic ruling class rules over the state, entrenching this inequality.
====The Neoclassical Elite Approach====
*Primary conflict: masses and elites
*Believed that democracy and group-based social equality were unachievable
*All social systems were inherently undemocratic, ruled by a small elite who justified their disproportionate power
*Pareto: distinguished between governing and non-governing elites
**Argued that power is based on four factors
***'''Social heterogeneity''': conflict between the ruled and those that rule. 
***'''Interest''': goals individuals want to achieve (ex. wealth, power, desirable mates)
***'''Residues''': “psychological dispositions occupying an intermediate status between human sentiments and observable expressions” (Sidanius and Pratto, Chapter 1). It includes knowable and unknowable things.
****'''Class I residues''': instinct for combinations
Essentially openness. Desire for adventure, inventiveness, progressivism
****'''Class II residues''': preservation of aggregates
Norm-following. Upholding traditions. Respecting institutions like the church.
***'''Derivations''': logical justifications that elites give regarding them ruling even if their real motives are sentiment-motivated
****Ex. divine right of kings
*'''Authors contend that an argument with this class of theories is that elites rule because of their individually virtuous or meritorious qualities. Though some people may be exceptional, identification in a dominant social group helps with access to opportunity and legitimacy.'''
===Evolutionary Theory===
*Evolution necessitates we compete for resources and seek to be evolutionarily fit (have offspring).
*'''Inclusive fitness''': organisms will protect not only their own evolutionary fitness, but the fitness of genetically similar organisms.
*People in arbitrary set groups tend to be more related to each other than those of different groups (PD: To what degree? I feel like the genetic differences are actually quite small. It’s phenotypic differences that matter.)
*'''Evolutionary theory has been used to justify differential societal treatment of arbitrary set groups.'''