Editing Sidanius Pratto 1999 (section)

===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'''