Emotion and cognition in prejudice

- [Voicover] Prejudice is made up of several different components. The first component that we have is a fundamental underlying thought overgeneralized belief, otherwise known as a cognition. We often refer to these as stereotypes. The second aspect to prejudice is that it carries with it an emotional component, like anger or a strong dislike, and we term that an affect, or affective component. And thirdly, predjudice consists of a propensity to carry out a behavior to act on the prejudice. And when somebody does that, it actually turns into discrimination. So as I've earlier mentioned, cognition, a thought can otherwise be called a stereotype. And a tendency to lead to a behavior when a prejudicial way of thinking actually leads to a behaviorial change, that's termed discrimination. So we can already see that we can break down prejudice into these three areas. Well, when we think about prejudice, is there a kind of personality factor at play? And there is a line of thinking to suggest that, yeah, there is a type of personality that could be more susceptible to prejudice, and that's called the Authoritarian Personality. Now, what I'm gonna do here is to draw a big pair of military jackboots, lots of laces. Because people with authoritarian personality, they're kinda pretty militaristic in some ways. They kinda listen to their superiors, they're pretty obedient to their superiors, I should say. But on the other hand, they don't really have much sympathy or caring for people they deem to be inferior to themselves. They can actually be pretty oppressive to people that are under them. And they are pretty rigid thinkers, pretty inflexible with their viewpoints. Some of you may be thinking, that doesn't sound like a lot of fun. Well, one of the things that we think about, and when we think about these people, we think that perhaps they actually had quite harsh upbringings. They probably underwent a lot of disciplining themselves when they were growing up. And people with this authoritarian personality, they actually use prejudice to help them cope with their world view, it's actually protective of their ego. And prejudice avoids them having to confront the unacceptable aspects of themselves. They're always focusing on other people, and how other people behave, and how other people act, and how much they hate or don't like other people. Now, this authoritarian personality, this is actually quite controversial, and I should mention that, and you have to know that not everybody agrees with this jackboot personality type. And one other thing you should think about, if it's a personality type, it's gonna be difficult to change. And that makes interventions to reduce prejudice by targeting authoritarian personalities more difficult. So what if it's not to do with personality? What if it's to do with more so emotion rather than personality? Well, one of the ideas that has come up is the idea that something like frustration, so somebody getting very frustrated, that could actually, in some ways, lead to a prejudice. Well, how exactly does that? When somebody's frustrated, one of the thoughts is that they become frustrated and that frustration very often turns into these aggressive impulses. Right, so for example, you are working in a very low paid job. You get really frustrated and you start to get angry, and you start to get aggressive, and you start to get aggressive towards your employer for giving you such a crummy low paid job. Well, one of the challenges is that if you start getting really aggressive to your employer, boom, you may lose your job. And you may not necessarily want that. So if you don't become aggressive to your employer, if you start bottling up, this aggression's gonna keep mounting up. So, what do some people do? Some people may take this aggression over here and may re-channel it somewhere else. So, instead of their employer, they may re-channel it towards minorities. This is much more acceptable in many ways, because when they do that, they're not gonna lose their job. They can displace out their aggression towards other people, minorities, different racial groups. And what do we think they're doing here? They're doing something we call scapegoating. So they are literally taking this frustration that's turning into aggression, and instead of putting out their employer or other powerful figure, that it's gonna be a disadvantage to them, they will re-channel it towards a different group of individuals. And historically, we have seen that throughout the world, throughout the US, throughout Europe, in particular, times of economic hardship and disadvantage. And this theory is called the Frustration Aggression Hypothesis. In line with the Frustration Aggression Hypothesis, I want to tell you about another hypothesis. And this is called the Hypothesis of Relative Deprivation. Now, what the Hypothesis of Relative Deprivation suggests is that people become very frustrated and you get upsurge in prejudice and discrimination when people feel deprived of something they feel entitled to. And there's a discrepancy between what their expectations are, and what they actually get. So let's look at this graph here, and let's label the axis. Label the horizontal axis as Time, and label the vertical axis as, say Standard of Living. So if our expectation is that living standards increase gradually over time, and this is what we expect, and then what we actually get is this. So as you can see, living standards actually don't increase with time, actually these tend to drop off, maybe because of some economic problem. We're left with a difference. And it's this difference that is the relative deprivation. And it's the extent, and how quickly that relative deprivation comes about that can lead to collective unrest, an upsurge in prejudice and also discrimination, 'cause that's the behavioral component that can occur after prejudice. So actually, the Frustration Aggression Hypothesis, and the Hypothesis of Relative Deprivation, these two things are linked.