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CLASSMATE 1

My score for Hostile sexism is 1.82, and the benevolent was 2. 73. I compared my scores to the average score of Males and Nigeria. I chose to compare my score with that of the males because our society has a set of ideas about how women are expected to behave, ranging from dressing, speaking, accommodating, and nurturing. The presence of feminism and woman studies has reduced these assigned roles to women; however, the connection still exists. Women still face sexism in the work area and experience a personality trait stereotype where women are expected to be accommodating, stay at home with children, etc. Compared to the Male Average Score, it wasn’t surprising to see theirs higher than mine. I was, as expected, a high score. According to our text, stereotypes, like other cognitive representations, are maintained because the information that confirms our stereotypes is better remembered than information that disconfirms them (Fyock &Stangor, 1994). For example, if we believe women to be bad at math and see a woman with bad scores in math, we quickly remember it compared to a woman with good scores in math. It also applies to my expectation of a higher score of efficiently placing some men discriminate against women even though I have seen men who support women.

The other category I selected was a country (Nigeria). From an African background, I am aware of my social cognition, which is how my knowledge about social worlds influences me as an individual. I was curious to compare how largely I’ve been socially influenced by the social norms of the United States to Africa. Although I am aware of how submissive African women have to be to their husbands and how authoritative some African men can be, I was shocked by how high scores of Nigeria are in both hostile sexism and benevolent sexism. Average Nigerian scores on hostile and benevolent sexism were way higher than those listed on the data. Due to their collectivism, Nigerians are more concerned about interdependence and thus have a high social dominance orientation (SDO). As sexist as I may sound, some of the questions were demeaning to me. For example, question 20, “Men should be willing to sacrifice their well-being to provide financially for the women in their lives,” which I strongly disagreed with. As a wife and mom, I wouldn’t want my husband or son to sacrifice his mental health or health to provide for me financially. I would like to be loved, respected, but not financially sound to the detriment of someone’s health.

 

 

 

2. The “ambivalent sexism” does make sense because it was developed to measure hostile and benevolent attitudes towards women. In contrast to many other forms of ethnic, racial, etc., relationships between men and women are not marked by simply antipathy and negative stereotypes. Sexism is commonly thought to be a manifestation of male hatred against females. This viewpoint overlooks one crucial aspect of sexism: subjectively good attitudes toward women, which frequently coexist with sexist hate. The ASI considers sexism a multifaceted concept that includes two types of sexist attitudes: hostile and benevolent sexism.  Hostile sexism is denoting an adverse reaction to women who are believed to be challenging men’s power and prestige, and benevolent sexism is best thought of beliefs about women that see them as fair, obedient, innocent, fragile. Often these attitudes characterize a desire to protect women. Benevolent sexism is chivalrous attitudes toward women that feel favorable but sexist because it categorizes women as weak and needs men’s protection. Examples of such questions are “A good ought to be set on a pedestal by her man” Looking at both definitions, one may think they’re opposite, but they relate to each other. They both predict how men prejudices and stereotype women. The prevalence of hostile and benevolent sexism should be noted. Women have been relegated to social roles with lower status than men in practically all cultures and periods for which evidence is available. In our current society, there is evidence that women still encounter discrimination in the workplace, including sexual harassment, and that they are perceived less positively than men when it comes to solid leadership capacities, strength, etc. Women are depicted as kind but incompetent and weak at many vital jobs, even though stereotypes of women contain many good features. The positive traits relate to social-emotional characteristics; therefore, women are portrayed as friendly but incompetent at many essential duties (e.g., analytical thinking). Feminism has helped enlighten every one of this injustice and acts as a way for others” s to take action to help make equality happen. This activism has helped provide women’s right to voice in all the laws and regulations we are governed by. Feminism must work and improve on intersectionality. This means fighting for intersectionality by not excluding people based on their race or color, gender, status, sexual orientation, etc., and acknowledging how race, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status affect Feminism.

In Feather& Mckee’s (2012) research, Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI) was used to link hostile and benevolent attitudes toward women (HS and BS) to 10 value types from the Schwartz Value Survey, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), and social dominance orientation (SDO). They hypothesized that a person’s value priorities would influence how they respond to the scales employed in the study. 170 students (62 men, 107 women, and 1 non-specified gender) from an Australian university completed the scales. The participants completed questionnaires that included a 57-item Schwartz Value Survey, the 30-item Right-wing Authoritarianism Scale, the 14-item Social Dominance Orientation Scale, and the 22-item Ambivalent Sexism Inventory. They found Gender variations in the importance of power values, HS, BS, RWA, SDO, and several relationships. After controlling for gender, HS and BS were favorably connected with power and security values and negatively correlated with universalism and kindness values. RWA and SDO were linked to separate value patterns with considerable overlap, and they mediated relationships between value importance and HS and BS to some extent.

 

 

References

 Feather, N. T., & McKee, I. R. (2012). Values, Right-Wing Authoritarianism, Social Dominance Orientation, and Ambivalent Attitudes Toward Women Values, Right-Wing Authoritarianism, Social Dominance Orientation, and Ambivalent Attitudes Toward Women. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 42(10), 2479–2504. https://doi-org.ezproxy.umgc.edu/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2012.00950.x

 UnderstandingPrejudice.org: Teacher’s corner. (n.d.). UnderstandingPrejudice.org. https://secure.understandingprejudice.org/teach/  

 

Task 2

I watched this to the end, though the instructions were for 25 minutes. It honestly drove me to tears knowing that children had to encounter those feelings, especially current kids who have to go through bullying and discrimination due to no faults. It is inevitable that the teacher is fantastic and did an excellent job teaching these kids a life-changing lesson; however, as she mentioned, it is detrimental without practice. To teach her students about discrimination, Jane Elliot induced stereotyping and prejudice through the use of social psychological phenomena such as cognitive mistakes, self-perceptions, and the bystander effect by informing them that blue-eyed people were superior to brown-eyed people. The blue-eyed pupils were given a special privileges and instructions to ignore the brown-eyed students. Elliott began by creating a stereotyping situation among the youngsters by dividing them into two easily distinguishable physical characteristics such as blue and brown eyes. She began to say nasty things about one group, and the kids readily accepted the new values that each group represented. Depending on who was in charge for the day, they acquired prejudice against other blue or brown eyes. They took turns in their assigned roles for one day apiece. And over those two days, there was a bystander effect, in which no one seemed to come to someone’s aid, and friends simply accepted and observed as a person was verbally abused and told that their poor performance was due to the color of their eyes. Ms. Elliot’s observation about the children’s academic performance during the experiments attests to Shapiro & Neuberg’s 2007 research that stereotypes influence academic performance. According to Ms. Elliot, the children’s score goes up on the day they are in the majority group and down on the day they’re in the minority group. These scores can also be influenced by stereotype threat which, according to the text, is when a performance is decreased by knowledge of a cultural stereotype. The children in the minority group were affected because their group was linked with lower IQ and learning abilities. And the majority might be feeling confident about the knowledge of high IQ and performed better.   Being prejudiced creates a sense of inferiority, plays on all aspects of your self-esteem, and can cause stereotype threat.

As an African and a woman of color in America, there are a zillion experiences I have seen happening and experienced when it comes to prejudice and discrimination, but I will share the most recent one. A friend visited me, and I took her to a work dinner. During the introduction phase, a colleague spontaneously social categorized my friend from my country and a religious group. After the end of dinner, one of my colleagues asked my friend why her accent was stronger than mine? She replied because I have been living here, and she just arrived in the states (literally weekdays ago.). She kept asking as if she did not understand what my friend was saying. She then turned to me and asked if my accent is weaker because I was more educated than my friend. With a quizzical expression on my face, I replied that she is a PharmD student and an outstanding student; as such, before I could finish my statement, she said sorry and shamefully excused herself. Instantly I acknowledge the power of discrimination, how language can reflect one’s intelligence, the ability to speak, and, most importantly, to be understood. And the ability to listen and understand. I believe my colleague felt ashamed because she failed to listen and understand. An excellent and well-educated student is reduced to an illiterate because of discrimination.

As I watched the video, I was struck by how committed Ms. Elliott is upholding the concept of equality and attempting to teach her children and adults in the most effective manner possible. However, when the approach was extended to adults, the learning was more difficult. Some grownups appear to be having trouble accepting the newfound reality that they discriminate against others. The experiment on adults was hard to witness, and it reminded me of Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment. The adults were traumatized, and they felt powerless in the face of the majority group and Ms. Elliot and couldn’t find the strength to cease doing what they believed was wrong. Others were prone to engage in belief perseverance, which involves rejecting evidence and sticking to one’s own beliefs. If powerful emotions are not aroused, the learning may not last. I believe that the most successful and long-term strategy for achieving a society free of stereotyping, bigotry, and prejudice is to teach children through exercises similar to Elliott’s experiment, but with coaching aspects included. Introduce a new office a week or two before the session where kids can go anonymously for help if they are angry. At this office, kids will learn how to cope with discrimination issues, such as joining together with like-minded kids to refuse to do what they believe is wrong. Although this is more of a self-defense lesson, teaching children self-defense may be the slowest but most effective way to eradicate prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination worldwide.

 

 

Reference

 Frontline. (1985). A Class Divided. Retrieved from: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/

 

CLASSMATE 2

Task 1: Sexism

The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory is a scored test that asks the participant their degree of agreement on a scale form 0 (“disagree strongly”) to 5 (“Agree Strongly”) with 22 individual stereotypes about women (or about men in relation to women). These beliefs include generalizations that appear to be negative (e.g., “Women are too easily offended”), or positive (e.g., “Many women have a quality of purity that few men possess.”). The composite score is averaged across all questions to result in a Hostile Sexism Score and a Benevolent Sexism Score, each between 0 and 5.

Social categorization between women and men exists across all cultures around the world, and has been in existence as long as humans have been around. “Traditionally, the dominating social role of the woman was as housewife, and that of the man was focused on work and family maintenance. Nowadays, the social role of women is evolving in the direction of taking a profession, while increasingly men are taking care of the household.” (Sekścińska, Trzcińska, and Maison, “The Influence of Different Social Roles Activation on Women’s Financial and Consumer Choices.”) The bases for the social categorization between women and men have changed as the change in roles, culture, and social institutions have accelerated with economic and technological advances. However, stereotypes and sexist attitudes persist.

When most people think about sexism, they mean hostile sexism. It is clear why hostile sexism is harmful to women, resulting in discrimination behaviors. I had not given much thought to benevolent sexism, or how it might be harmful. However, those attitudes serve to keep women “in their place” by making women dependent on men for their value and for their livelihood. In the 1980s my manager at the furniture store where I worked regularly used language that amounts to sexual harassment, and explicitly told me that he prefers male employees because they are better salesmen. I imagine his hostile and benevolent ASI scores would be high, particularly the hostile ones.

My hostile sexism score was 1.64.  This compares with 2.05 for the website, 1.60 for United States women, 1.72 for German women and 2.41 for South African women.  My score was in line with US women.  Men’s scores for hostile sexism ranged from 2.24 in the US to 3.44 in South Africa (website average of 2.74). My benevolent sexism score was 2.09. This compares with 2.68 for the website, 2.00 for women in the US, 2.40 for women in Germany, and 3.45 for women in South Africa. Men’s scores for benevolent sexism ranged from 2.30 in the US to 3.2 in South Africa. I chose countries on three continents to make sure I got a broad sample of countries. One interesting data point was that Germany was the only country in my small sample of data where a benevolent sexism score was lower than the hostile sexism score for a country (Germany). I chose Germany specifically because over the years I had two German exchange students come live in my home and was surprised by some of their attitudes.

Hostile and benevolent sexism can only be reduced when societies promote equality and open mindedness, both in terms of attitudes as well as by providing opportunities that move society away from stratification along traditional gender roles.

The questions in the ASI are phrased in a way that encourages outgroup homogeneity by forcing the reader to view members of the individual groups (women or men) as more similar to each other than to the opposite group. For the same reason, in-group favoritism could possibly affect women’s responses. This may be reflected in the tendency for women to have higher benevolent sexism scores than their hostile sexism scores. Also, as an explicit measure asking participants questions that they can easily infer would make them more or less sexist, the ASI may encourage people to answer the way they want to be perceived (i.e., not sexist) rather than providing answers that accurately reflect their attitudes.

Sexism results in social dominance orientation (SDO) to reinforce social and economic inequalities that stem from social categorization. Men and women are able to accept inequality in the hostile and benevolent aspects because of historical context, outgroup homogeneity, and ingroup favoritism.

One study I read investigates the hypothesis that reactions to automobile accidents vary as a function of the gender of the driver. (Pek and Leong, “Sex–Related Self–Concepts, Cognitive Styles and Cultural Values of Traditionality–Modernity as Predictors of General and Domain–Specific Sexism.”) In the study they describe an accident, then ask participants to draw conclusions about it. Some participants are told that the driver is male, while others are told the driver is female. The researchers found that more participants (men and women participants) faulted the female drivers than did the male drivers. This stemmed from stereotypes that people held that women demonstrated inattention and carelessness to a greater degree than men. They also explored how female-driving stereotypes might translate into real-world consequences and lead to discriminatory treatment of female defendants in civil case litigation.

Sources:

Pek, J.c.x., and F.t.l. Leong. “Sex–Related Self–Concepts, Cognitive Styles and Cultural Values of Traditionality–Modernity as Predictors of General and Domain–Specific Sexism.” Asian Journal of Social Psychology 6, no. 1 (April 2003): 31–49. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-839X.t01-1-00008.

 

Task 2: Racism

Dr. Jane Elliot had come up with the idea for the exercise with her third graders before but felt compelled to act after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Although it is a brief exercise, she is able to go beyond the knowledge that discrimination exists, but to help white people understand that white people in the US are easily able to ignore and deny the harm they impart on others through the stereotypes, discrimination and institutionally enforced methods of dehumanizing people that constitute racism. The idea is to solve racism by forcing people to “Never judge another man until you have walked a mile in his moccasins” (quotespedia.org, “Never Judge Another Man until You Have Walked a Mile in His Moccasins. – Native American Proverb – Quotespedia.Org – Quotespedia.Org.”).

Our readings discussed change cognitive aspects, such as positive black role models like Oprah Winfrey or Lebron James, as a way that White Americans were able to become less prejudiced. However, this approach essentially places the responsibility for correcting white prejudice and discrimination in the hands of blacks, rather than where the responsibility belongs. Dr. Elliot avoided this trap and demonstrates to her white students that they (whether as brown- or blue-eyed groups in power) were responsible for mistreating the other group by making them be the group discriminated against.

Another theory about reducing prejudice is the contact hypothesis, which suggests by increasing the amount of contact between groups will reduce prejudiced attitudes. The contact hypothesis also drives the realization that diversity in movies, television, advertisements and other media is important for all races.

It was surprising to me how easily Dr. Elliot was able to create unjust characterizations about the disadvantaged groups in the minds of the advantaged group. She was able to couch any reaction or behavior, whether it would normally be seen as positive (e.g., independent thought), negative (e.g., anger), or neutral (e.g., asking a question) as evidence of a lack of character or intelligence. It was also interesting how negative behaviors exhibited by individuals in the disadvantaged group were generalized to apply to that group while positive behaviors exhibited by individuals in the advantaged group were generalized to apply throughout the group. Another major observation was that the psychological impact of the harsh treatment had major effect on students’ performance on assessments. Dr. Elliot tested students two weeks before the experiment, on the day that students were in the disadvantaged group, and two weeks after the experiment. Performance was greatly diminished for students after less than one day living under disadvantaged circumstances.

The most disheartening thought that I take away from the video is that 50 years after those experiments, very little has changed with respect to whites’ willingness to confront their prejudice and the impact it has on others. (DiAngelo, 2018)

As we saw during the interviews with the participants when they came back as adults for a reunion, after having the shared experience, the students viewed themselves as connected (brown- and blue-eyed pupils). This can be seen as creating a common ingroup identity, much in the same way that athletes or soldiers who bond together through common experiences. This is one way to reduce prejudice by forming a superordinate categorization.

In my own experience growing up in the 70s and 80s in Montgomery County, Maryland, the school system aggressively tracked black children like me into remedial classes. I remember mean teachers who constantly had low expectations of minority students. Teachers, with a few exceptions, did not take an interest in helping black students to thrive. This was right here in what might be considered a modern, progressive and open-minded school system. Even today, studies show that black students are punished more harshly and more frequently than their white counterparts for similar behaviors. “…counties with higher rates of explicit biases that favor whites had greater black–white disciplinary disparities across all five outcomes examined…The relationship between implicit bias and disciplinary disparities is also often associated with disciplinary disparities” (Riddle and Sinclair, “Racial Disparities in School-Based Disciplinary Actions Are Associated with County-Level Rates of Racial Bias.”)

These societal behaviors mirror what Dr. Elliot found in her classrooms, except in real life there is no switching places on the second day.

Sources:

Riddle, Travis, and Stacey Sinclair. “Racial Disparities in School-Based Disciplinary Actions Are Associated with County-Level Rates of Racial Bias.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 17 (April 23, 2019): 8255–60. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1808307116.

 

      DiAngelo, Robin. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Audible Audio Edition): Dr. Robin DiAngelo, Michael Eric Dyson – Foreword, Amy Landon, Beacon Press: Books.” Accessed October 8, 2021. https://www.amazon.com/White-Fragility-audiobook/dp/B07D6XQQRY/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2IL481JFLGI4C&dchild=1&keywords=white+fragility&qid=1633734436&s=audible&sprefix=white%2Caudible%2C162&sr=1-1

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