PSY 3790 Module 3 Prejudice and Discrimination Paper: Resume Callbacks, Stereotype Threat and Intergroup Contact Example

Same Building, Different Neighbors: Prejudice, Its Effects and the Power of Contact

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Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, Thomas Edison State University

PSY-3790: Social Psychology

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Month Day, Year

Same Building, Different Neighbors: Prejudice, Its Effects and the Power of Contact

Introduction

Our building has changed over the past decade. Longtime residents, many of them Black families who have lived here for decades, now share hallways with newer Latino and Asian families. At meetings, I hear complaints that "those people" do not care about the building, and in the laundry room, groups rarely mix. These tensions weaken the association. This paper examines what social psychology has learned about stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination and how they can be reduced.

Defining Terms

A stereotype is a belief about the characteristics of members of a group. Prejudice is a hostile or unfavorable feeling toward a group and the people in it. Discrimination is behavior that treats people unfairly because of their group membership. Stigma refers to a characteristic that marks a person as devalued in a social context. These are related but distinct: a person can hold stereotypes without acting on them, and discrimination can occur through policies without individual prejudice.

Where Prejudice Comes From

Research identifies several sources. People naturally sort others into groups and tend to favor their own group, even when groups are formed arbitrarily. Competition for resources, such as housing or jobs, can heighten hostility. Stereotypes are learned from family, media and culture, and they can be activated automatically, influencing judgments without awareness.

Measuring Discrimination in the Field

Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004) conducted a field experiment in Boston and Chicago, sending about 5,000 fictitious resumes in response to help-wanted ads. They randomly assigned names that sounded distinctively white, such as Emily and Greg, or distinctively Black, such as Lakisha and Jamal, to otherwise similar resumes. The applicants with names read as white were invited to interview roughly half again as often. A stronger resume raised callbacks more when it carried a white-sounding name than a Black-sounding one. Because everything except the name was controlled, the study provides strong evidence of discrimination in hiring.

The Effects of Stereotypes on Their Targets

Stereotypes affect the people they target. Steele and Aronson (1995) gave Black and white Stanford students difficult verbal test items. Framed as a test of intellectual ability, the items produced lower scores for Black students than for white students with comparable records. When the same test was described as a laboratory problem-solving task unrelated to ability, Black students performed as well as white students. Simply asking students to record their race before the test also lowered Black students' performance. The authors called this stereotype threat: the pressure of possibly confirming a negative belief about one's group can drag down performance.

Reducing Prejudice Through Contact

Gordon Allport's contact hypothesis proposed that contact between groups reduces prejudice under certain conditions: the groups meet as equals, pursue goals they share, cooperate rather than compete and have the support of authorities. Pettigrew and Tropp (2006) meta-analyzed 515 studies involving more than 250,000 participants. Intergroup contact was consistently associated with reduced prejudice, and the effect held across many types of groups, including racial, ethnic, age and sexual orientation groups. Allport's conditions strengthened the effect but were not required for contact to help, and reduced prejudice generalized beyond the specific people encountered to the group as a whole.

Applying the Research

Our building offers natural opportunities for contact, but casual encounters in hallways rarely meet Allport's conditions. I proposed cooperative projects with common goals: a joint committee of longtime and newer residents to document repair problems floor by floor, a community garden on the roof and potluck meetings with interpreters so that everyone can participate as equals. Leaders from each community will co-chair the committee, providing the institutional support Allport emphasized.

Reducing Stereotype Threat at Meetings

Steele and Aronson's findings suggest that newer residents who worry about being seen as uninvolved, or longtime residents who fear being stereotyped as hostile, may hold back at meetings. Emphasizing shared identity as tenants and valuing everyone's contributions can reduce this pressure.

Stigma and Housing

Stigma also affects residents in public housing and rentals more generally, who may be stereotyped as irresponsible. Advocacy that presents tenants as partners in maintaining their homes challenges this stigma.

Implicit Bias

Stereotypes can operate automatically. Measures of implicit associations show that many people link groups with traits without endorsing those links consciously. How strongly such measures predict behavior is debated, but their existence suggests that good intentions alone may not prevent biased judgments, which is one reason structured procedures, such as clear criteria for decisions, help.

Interpreters and Equal Status

Language barriers can make newer residents seem uninvolved when they simply cannot follow discussions. Providing interpreters at meetings gives them equal status as participants, one of the conditions Allport emphasized, and lets longtime residents hear their concerns directly.

Measuring Change

To see whether the joint committee works, we will survey residents before and after on how much they trust neighbors from other backgrounds and track attendance by building section.

Stigma and Mental Health

Stigma affects people with mental illness as well as racial and ethnic groups, discouraging them from seeking help. Several residents told me they would never mention depression at a meeting, which reminded me that stigma can silence people in ways that are invisible to others.

Limits

Field experiments measure discrimination at one stage, such as callbacks. Some later studies of stereotype threat have found smaller effects. Most contact studies are correlational, though experimental studies show similar results.

Conclusion

Bertrand and Mullainathan documented discrimination in hiring through a careful field experiment, Steele and Aronson showed that stereotypes can impair their targets' performance and Pettigrew and Tropp showed that contact between groups reduces prejudice across hundreds of studies. Cooperative projects with shared goals and equal roles offer our building a research-based path from suspicion to solidarity.

References

Bertrand, M., & Mullainathan, S. (2004). Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment on labor market discrimination. American Economic Review, 94(4), 991-1013. https://doi.org/10.1257/0002828042002561

Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(5), 751-783. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.90.5.751

Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(5), 797-811. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.69.5.797