11.2 Ingroup Favoritism and Prejudice
[Production: Please remove red, strikethrough text from the OER.]
Learning Objectives
Review the causes and outcomes of ingroup favoritism.
Summarize the results of Henri Tajfel’s research on minimal groups.
Outline the personality and cultural variables that influence ingroup favoritism.
[Production: please add text and two activities as new content]
In this section, you will be learning about prejudice and ingroup vs. outgroup dynamics. Take a moment before beginning this section to complete the following scales; the results may surprise you and will help to shape your understanding of the content that follows.
Activity 7: Modern Racism Scale
*This section of the open course textbook is designed to support PSYC 3271, and the activity numbering corresponds to Unit 3.
Introduction
The following scale was designed to evaluate the cognitive component of racial attitudes. The original scale was used to measure White Americans’ racial attitudes toward Black Americans. This adaptation has been designed to measure racial attitudes toward Indigenous Peoples and will help you to understand your own perspective when it comes to modern racism towards Indigenous Peoples in Canada.
Use this as a learning opportunity, if you change your answers to make them seem more socially appropriate, you may miss the chance to learn something new about yourself and strive for personal growth.
[Production: please put this text in a shaded text box]
This section deals with the topic of anti-Indigenous prejudice, which may lead to emotional distress for Indigenous Peoples with lived experience of prejudice. Support is available for students through Cplul’kw’ten, a friendly and inviting Indigenous centre. Please reach out by emailing indigenous@tru.ca.
[Production: end of text box]
Instructions
Respond to each of the following items using this scale:
1 (Strongly Disagree), 2 (Disagree), 3 (Neutral), 4 (Agree), 5 (Strongly Agree)
Try to be as honest as possible. Record your answers in your course notes. You will not be expected to share your score.
It is easy to understand the anger of Indigenous Peoples in Canada. (R)
Indigenous Peoples are getting too demanding in their push for equal rights.
Over the past few years, Indigenous Peoples have gotten more economically than they deserve.
Over the past few years, the government and news media have shown more respect to Indigenous Peoples than they deserve.
Indigenous Peoples should not push themselves where they’re not wanted.
Discrimination against Indigenous Peoples is no longer a problem in Canada.
Scoring:
*Question 1 is reverse coded, which means the reverse value should be assigned to the response scale. So, for question 1, you would use the following reversed values for the scale:
5 (Strongly Disagree), 4 (Disagree), 3 (Neutral), 2 (Agree), 1 (Strongly Agree)
Determine your Modern Indigenous Racism Score by finding the average your responses. (Add all your scores to find a total and divide by 6. This is your final score.)
A higher score indicates more entrenched beliefs of racial inequality and anti-Indigenous prejudice.
Are you surprised by your score? What values or factors may be influencing your attitude toward Indigenous Peoples?
Adapted from:
McConahay, J. B. (1986). Modem racism, ambivalence, and the modern racism scale. In J. F. Dovidio & S. L. Gaertner (Eds.) Prejudice, discrimination, and racism (pp. 91–126). New York: Academic Press.
Activity 8: Ambivalent Sexism Inventory
*This section of the open course textbook is designed to support PSYC 3271, and the activity numbering corresponds to Unit 3.
Introduction
Completing the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory will help you to understand your own perspective when it comes to sexism. Use this as a learning opportunity. If you change your answers to make them seem more socially appropriate, you may miss the chance to learn something new about yourself and to strive for personal growth.
Instructions
Visit The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (Plous, 2026) on the Understanding Prejudice website. You will be asked to respond to 22 statements using this six-point scale:
0 (Disagree Strongly), 1 (Disagree Somewhat), 2 (Disagree Slightly), 3 (Agree Slightly), 4 (Agree Somewhat), 5 (Agree Strongly)
Try to be as honest as possible.
When you have responded to every question, select “Submit Answers”.
Note: [Production: please put text in a shaded textbox]
In order to get your scores, you will be prompted to share your sex, year of birth, country of citizenship, and race, which is used to compare your results with other people who have taken the inventory on the website.
If you do not want to share this information, you may choose to complete the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory manually. The inventory and scoring instructions can be found in the Appendix of Glick and Fiske’s 1996 article, Hostile and Benevolent Sexism: Measuring Ambivalent Sexist Attitudes Toward Women. A copy of this article can be found in the Resources section in Moodle. [end of textbox]
Record your scores in your course notes, for your reference. You will not be expected to share your score.
Scores on the hostile sexism and benevolent sexism dimension can vary from 0 to 5. Although there is no fixed point that divides sexist and non-sexist people, higher ASI scores are related to greater degrees of sexism.
Were you surprised by your scores?
Source:
Glick, P., & Fiske, S. T. (1997). Hostile and benevolent sexism: Measuring ambivalent sexist attitudes toward women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21(1), 119–135.
[Production: end of activities content]
We have now seen that social categorization occurs whenever we think about others in terms of their category memberships rather than on the basis of other, more personal information about the individual. And we have seen that social categorization can have a variety of negative consequences for the people who are the targets of our stereotypes. But social categorization becomes even more important, and has even more powerful effects on our reactions to others, when the categorization becomes more emotionally involving, and particularly when the categorization involves categorization into liked ingroups and potentially disliked outgroups (Amodio & Devine, 2006).
Because our ancestors lived in small social groups that were frequently in conflict with other groups, it was evolutionarily functional for them to view members of other groups as different and potentially dangerous (Brewer & Caporael, 2006; Navarrete, Kurzban, Fessler, & Kirkpatrick, 2004). Differentiating between “us” and “them” probably helped keep us safe and free from disease, and as a result, the human brain became very efficient in making these distinctions (Mahajan et al., 2011; Phelps et al., 2000; Van Vugt & Schaller, 2008; Zaraté, Stoever, MacLin, & Arms-Chavez, 2008). The problem is that these naturally occurring tendencies may lead us to prefer people who are like us, and in some cases even to unfairly reject people from outgroups.
