Fluent Essays

Wherever you go, you will be observing human behavior, and it is difficult not to make a judgment about people after observing how they behave. You might consider three people on a crowded bus to be kind if you see them give up their seats so a mother can sit down with her two young children. You might consider a grocery store employee to be rude if you asked him where to find the milk and he rolled his eyes and sighed heavily before directing you to its location. These two judgments would be logical—kind in the first case and rude in the second—because that is the type of people they appeared to be. However, social psychologists are more concerned with the external social conditions that influence behavior. Maybe only one of the people on the bus acted kindly and the other two gave up their seats because they did not want to be perceived as unkind by others on the bus. Perhaps the grocery store employee is usually kind, but he behaved rudely because he has been told to work an extra shift at the last minute and it means he will likely miss a friend’s birthday party. If you attribute someone’s behavior to her or his personality, your judgment may underestimate the social conditions that influenced the behavior. When explaining the causes of someone’s behavior, underestimating or discounting the social situation results in what social psychologists call an attribution error.  For your assignment this week, you will look at a scenario and consider how the cause of a person’s behavior may be explained better by situational influences than one’s personality or internal disposition.    Review the Learning Resources for this week and consider how the causes of a person’s behavior may be explained by situational factors. Consider the following scenario for this Assignment:                                                                                Imagine that you have been summoned for jury duty in the United States. If you are selected to be on the jury,     you will be hearing a rape case where a 23-year-old female alleges sexual assault. In order to select the jury (a     process known by the Latin term voir dire), both the prosecutor and defense attorney question the jury pool to identify and dismiss for cause people who have strong opinions about the subject matter, who already know about the case, or who may be biased for or against either party to the trial. Attorneys may also dismiss members of the jury pool who they think will not be favorable to their case. These types of dismissals are called peremptory challenges and the attorneys have a limited number of them.                                                                                                                                              During the process of jury selection, you notice the prosecutors are using their limited peremptory challenges to dismiss most of the young women from the jury pool. You find this peculiar, given that young women would seem to be most favorable to the prosecution’s case.   Submit 1–2 pages, not including title page and reference page: Informed by social psychology theory, explain why the prosecutor was reluctant to seat young women on the jury. Please provide a detailed explanation for this seemingly odd behavior. In addition to the Learning Resources, search the Walden Library and/or Internet for peer-reviewed articles to support your Assignment. Use proper APA format and citations, including those in the Learning Resources. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9OF3wHDw0MWhere Does the Buck Stop? Applying Attribution Theory to Examine Public Appraisals of the President CIGDEM V. SIRIN University of Texas at El Paso JOSÉ D. VILLALOBOS University of Texas at El Paso This study applies attribution theory to examine public appraisals of the president. To date, most political science research on attribution theory has focused on domestic policy, and no work has considered both domestic and foreign policy domains in tandem. To fill this gap, we formulate and experimentally test a series of hypotheses regarding the level of responsibility and credit/blame that individuals attribute to the president in both policy domains across varying policy conditions. We also consider how party compatibility affects people’s attribution judg- ments. Our findings provide a new contribution to the literature on political attributions, executive accountability, and public perceptions of presidential performance. Modern presidents have increasingly taken on a public leadership role in the political arena. Through wars, economic crises, and increased civic demands, presidents have sought more involvement and influence in overseeing public affairs (Edwards 1983), a development accompanied by an exponential growth and institutionalization of the executive branch (Burke 2000; Hart 1995). Amid such developments, the media has focused on the president as the most salient political actor (Farnsworth and Lichter 2006; see also Brody 1991), while public polling surveys have consistently connected the president’s job performance with conditions in the foreign and domestic policy domains Cigdem V. Sirin is assistant professor of political science at the University of Texas at El Paso. She has recently published her work in Acta Politica, International Political Science Review, and the International Journal of Conflict Management. José D. Villalobos is assistant professor of political science at the University of Texas at El Paso. He has recently published articles in Political Research Quarterly, Administration & Society, the International Journal of Public Administration, and Review of Policy Research. AUTHORS’ NOTE: We wish to thank Nick Valentino and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful insights and comments on this project. Presidential Studies Quarterly 41, no. 2 (June) 334 © 2011 Center for the Study of the Presidency (see Edwards 1990). Subsequently, the public has developed growing expectations for presidents to be responsive to their needs (Cohen 1995, 1999). In the course of such systemic and institutional changes, presidents have, particu- larly during election campaigns, reinforced and embellished the perception that they have the means to solve the nation’s problems. However, presidents consistently fall short of keeping their promises to the public, revealing a gap between public expectations of the president and the president’s capacity for governing (see Cronin 1977). In the midst of this paradox, scholars have beContents lists available at ScienceDirect Psychology of Sport & Exercise journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/psychsport Confirmation bias and the stereotype of the black athlete Gordon B. Moskowitz∗, Devon Carter Lehigh University, USA A R T I C L E I N F O Keywords: Implicit bias Stereotyping Subtyping Confirmation bias Person perception Social judgment Black athlete A B S T R A C T Objectives: Examine how the subtype “black athletes” differs from that of black men. More centrally, to illustrate that the category black athletes can be triggered and lead to implicit bias. This bias is implicit and impacts a perceivers evaluation outside conscious awareness. Design and method: Participants were white residents of the United States. Experiment one assessed familiarity with three qualities comprising the cultural stereotype of black athletes. Experiment two explored implicit bias from the stereotype using a within subjects design. Participants read a series of quotes and rated how strongly they implied these stereotypical qualities. Each participant rated such quotes from a black athlete, white athlete, black salesman, and a white salesman. Results: Implicit bias was revealed in the type of ratings provided of black athletes. The ratings for the black athletes along these two stereotypical dimensions significantly differed from the ratings made to the same quotes when uttered by other men. Conclusions: The stereotype guided how participants viewed the persons actions/words. The stereotype of black athletes is distinct from black men generally. Participants did not rate men negatively along the stereotypic dimensions when they were black salesmen, only when they were black athletes. Additionally, although the quality “athletic,” which is part of the global stereotype of black men, has a positive connotation, the stereotype that is built around this quality is not positive. It is a stereotype that this group has natural athletic ability that leads to an arrogance and lack of work ethic (since one is naturally gifted). Implicit bias occurs when stereotyping and prejudice impacts people outside of awareness and without conscious intent. It arises when either a stereotype or an attitude is triggered by thoughts of a social group. This “triggering,” (known as priming, e.g., Higgins, 1996) then shapes how we respond. A wide set of responses are affected by implicit bias – from how we categorize, where attention is allocated, the types of judgments and inferences we form, the expectations and standards we set, what we consider valid and veridical, how we feel, our approach and avoidance tendencies, and how we more generally act (e.g., Moskowitz & Olcaysoy Okten, 2018; Nelson, 2018). Our current con- cern is with how stereotypes of black athletes implicitly bias ones judgment. In a first experiment we examine the stereotype of the black athlete, identifying if there is consensus around a set of attributes posited to be part of the cultural N. Tausch & M. Hewston e: Social Dominance Orientation and Stereotype Ch angeSocial Psychology 2010; Vol. 41(3):169–17 6© 2010 Hogrefe Publishing Original Article Social Dominance Orientation Attenuates Stereotype Change in the Face of Disconfirming Information Nicole Tausch1 and Miles Hewstone2 1Cardiff University, UK, 2University of Oxford, UK Abstract. This study examined whether social dominance orientation (SDO) affects the malleability of group stereotypes in the face of disconfirmation. Data were collected at two time points: At Time 1, baseline stereotypes and SDO were assessed, and at Time 2, either moderately or extremely stereotype-inconsistent information was presented and stereotyping measures were repeated. Consistent with previous research, exposure to moderately inconsistent information resulted in greater stereotype change than exposure to extremely inconsistent information. As expected, SDO was negatively related to stereotype change, in particular after presentation of moderately inconsistent information. The judged typicality of the target exemplar mediated the effects of the manipulation but did not mediate the effects of SDO. Implications for future research and interventions to reduce stereotyping are discussed. Keywords: stereotype change; disconfirming information; social dominance orientation The present research examined whether the malleability of group stereotypes in the face of disconfirming information is affected by characteristics of the social perceiver. Research on the role of individual differences in social perception pro- cesses has a long tradition in social psychology (e.g., Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950), and it has long been assumed that the “prejudiced personality” “does not change his mental set easily, but persists in old ways of reasoning” (Allport, 1954, p. 171). Although more recent re- search has extensively studied individual differences as pre- dictors of social information processing strategies and has successfully demonstrated the link between personality and stereotyping (see Duckitt, 2005, for a review), little is still known about whether individual differences predispose so- cial perceivers toward the maintenance of prejudiced beliefs even in the face of disconfirmation. The present research aims to fill this gap in the literature by examining whether individual differences in ideological orientation, specifically social dominance orientation (SDO; Pratto, Sidanius, Stall- worth, & Malle, 1994), affect the amount of stereotype change in response to disconfirming information. Stereotype Change in the Face of Disconfirming Information A large number of empirical studies have shown that peo- ple often resist stereotype change when presented with in- consistent information (see Hewstone, 1994, for a review). This stability is achieved through cognitively isolating ste- reotype-inconsistent group members from the group repre- sentation; that is, stereotype discon