- [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.