- [Narrator] 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 of 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, prejudice 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'd earlier mentioned, cognition,
a thought can otherwise be called a stereotype
and the tendency to lead to a behavior
when a prejudicial way of thinking actually leads
to a behavioral 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 going to do here is to draw a big pair
of military jack boots, lots of laces
because people with Authoritarian Personality
they're kind of militaristic in some ways.
They kind of 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
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 worldview.
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
jack boot personality type.
And one other thing you should think about
if it's a personality type,
it's going to 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 someone getting very frustrated,
that could actually in some ways lead to prejudice.
Well how exactly does that
When somebody is 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 is going to 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 going to 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 pointing it at their employer
or other powerful figure that is really going to
disadvantage them, they will re-channel it towards
a different group of individuals.
And historically, we have seen that throughout the world
throughout the U.S. throughout Europe
in particular, times of like 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 axes,
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
and actually tend to drop off,
maybe because there's 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 verge
of deprivation comes about that can lead
to collective unrest and upsurge in prejudice
and also discrimination.
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.