Diversity Day: Prejudice, Discrimination, and Stereotypes

I can honestly say I have never met a person who does not enjoy the show The Office. In fact, about a week ago one of my friends from home decided to play a cruel joke on me and tell me that the show had been removed from Netflix... when the first tear was about to fall from my eye she decided to be nice enough to save me some tissues and say that she had lied and the show is still alive and well. One of the aspects of The Office that people find most comical is the blunt way in which Michael Scott, the show's main character, approaches uncomfortable issues within the work place. In just the second episode of the series, Michael comes up with a "creative" way, so to speak, to portray and, in his mind, deal with diversity within the office. On what is known as Diversity Day, Michael Scott has each of the employees place an index card on his or her head without looking at what is written on it. On each card there is a "race" (as Michael refers to it); the activity that the members of the office participate in is that they must each go up to another person and describe stereotypes that pertain to the group of people written on the card on the head of his / her colleague.

Although Michael's activity can very much be considered flawed and inappropriate, it serves to convey a major societal issue of prejudice, our assigned topic of discussion for week 7. The obvious way in which the activity is flawed is the use of the word "race" as the term for the groups of people written on each card. As for the appropriateness of the activity... I don't think any explantation is needed.

Prejudice is defined as a hostile or negative attitude toward people in a distinguishable group, based solely on their membership to that group. The cognitive component of prejudice is stereotypes, which are defined as generalizations about a group of people in which identical characteristics are assigned to virtually all members of the group, regardless of actual variation among the members. In the clip below, Pam hesitantly uses the stereotype that Asian people are bad drivers. In turn, Dwight associates this same stereotype with women. Describing both Asians and women as bad drivers is also an example of out-group homogeneity, which is the belief that every member of a distinct group is more alike in one way or another than the individuals of the group are in reality (in this case, all Asians and all women are bad drivers, not just the specific examples of either that we have encountered).

If prejudice is the affective component and stereotypes are the cognitive component, then the last piece of the bias-puzzle that is left to discuss is the behavioral component: discrimination. Discrimination is an unjustified negative or harmful action toward members of a group based solely on their membership in that group. If the prejudice feelings and stereotypical thoughts presented in these previous scenes of The Office were carried out into the real world, you might see Pam and Dwight laying down on their car horns and screaming slurs out their windows at an Asian and female driver in front of them, respectively. In a more worldly context, however, where do we see many examples of discrimination and the harmful affects that it has on people of target groups?

A study done by E. Ashby Plant and B. Michelle Peruche was done to examine shooter bias, a major issue that we have seen in recent years largely publicized in the news. Shooter bias is the idea that prejudice towards and stereotypical thoughts of African Americans lead police officers to pull their guns on African American suspects quicker than on white suspects. In a computer-simulated experiment, police officers were posed with pictures of either a white or black assailant accompanied by either a gun or a neutral object (ie. a wallet). The officers were instructed to hit a button that represented shooting the assailant or a button that represented not shooting the assailant. The results of the study showed that officers made the most errors when white men were shown with a gun (not shooting) and when black men were shown without a gun (shooting) (Plant & Peruche, 2005). The findings prove that a shooter bias does exist. The reason for this bias can be contributed to black stereotypes that associate African Americans, men especially, with violence, criminality, danger, etc.

Michael Scott, as seen in these clips and the remainder of his time in The Office series, could clearly use some help in reducing his prejudice way of thinking. Social psychologists have come up with methods to do so, including the contact hypothesis, which simply says that putting different groups in some sort of contact with one another can lead to less prejudice feelings. In a study done by Muzafer Sherif in 1961, the lead social psychologists and his colleagues were able to bring two groups of boys, who had purposely been pitted against each other in a camp-like situation by the psychologists, by giving them a superordinate goal, which is one that requires mutual interdependence, the need to depend on one another to accomplish a goal that is important to both sides.

[Submitted by: Alexis Leighton]

References

Plant, E., & Peruche, B. (n.d.). The Consequences of Race for Police Officers' Responses to Criminal Suspects. Psychological Science, 180-183.