Sociology 3701: Outline--Week Fifteen

I. Groups: Prejudice on Campus

II. How can we overcome prejudice?

A. Is education the answer? Why is better information not sufficient by itself to overcome people's stereotypes?

Oliver Wendell Holmes: "Trying to educate a bigot is like shining light into the pupil of the eye--it constricts." And we are all like this to a significant degree--we filter new information through our existing construction of reality and self.

Pettigrew: the ultimate attribution error

B. Sherif: the Eagles and the Rattlers-- 12-year-old boys in a summer camp who are intentionally set against each other... merely ending the divisive efforts and bringing them back into contact with one another not sufficient to overcome hostilities...camp directors had to manufacture emergencies that could only be resolved by intergroup cooperation

C. Allport: The Nature of Prejudice. Equal status contact.

Aronson and his colleagues in Austin, Texas: jigsaw groups. Not just equal status contact but interdependence. I can only succeed if I help you to function well.

Not only improvements in self-esteem, liking for school, and academic performance for both majority groups and minority groups, but eventually had an effect on people's informal friendship groups... the playground was no longer self-segregated

D. Can political/legal changes change people's attitudes?

1. The psychology of inevitability... cognitive dissonance and its reduction via decreasing prejudice... laboratory evidence, but not with really deep-seated prejudice

2. Pettigrew: cities that experienced more violence as they desegregated their schools, vs those that experienced less. e.g. the Boston bussing conflicts

III. Video: "The Color of Your Skin"

IV. Resistance/mindful reconstruction

I. Modernism and Postmodernism

A. Modernism: the belief which began in the Enlightenment Period that a science of human behavior is possible and that with the help of reason, social problems can be addressed and solved.... optimism about progress and belief that the systems developed in western Europe and the United States (capitalism, democracy, rationalization, respect for human rights) are the eventual future for the whole world.

B. Postmodernism: the belief that all knowledge systems are partial and based in social location (race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality)... that there is not ultimate truth (maybe even in the physical sciences but certainly in the realm of the social)... pessimism about any concept of progress and about any kind of social evolutionary theories... Nietzsche, Foucault, Baudrillard

C. Deconstructionism: the analysis of a social arrangement or idea in terms of the way it privileges a particular social class, gender, race, sexuality, or nationality.

D. Creativity, resistance, and "truth"

1. When we don't recognize the human potential for social creativity, we end up functioning as social robots... treating the norms of our culture as if they were the laws of nature... accepting its inequality systems, with all their negative implications for the way we treat each other and the way we see ourselves.

2. But when we do acknowledge social creativity and the way social knowledge and social reality reflect position in the various stratification systems, there is also a danger: extreme relativism and cynicism. This is the worst side of deconstructionism.

3. What is our alternative? Pollock and O'Brien: "Mindful reconstruction"

a. Just because cultural forms are human creations doesn't make them any less essential.

b. Human institutions always in danger of getting too rigid; human institutions always advantage some groups at the expense of others... need for reform or even revolution at times.

c. The role of the social psychologist as a practical change expert (or perhaps more accurately, somehow who is working to build up that expertise).

For example, my own activities: protest movements, cooperatives, church, family... informed by my reading of sociology and by my experiences but with a full awareness of the possibilities (and dangers ) of social creativity.... sometimes it does seem to me that "faith" is a human construction, but that doesn't remove my need for faith... step by step process of trying to become the person I mean to be, not as a process of individual self-creation, but through my relationships with other people