Attitudes At The Social Level Don't Change Easily
‘They’re all like that’ is a common reference term when we speak about people from an out-group. (http://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/out-group_homogeneity.htm) Why do we do this? The answer is quite simply because ppeople tend to categorize themselves, and others, to make sense of their realities and establish order in their worlds. Whether categorization takes place on the grounds of religion, ethnicity or whatever, it impacts social relations. (Leyens, et al. cited in Castano et al., 2002) When we make distinctions between in-group and out-group, we induce an “us and them” mentality, setting the stereotyping process in motion. Inevitably this will spill over into prejudiced behavior. (Mackie & Smith cited in Castano et al., 2002)
The question then exists: will in-group preference automatically develop into prejudice, or can both sides of the coin, in-group preference as well as positive views of an out-group, successfully co-exist in an individual’s social reality? In an experiment American pre-schoolers were asked to assign negative and positive traits to either their own group or an ethnic out-group. The children rated their group more favorable than the other group. When they didn’t have to choose between the groups, they rated the out-group favorably. According to Kowalski (2003), these were positive findings, because it shows that preference for an in-group was not equated with out-group rejection.
Having positive evidence that in-groups and out-group favoritism don’t necessarily have to lead to prejudice, how then do we change social attitudes? Tesser (1995) suggests that, should we agree that group boundaries maintain and preserve inter-group biases, then the strategy should be to decrease the importance of such boundaries in order to reduce theses biases. Allport (cited in Amichai-Hamburger & McKenna, 2006), farther of the Contact Hypothesis, is convinced that if one gets to know someone from an out-group over time, prejudice will...
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