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Comment and give an opinion about the topics below: please use your own words.
Attraction and Relationships
Particularly in this country, we tend to have idealized notions of friendship, attraction, and love. But the social psychologists who initially began studying interpersonal relationships and interpersonal attraction did not. They tended to take a more “economics” approach to relationships. Students who encounter these economic approaches sometimes reject them immediately because they don’t match our typical worldview of relationships. Although recent research, as your book discussed throughout chapters 11 & 12, demonstrates that there is much more than interpersonal economics to human relationships of all kinds, let’s consider some of these early theories briefly here and try to take from them something that will help us in real life.
Social Exchange Theory
Social exchange theory plainly takes an economic approach to relationships. It suggests that we weigh our happiness in a relationship by keeping tabs of costs and benefits. Before we go on, do you think people actually do this? Hmm…
Have you ever made a list of the pros and cons of a potential romantic partner? Have you ever been sick of a friend who never seems to give back to you, but always needs your support? Simply substitute the language of costs and benefits here, and think about if similar examples apply.
If we admit that there is more to relationship than economics, we can consider how much of relationship is basically economical. What do you think? I expect that we can all think of situations in which we weigh costs and benefits of relationships, but how much do we do so? Maybe it’s not even always done intentionally or consciously. Do you tend to have a feel for how much your current relationship, or maybe your last relationship, is/was equal? Isn’t wanting relationships to be equal or fair really considering the costs and benefits?
But social exchange theory doesn’t stop there. It further suggests that we not only consider the ratio of costs and benefits, but that we consider comparison levels. That is, we don’t just think about the cost/benefit ratio of our current relationship in a vacuum, but we compare them to others we know. Is your relationship more equal or more beneficial than your best friend’s current relationship? How about compared to your parents’ relationship?
Let’s take it another step, and consider comparison level of alternatives. Now, we are not talking about comparing our relationship to others’ relationships, but comparing our relationship with other potential relationships that we think we could have instead. How much are you putting into your current relationship versus how much are you getting out of it? Now, think about an alternative partner- maybe someone you know who is attractive and you could potentially be with if you were not with your partner. Now imagine what your relationship would be like with this person, and compare that to your current relationship. If you were with the other person, would you be putting more or less into the relationship? Would you be getting more or less out of it? That’s a comparison level of the alternative.
Even though social exchange theory is in the language of economics, we can find some truth there. All of us, now necessarily intentionally or always consciously, keep tabs about whether our relationship is equal or fair. We all get frustrated when it feels like we are putting in more than we are getting out of a relationship. And we compare our relationships to others’ as well as compare our partners to potential other partners. As I said, this isn’t the only thing that we think about in relationships, but it is one thing.
The shifting nature of Love
Keeping tabs of costs and benefits and making constant comparisons often characterizes the early stages of relationships. But things change over time. We can consider how love shifts in Sternberg’s model of love, and when we track happiness and passion in marriages over time. We can think of how physical attraction and the feeling of euphoric being “in love” shape early stages, but become less important over time. After developing trust, intimacy, and friendship, the later stages of a relationship only vaguely resemble how it all began (at least in our culture). Relationships often run into trouble when one or both people hold the idea that the relationship will never leave the passionate “in love” stage. Relationships tend to grow much stronger when people accept the fact that they shift, or grow over time. Certainly all relationships do not grow in the same way or into the same thing, but overwhelmingly the research in social psychology says that relationships change over time.
Baumeister and Bushman discuss some underlying motives for relationships, as well as gender differences in what is attractive and what is important. They discuss predictors of initial attraction, and cultural differences in love, friendship, and attraction. All of these details are important, but what I most hope that you take from our study of interpersonal relationships and attraction is that there is much more to human relationships than our cultural ideals. We have realistic concerns of cost/benefit (particularly early on), underlying motives for what is attractive and what we want from a relationship, and our relationships shift over time. There are both universal and culture-specific patterns to relationships, and understanding both help us better understand the social psychological approach to studying interpersonal relationships and attraction.
Stereotyping, Prejudice, & Discrimination from the Social Thinker
To properly understand the nature of stereotypes and prejudice, it is important to remember our view how the social thinker perceives the self and others. Now we will extend this discussion beyond single individuals to how the social thinker perceives groups of people. (Please note: students often find it helpful at this point to quickly review the learning guide on the Social Thinker that was assigned early in the class.)
Before we proceed, let’s try a simple exercise: Take a moment to write down (or at least think of) at least 5 groups of which you are a member. These can be formal groups, informal groups, or anything- just 5 groups of which you are a member.
As discussed in Chapters 13 and 14 of your book, when we begin to consider how the social thinker categorizes and perceives groups of people we necessarily discuss stereotyping. As your book suggests, the term stereotype can be thought of as a generalized belief about a group. Thus, although we commonly think of stereotyping in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, and other more loaded social topics, we can also hold stereotypes about any group. We can stereotype families, ‘clicks’ in school, careers, towns, and any other group you can think of. When I think of 5 groups of which I am a member, I can think of my family, my profession (psychology), my basketball team, my ethnicity and gender, and my group of friends. Considering these groups, I could quickly think about stereotypes about redneck families in the southeast U.S., professors, jocks, white guys, and hippies. Someone who knew my group memberships could think of me with any of those stereotypes. If you can generalize some belief about a group (which, as the book discusses is a normal categorization process in social thinking) then you have stereotyped. One of the major points from this section of the course, though, is that stereotyping is not the same thing as prejudice or discrimination. See the book for further detail of these definitions.
Stereotypes are part of our categorization process in social thinking. Can you imagine what it would be like if we couldn’t make these categorizations? No mental shortcuts involving people? Can you imagine the immense amount of mental resources we would be using all the time without categorization shortcuts? Social thinking would certainly be much more demanding on our cognitive systems.
Ingroups and Outgroups
When we perceive groups, we naturally tend to favor our groups over others. Think about the social thinking biases that we have for the self and others, and extend this logic to groups. We naturally tend to see our groups more positively as a result of these processes. Thus, we see general tendencies such as:
Ethnocentrism (ingroup favoritism)
Outgroup homogeneity (thinking that people in other groups are more similar to each other than are people from your ingroup)
Simplistic outgroup view (overgeneralizations)
Exaggerated differences between groups
Can you think of an example from real life for each of these tendencies?
Why do these group perception biases happen?
If you can’t answer these questions, be sure to read chapters 13 & 14.
In addition to the automatic categorization mentioned processes above, your book also discusses the role of social identity and other motives. Your book provides an excellent discussion of how and why we make group generalizations and compare our groups to others. Within your textbook, look for the description of the 1950s study by Sherif, which is often called the Robber’s Cave study (because that’s the name of the state park where it was conducted). This is a classic study done with a boys camp on how groups can form easily, and how group identity can predict a number of group competition behaviors. As this study shows, tt turns out to be very difficult make the two groups come together as one when they initially disliked each other, and this can only occur under specific conditions. When the researchers started this study, they imagined that creating harmony between the groups would be so difficult. The results were a surprise then, and continue to surprise many students of psychology today.
Here’s a podcast of a social psychologist, Michael Britt, describing this study and its relation to conflict resolution (note: you have to wait for a few minutes before he actually starts talking about the study).
http://www.thepsychfiles.com/2007/06/episode-20-conflict-resolution-a-classic-psychological-studyLinks to an external site.
As with the other forms of social thinking, your text demonstrates how specific motives lead to certain behaviors. I will keep the present lecture short because Chapter 13 of your book provides an excellent discussion. As you read and learn about how the social thinker perceives groups, maintain your focus on why this happens in addition to what happens.
Traditional versus Modern Racism
Compared to decades past, we less frequently hear of overtly racist or prejudice behaviors these days (although they do still occur). If we don’t see it happening overtly, does that mean prejudice and discrimination has gone away in our country?
Social psychologists would say, no. Rather than having gone away, research in social psychology suggests that prejudice has simply shifted from overt to more subtle forms. Your book does a good job of discussing key research on Modern Racism. In addition I have listed some of the ways in which Modern Racism exists today, but appears invisible:
People not willing to express racist views
People less likely to act on their prejudice
Racists feelings more likely to be manifest when discrimination cannot be construed as racists, such as:
Interpreting ambiguous behaviors or inferences
Making assumptions about others
Making attributions for behavior
Racist feelings tend to be exhibited in opposition to policies and programs that might favor minorities
So if the list above characterizes the new form of racism, have things gotten better socially in our country? Why or why not?
We can also think about racism (or sexism) from an alternative perspective of understanding what privilege means. Please read the article on Canvas by Peggy McIntosh titled, “White Privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack.” Even though this article was written more than 25 years ago, the point remains true. As you read what the author carries in her “invisible knapsack” please take a few minutes to think about what is the same now? And what has changed? What else do people’s knapsacks carry that are different than in 1990 (before the invention of smart phones, social media, etc.).
Recall all the way back to one of our first learning guides, on the Self. Remember when I said that the Self serves as a filter and a reference point? (If not, quickly look at that learning guide again.) Now think about the different filters and reference points for two people: one who has lived life since birth with privilege and another who has lived without such privilege. Think about how these two people automatically “see” the world differently and make different assumptions about others based on their learned reference points.
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White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack
by Peggy McIntosh
Through the work to bring materials from Women’s Studies into the rest of the
curriculum, I have often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say
they will work to improve women’s status, in the society, the university, or the
curriculum, but they can’t or won’t support the idea of lessening men’s. Denials which
amount to taboos sur round the subject of advantages which men gain from women’s
disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged,
lessened or ended.
Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized
that since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a
phenomenon of white privilege which was similarly denied and protected. As a white
person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something which puts others at a
disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white
privilege, which puts me at an advantage.
I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught
not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is
like to have white privilege. I have come to se white privilege as an invisible package of
unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was
‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless backpack of
special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.
Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in Women’s
Studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so
one who writes about having white privilege must ask, “Having described it, what will I
do to lessen or end it?”
After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I
understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I remembered
the frequent charges from women of color that white women whom they encounter are
oppressive. I began to understand why we are justly seen as oppressive, even when
we don’t see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned
skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.
My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an
unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to
see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will.
My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out:
whites are taught to think of their lives as a morally neutral, normative, and average,
also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow
“them” to be more like “us.”
I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects
of white privilege in my life. I have chosen those conditions which I think in my case
attack some what more to skin-color privilege that to class, religion, ethnic status, or
geographical location, though of course all these other factors are intricately
intertwined. As far as I can see, my African American co-worker, friends and
acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time,
place, and line of work cannot count on most of these conditions.
1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the
time.
2. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing
in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.
3. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or
pleasant to me.
4. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be
followed or harassed.
5. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see
people of my race widely represented.
6. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown
that people of my color made it what it is.
7. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the
existence of their race.
8. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white
privilege.
9. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race
represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my
cultural traditions, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can cut my
hair.
10. Whether I checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work
against the appearance of financial reliability.
11. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not
like them.
12. I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without
having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the
illiteracy of my race.
13. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.
14. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
15. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
16. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who
constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such
oblivion.
17. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and
behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.
18. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to “the person in charge,” I will be facing
a person of my race.
19. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I
haven’t been singled out because of my race.
20. I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys,
and children’s magazine featuring people of my race.
21. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling
somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard,
held at a distance, or feared.
22. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having co-workers
on the job suspect that I got it because of race.
23. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race
cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.
24. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against
me.
25. If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode
or situation whether it has racial overtones.
26. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more or
less match my skin.
I repeatedly forgot each of the realization on this list until I wrote it down. For
me white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to
avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things
are true, this is not such a free country; one’s life is not what one makes it; many doors
open for certain people through no virtues of their own.
In unpacking this invisible backpack of white privilege, I have listed conditions of
daily experience which I once took for granted. Nor did I think of any of these
perquisites as bad for the holder. I now think that we need a more finely differentiated
taxonomy of privilege, for some of these varieties are only what one would want for
everyone in a just society, and others give license to be ignorant, oblivious, arrogant
and destructive.
I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a pattern of
assumptions which were passed on to me as a white person. There was one main
piece of cultural turf; it was my own turf, and I was among those who could control the
turf. My skin color was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make. I could
think of myself as belonging in major ways, and of making social systems work for me. I
could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant
cultural forms. Being of the main culture, I could also criticize it fairly free.
In proportion as my racial group was being make confident, comfortable, and
oblivious, other groups were likely being made confident, uncomfortable, and alienated.
Whiteness protected me from many kinds of hostility, distress, and violence, which I
was being subtly trained to visit in turn upon people of color.
For this reason, the word “privilege” now seems to me misleading. We usually
think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck.
Yet some of the conditions I have described here work to systematically overempower
certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of one’s race or sex.
I want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power
conferred systematically. Power from unearned privilege can look like strength when it
is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the privileges on my list are
inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or
that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society.
Others, like the privilege to ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity of the
holders as well as the ignored groups.
We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages which we
can work to spread, and negative types of advantages which unless rejected will always
reinforce our present hierarchies. For example, the feeling that one belongs within the
human circle, as Native Americans say, should not be seen as privilege of a few.
Ideally it is an unearned advantage and conferred dominance.
I have met very few men who are truly distressed about systemic, unearned
male advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and others like
is whether we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage
and conferred dominance and it so, what we will do to lessen them. In any case, we
need to do more work in identifying how they actually affect our daily lives. Many,
perhaps most, of our white students in the US think that racism doesn’t affect them
because they are not people of color; they do not see “whiteness” as a racial identity. In
addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems at work, we need
similarly to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage,
or physical ability, or advantage related to nationality, religion or sexual orientation.
Difficulties and dangers surrounding the task of finding parallels are many.
Since racism, sexism, and heterosexism are not the same, the advantaging associated
with them should not be seen as the same. In addition, it is hard to disentangle aspects
of unearned advantage which rest more on social class, economic class, race, religion,
sex and ethnic identity than on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are
interlocking, as the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977 continues to remind
us eloquently.
One factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take both
active forms which we can see and embedded forms which as a member of the
dominant group one is taught not to see. In my class and place, I did not see myself as
a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by
members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance
on my group from birth.
Disapproving of the systems won’t be enough to change them. I was taught to
think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitudes. [But] a “white”
skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the
way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate, but cannot end,
these problems.
To redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen
dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tool
here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned
advantage and conferred dominance by making these taboo subjects. Most talk by
whites about equal opportunity seems to me now to be about equal opportunity to try to
get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist.
It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness
about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to
maintain the myth of meritocracy the myth that democratic choice is equally available to
all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a
small number of people props up those in power, and serves to keep power in the
hands of the same groups that have most of it already.
Though systematic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions
for me and I imagine for some others like me if we raise our daily consciousness on the
perquisites of being light-skinned. What well we do with such knowledge? As we know
from watching me, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned
advantage to weaken hidden systems of advantage, and whether we will use any of our
arbitrarily-awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base.
[1989]
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