Briefly review the Billig paper, your opinion on in and then answer these questions:
Why is extreme prejudice (bigotry) difficult to study? Why is it that the social cognitive approach has difficulty accounting for extreme prejudice? What do you think are the best ways to tackle the study of extreme prejudice/bigotry?
Billig's article opened my eyes up to the differences between prejudice and bigotry. I think that it is important to understand the motives behind each concept here: Prejudice is rooted in society's need for categorization and identity. Much of this is brought on by experiences, values, and exposure to diversity. This is why many people hold prejudices toward other groups. It doesn't necessarily mean a person has HATRED toward an out-group, it simply implies that the person holds different views (both positive and/or negative) for that group in comparison to their in-group.
Bigotry, on the other hand, is where the hatred comes in. From my understanding of the article, bigotry stems from one's basic prejudice, but it is just taken to the extreme. I see bigotry as being caused by a sort of group polarization of prejudice. What I mean by this is that an individual might hold certain prejudices, but influence from others in spreading the "bigot-mindset" turns those seemingly mild prejudices into outright hate. Notice the keywords "group" and "influence" here. Billig (and Tajfel) both bring up Nazism and genocide during world war II. They point out that 'dehumanization' of the out-group was a huge factor here, which is definitely true, but the influence of the group on individual behavior seems to be a just as, if not more important in terms of the transition from 'prejudice' to 'extreme hatred'.
There could be various reasons why bigotry is difficult to study. An obvious one to me is the fact that a lot of people who hold these beliefs choose not to make them public. So if you're trying to study the motivations behind a person's extreme prejudice, the difficulty first lies in identifying the person as having extreme prejudice. To me, this is why the IAT is so loved within the realm of social psychology: It gets at a person's IMPLICIT biases. You can identify someone as having specific associations with one group without them explicitly telling you via survey research or something similar. However, does this test provide us with the ability to identify someone with extreme prejudice? Not that I know of....
A good chunk of this article focused on the distinction between prejudice and bigotry (as I mentioned above). Billig makes the argument that to identify a person as a bigot, you don't necessarily have to study their 'internal causes' but simply recognize their observable, external behavior. If a person holds an extreme prejudice toward a certain group, their hatred will be displayed. However, because of the social norms we now have in place thanks in part to the civil rights movement, the majority of bigots probably do not display their hatred publicly (which I realized I mentioned before). But it is a lot easier to study these people from a social cognition standpoint and recognize they have a prejudice....the problem is that we have difficulty identifying how STRONG their prejudice is. Is is mild? Is it hatred? Or is it on the continuum between the two? To see prejudice-bigotry on a continuum is something that, as Billig said, should be pushed more in social psychology research.
I'm not sure how much previous research has been done on bigotry, but if there were a way to study groups who openly hold these strong opinions toward out-groups and recognize how they compare to the rest of the population would be a good start. A "bigotry-benchmark" if you will......not that there wouldn't be issues with this.
The Billig article was a truly enlightening piece both in terms of its historical context and its implications for social cognition research. One of the most important themes that Billig brings to the surface is the complex impact that the Holocaust and World War II had on researchers in the field of Psychology. These events both provided Psychologists like Tajfel with fuel for discovering how such atrocities could occur, but at the same time, they inhibited meaningful conclusions. Essentially, explaining the Holocaust in any way other than an anomalous occurrence would have cheapened it and caused an outrage.
Bigotry is a phenomenon that is fortunately not commonplace in the U.S. In settings where experimental research is done, bigots are most often discouraged and rebuked by modern social norms, so observations of this phenomenon are difficult to come by. The actual study of bigotry would require financial resources that many institutions just don't have. Also, the lab would need to move to populations where one would find more bigoted individuals. This poses a dilemma because it more than likely will pose a threat to safety for a researcher and full disclosure by the participants may be hard to come by. These issues, coupled with the fact that much of the present research in the field is convinced that bigotry is a dying phenomenon, is sure to make actual research of bigotry an impractical task.
In terms of social cognitive research, research on prejudice is more accessible when it can be broken down into individual parts and tested in the lab. Tajfel posed the Social Identity model to account for prejudice processes. With this he broke prejudice down into pieces of functions and motivations. This breakdown of cognition is a common occurrence in social cognitive research, but it cannot sufficiently account for extreme prejudice because it works in a reductionist process. Extreme prejudice requires a much broader, holistic view as it is an amalgamation of numerous cognitive and motivational processes.
In the article, Billig talks about how Tajfel came so close to explaining the Holocaust according to his theory, but in the end he avoided making those implications. He essentially kept his cognitive theory within its bounds, always erring on the side of theory conservation rather than over-generalization. I think to some extent social cognitive research does an admirable job in limiting the extent to which they generalize findings. Of course it would be easy to theorize about the implications all the way down the line to genocide, but that cannot be done if one is staying true to empiricism. To me this also is a reason why social cognitive research has limitations when explaining bigotry. This is not a bad limitation by any means, by the way, but it is a limitation nonetheless.
Amping up the social cognitive method to include extreme prejudice/bigotry is not needed in my estimation. The work being done in this field is very productive, and in understanding the bottom better, we trust models better. Billig wraps up his article by calling for closer looks at the discursive process of some these phenomenon like dehumanization or ideologies. He also calls for research into emotion aspects of bigotry and ideology. Language and emotion are two very important factors to the expression of bigotry, but once again, they are only part of the whole. I feel that bigotry and more hateful prejudice response are better understood in aggression, intergroup hostility, and "evil" models. These more holistic models frequently include individual social cognitive bases like that of dehumanization, but they also are familiar with group processing, emotionality, and external factors. Reaching across areas and methods of research is precisely how a complicated phenomenon like bigotry should be studied. We cannot rule out even the most minuscule explanations, but we also cannot get so small that we lose perspective. Therefore, it would be pertinent to allow for areas of research to go reductionist and some to go holistic. Only in covering the whole spectrum of phenomenon can we make educated assessments of such atrocities as the Holocaust in a way that gives due respect to their egregious nature. Such perspective can also chance realism, combat ignorance and naivete, and suggest meaningful interventions to eliminate possible repeat occurrences.
What I found most interesting about this article is the specific theoretical view that Billing uses to approach Tajfel’s writings, as well as the phenomena of prejudice and bigotry. Billig emphasizes the idea of socially constructed meaning, including the meaning of the social psychological theories themselves. In this approach, universal psychological principles appear not to suffice to explain all social phenomena; the unique historic and social conditions of a given society also contribute to the observable phenomena. For example, in the case of prejudice and bigotry, the specific social conditions and norms shape the content of prejudice and they also determine the degree to which the expression of prejudice is allowed and under what circumstances. This view also takes into account the importance of language and word connotations, for example in the choice of a stronger word to label extreme prejudice (bigotry), thus distinguishing it from the purely cognitive process of categorization.
It is difficult to study bigotry because it seems to transcend individual processes; external socio-historic conditions also have an important role in the phenomenon. In addition, bigotry goes beyond cognition, it implies an emotional or motivational component, and therefore its study will be marked by the difficulties inherent to the study of emotional experiences (e.g., the limitation of relying on self-report). In societies where there have been social movements towards equal rights, social norms prohibit the open expression of prejudice or bigotry, so self-report becomes even more inappropriate for studying the phenomena.
I think that cases of extreme prejudice/bigotry should be approached as case studies, which would allow a detailed analysis of all aspects of the phenomenon, using different research methods (both quantitative and qualitative) and various theoretical perspectives (such as cognitive theories, emotion and motivation theories, sociological and economical theories, etc.).
I thought that this was a very interesting article. Like Tom mentioned, I thought that Billings bringing up the Holocaust, which is obviously important to consider in terms of the effects it had on researchers in psychology, was good. As Ryan mentions, a portion of the article is dedicated to making a distinction between prejudice and bigotry. Prejudice deals with making categorizations, while bigotry is much more extreme. Billings also discusses how bigotry is not at an individual level, but it involves groups and group level influence. I think what Ryan said about group polarization of prejudice is good, and it makes sense to conceptualize bigotry this way.
It is hard to study bigotry because of social norms that dictate that we should not display extreme hatred for other groups. The IAT attempts to get at some of these issues, but it doesn't allow you to identify someone with extreme prejudice. Also, emotional and motivational aspects come into play, and it is difficult to assess these concepts. These are some of the issues that the social cognitive approach has to handle when it comes to tackling the issue of bigotry.
In order to study these issues, I think we should try to utilize some other methods that maybe we don't use as often. Case studies of extremely prejudiced groups could provide some ground work to tackling the issue. Various theoretical perspectives should also be brought to bear on these issues. Yes, many issues could arise with all of the things I just mentioned, such as the debate about qualitative versus quantitative research, but at least with a variety of different tools to utilize, we could come away with a better understanding of extreme prejudice.
This article was a detailed look into bigotry and prejudice. The author did an outstanding job at explaining the differences and also at giving some historical looks into such ideas. Bigotry is a very emotionally driven version of prejudice. It is driven by anger and goes beyond the every day happenings of prejudice. Bigotry is not common place today but it has been studied for decades and researchers have tried to explain happenings like the Holocaust to bigotry, however chalking up such a horrible occurrence to extreme prejudice would not give it justice. Such historical ties have impacted research in extreme prejudice.
Bigotry is hard to nail down in experiments because it is so socially unacceptable. Also, as the author mentions, it is important to look at ones actions to investigate bigotry, not their internal motives. With such complex ideologies about extreme prejudice, it would be very difficult to get a wide sampling of openly bigots. And in a large sampling of average individuals, it would be difficult to decipher who was truly a bigot and who was merely prejudice. I think the way to do a study effectively would be to distribute an ambiguous questionnaire that got at extreme prejudice. Those that answer above a certain score, bring in for behavioral observation and emotional tests. Once a total data set is established for each extreme prejudice individual, twist variables and see the differences. It would likely be a very small pool of individuals, but if done correctly, it could create a basic bigotry experiment.
I liked the Billing article. He seemed very passionate about bigotry and about Tajfel. This made it very easy to read, ad it seemed to go very fast. It seemed like he felt that Tajfel didn't talked about his past because he didn't want it to influence people, but Tajfels past needed to be talked about because it added another dimension to his research.
Why is extreme prejudice (bigotry) difficult to study?
Extreme bigotry is hard to study because it is socially unacceptable. People don't want to admit that they are bigots, especially to a psychologist, because they don't want to be watching the news one night and see story about how bigoted people are and realize that they were in that study. It is also only something that a small part of the population are. If most people were that way it wouldn't be considered extreme.
Why is it that the social cognitive approach has difficulty accounting for extreme prejudice?
Extreme prejudice is hard to account for because social pressures should lessen prejudice. It is hard to get groups of friends to take part in your studies and even harder to know that they are friends without confidentiality issues. This makes it even harder to asses social impact on those who are extremely prejudice.
What do you think are the best ways to tackle the study of extreme prejudice/bigotry?
I would start by defining extreme bigotry as an act that breaks the law and is directed against a person of a different group (what type doesn't matter, as long as the person thinks of the person as "the other"). This would mean they were in jail, thus everyone in the sample is pre categorized as being extreme. They also might not have the same social pressures to appear non prejudice as those who had not been caught in their discrimination. After this I would conduct a series of structured and non-structured interviews with the participants, as well as cognitive assessments to find what made them different.
The Billigs article covered studies that were done by Henri Tajfel and his studies were based on the psychology of bigotry and prejudice and concentrated on workin in social identity. The paper also talks about the 'blood and guts' approach that Tajfel diagreed with. I thought that tit was an interesting article in looking at studies that have influenced what we think about prejudices today.
Why is extreme prejudice (bigotry) difficult to study?
I think that studying biogtry would be difficult with the fact that no one wants to have that label. When people know that they are being studied and that the study is looking at their prejudices, participants will usually try and hide those negative predjudices they have of other races/ethnicities/genders etc.
Why is it that the social cognitive approach has difficulty accounting for extreme prejudice?
Usually if there are social aspects that are taken into account when studying extreme prejudices, they are extreme examples are usually groups of people (ex. KKK), and don't relate well to 'everyday' people. Usually the people that are in those groups identities are kept confidential, and their specific views can change from area to area. So making those extremes situations hard to study in a social cognitive approach.
What do you think are the best ways to tackle the study of extreme prejudice/bigotry?
I think the best way to study prejudice/bigotry would be looking at peoples actions rather than self-report measures.
Billig does a good job of distinguishing prejudice from bigotry. Before reading this article my own definition of prejudice had more in common with bigotry. Now, however, I can see the necessity of a distinguishing between the two terms. Bigotry is more extreme than prejudice because everyone has prejudice tendencies due to group categorization. Our brain automatically categorizes and begins labeling people with stereotypes before we are consciously aware; thus, those who make an effort to control these processes separate themselves from people who support prejudice beliefs.
Like others have said above, extreme prejudice is difficult to study because it is not socially acceptable in our country. Therefore, people are less likely to report such attitudes in order to appear socially desirable. The article also mentioned the issue of context. I think this is extremely important to consider in the study of prejudice. Not only does general prejudice change over time, but people's may be more likely to support prejudiced beliefs following certain events (e.g., 9/11, being robbed by a person of another race, etc.). Even though people may understand that they shouldn't be scared of people from a group in general, their brain may make automatic associations relating back to the negative experience and make them more apt to show prejudice.
I think that new brain imaging techniques can help us understand implicit attitudes better, however, I think that prejudice is an area where qualitative research may be beneficial to understand its intricacies. I liked the mention of case studies and it would be really cool to do extended studies where someone infiltrates an organization such as the KKK and tries to understand the hatred from within the group where people are more open about their attitudes. An integration of the understanding of prejudice from different fields may also help us look at the phenomenon in different contexts and could shed new light on areas that might be previously unconsidered.