Essay on "Policy-Related Suggestions (E.G., Education, Legal Issues, Prejudice-Related)"

Essay 3 pages (1208 words) Sources: 6 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

policy-related suggestions (e.g., education, legal issues, prejudice-related) can social psychologists make? What contributions can they make, say, differently than economists? Think of possible effects, biases, research findings that policy-makers could make use of. Please explain by-providing examples from an area of your choice.

Islamaphobia is a common phenomenon nowadays . The May 2002 report of the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) highlighted the regularity with which ordinary Muslims became targets for discriminatory attacks. Despite localized differences within each member nation, the recurrence of attacks on recognizable and visible traits of Islam and Muslims was the report's most significant finding. Policy makers can devise rules to forbid it, yet it continues. Social psychologists, on the other hand, can conduct investigation into the root causes of prejudice as well as interventions that have or have not been successful and, accordingly, engineer ways to prevent and control it. In this way, social psychologists can be as effective, or perhaps even more effective than policy makers in dealing with certain social problems using different techniques.

For instance, one of the realizations that social psychologists arrived at in regards to prejudice is that even though prejudice interventions abound, some of them have a precise opposite effect resulting in increased rather than decreased prejudice. Legault et al. (2011) conducted two experiments where participants received detailed information or prejudice reduction or were primed with prejudice-0reduciton stimuli. Both information and primes either reinforced social obligation to reduce / eliminate prejudice or encouraged autonomous motivation to that same end. researchers found that employing external control only increased explicit and implicit prejudice whilst placing the focus on autonomous control led to greater cessation of prejudice. In this case, the study, if found to be reliable, is invaluable to social polices on prejudice reduction since it shows that strategies, other than laws, must be formulated and implemetned in order to reduce prejudice.

Other ways in which social psychologists can be helpful in preventing and reducing prejudice lies in their assessment of the various interventions and those that they conclude are generally helpful. To that end, social psychologists have split Prejudice-reducing interventions into three rough categories:

1. Encounter groups / Intergroup contact / Cooperative learning -- employing Allport's (1954) 'contact hypothesis', this approach recommends acquaintanceship with members of the stigmatized group as prerequisite for impeding inter-racial bias. Interventions may include exposure to role models who contradict the symbolic area of the threat (otherwise known as an atypical exemplar), and targeting evaluations in order to perceive the situation from the other's perspective (Paluck & Green, 2009). There is mixed report regarding their success. Considered the most popular intervention (ibid), poor results of desegregation in this country indicate that contact hypothesis works best under limited and primarily superficial / laboratory conditions. The intergroup approach is based on the theory that people's perceptions favor their own groups relative to others (Paluck & Green, 2009), and that by associating with them in this cooperative or contractive manner, cognitive perceptions will be altered.

2. Thought suppression / modification and other cognitive strategies: These include strategies such as perspective taking, awareness of moral hypocrisy, and training in complex thinking and in statistical logic . Inclusive is social recategorizaiton, or acceptance of the common ingroup identity model, which believes that perception of oneself as part of a larger social entity will reduce prejudice.

In short: Changing thought, it is believed, will alter attitude.

3. Deindividuation: This theory developed by Brewer (1988) and Fiske and colleagues (Fiske & Neuberg, 1988), maintains that perceivers should effortfully engage themselves in accruing knowledge about other features of the individual's life and personality.… READ MORE

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