3 Strategies To Reduce Prejudice

We all have prejudices. Prejudices are attitudes, positive or negative, towards groups or members of groups and we use them to value and label people we do not know. For example, if we meet a gypsy and we think that gypsies play the guitar well, the interaction with him will be determined by that prior belief that he is a good musician. Biases serve to maintain status hierarchies between groups, but luckily there are different ways to reduce biases.

Prejudices are considered to have three components. They have a cognitive component, stereotypes, which represents the mental images we have of the members of a group. Another component is the affective, the emotions and feelings that are awakened. The last component is behavioral and is represented by discrimination, in negative behaviors towards the group about which there are prejudices.

Since prejudices are attitudes towards groups or members of groups, social psychology has developed different ways to reduce prejudices  based on the theories of categorization and social identity.

Reduction of prejudice through recategorization

People tend to categorize, to divide people according to categories. This categorization makes us favor those we include within our category more, giving rise to prejudices towards members of other categories. Therefore, increasing the flexibility of category boundaries will reduce biases. In this sense, there are at least three possibilities:

• Decategorization: consists of viewing members of other categories as individual people. In this way, prejudice will be reduced. If instead of seeing someone as a member of a country we see them as an independent person, the attitudes will be more positive.

• Cross categorization: consists of highlighting the common categories of membership that the members of two opposing groups may have. By making people aware of the categories they share, attitudes towards those people would be more favorable. We can have a different religion but still share gender and nationality.
• Recategorization: consists of trying to create a new categorization that jointly encompasses the members of different categories. Eg We are not Spanish and French, we are Europeans.

Reduce prejudice through common group identity

This last strategy, recategorization, is the one that has been studied the most. Since categorizing leads to the formation of identities:  if I categorize myself as a woman, I will form a woman’s identity. Thus, to promote recategorization it would be necessary to create new, more inclusive identities. Identities that encompass my identity and that of others.

For example, if my identity is a woman and yours is a man, I will favor my group, the women, more, and I will have prejudices towards the members of your group, the men. But if instead we both identify as feminists, I will favor both men and women.

Having a common identity increases helping and cooperative behaviors. Therefore, the more people that make up the identity, the more the group benefits will be. Also, going back to the previous example, the initial identities would not be lost. We would still be women and feminists or men and feminists. In this way, we would have a dual identity and although there would be another group with another identity, at the same time they would be members of our group. The problem is that social identities are not activated at the same time, only the one that is most important at the moment is activated.

Reduce prejudice through contact

Closely related to categorization strategies in prejudice reduction is the contact hypothesis. This theory holds that it is possible to reduce prejudice when contact between members of various social groups is increased or when it is known that members of the own group have established close relationships with members of other groups.

However, the contact hypothesis only seems to be successful when there are specific conditions that favor contact between members of different social groups. These conditions are four:

• There must be both social and institutional support when promoting contact.
• Contact must be prolonged. There should be enough time for the relationships between group members to be meaningful.
• The participants, the people between whom the contact occurs, should have a similar status. The condition of the groups must be the same.
• The groups involved must have common objectives, so that these shared interests generate cooperative relationships.

Collectively, there are a number of ways to reduce biases. It seems that creating a category that is “human” from which a human identity is generated would be ideal. This would be the perfect form of prejudice reduction.

However, the difficulty of getting people to identify as human and always being the most important identity complicates the viability of this option. Perhaps, a common enemy from another planet would cause us to identify ourselves as humans or Earthlings and end prejudice. Something possible, but unlikely.