For example, a statement such as Bill criticized Jim allocates some responsibility to an identified critic, whereas a statement such as Jim was criticized fails to do so. If you would like to develop more understanding of prejudice, see some of the short videos at undertandingprejudice.org at this link: What are some forms of discrimination other than racial discrimination? Although this preference includes the abstract characterizations of behaviors observed in the linguistic intergroup bias, it also includes generalizations other than verb transformations. As one might imagine, the disparity in ingroup-outgroup evaluations is more obvious on private ratings than on public ones: Raters often wish to avoid the appearance of bias, both because bias may be socially unacceptable and in some cases may be illegal. In many such cases, the higher status person has the responsibility of evaluating the performance of the lower status person. Hall, E. T. (1976). Some contexts for cross-group communication are explicitly asymmetrical with respect to status and power: teacher-student, mentor-mentee, supervisor-employee, doctor-patient, interviewer-interviewee. Information overload is a common barrier to effective listening that good speakers can help mitigate by building redundancy into their speeches and providing concrete examples of new information to help audience members interpret and understand the key ideas. In one study, White participants who overheard a racial slur about a Black student inferred that the student had lower skills than when participants heard a negative non-racial comment or heard no comment at all (Greenberg & Pyszczynski, 1985). But ethnocentrism can lead to disdain or dislike for other cultures and could cause misunderstanding and conflict. Listening helps us focus on the the heart of the conflict. When expanded it provides a list of search options that will switch the search inputs to match the current selection. This button displays the currently selected search type. While private evaluations of outgroup members may be negative, communicated feedback may be more positively toned. Ng and Bradac (1993) describe four such devices: truncation, generalization, nominalization, and permutation: These devices are not mutually exclusive, so some statements may blend strategies. This topic has been studied most extensively with respect to gender-biased language. There are many barriers that prevent us from competently perceiving others. Stereotypic and prejudiced beliefs sometimes can be obfuscated by humor that appears to target subgroups of a larger outgroup. In The Nature of Prejudice, Gordon Allport wrote of nouns that cut slices. He argued that human beings categorize who and what they encounter and advance one feature to a primary status that outweighs and organizes other features. . If receivers have limited cognitive resources to correct for the activated stereotype (e.g., they are cognitively busy with concurrent tasks), the stereotype may influence their judgments during that time period (cf. Peoples stereotypic and prejudiced beliefs do not only influence how they communicate about outgroup members, but also how they communicate to outgroup members. Again, depending on the situation, communicators may quickly mask their initial brow furrow with an obligatory smile. Television, radio, or Internet news may be local, national, or international, and may be biased by the sociopolitical leanings of the owner, advertisers, or reporters. Stereotype-incongruent characteristics and behaviors, to contrast, muddy the picture and therefore often are left out of communications. In intergroup settings, such assumptions often are based on the stereotypes associated with the listeners apparent group membership. It is unclear how well the patterns discussed above apply when women or ethnic minorities give feedback to men or ethnic majority group members, though one intuits that fear of appearing prejudiced is not a primary concern. Such groups may be represented with a prototype (i.e., an exaggerated instance like the film character Crocodile Dundee). . Stereotypes are oversimplifiedideas about groups of people. Although little empirical research has examined the communication addressed to historically disadvantaged outgroups who hold high status roles, these negative evaluations hint that some bias might leak along verbal and/or nonverbal channels. Students tended to rely on first-person plurals when referencing wins, but third-person plurals when referencing losses. Andersen, P. A., Nonverbal Communication: Forms and Functions (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1999), 57-58. Classic intergroup communication work by Word, Zanna, and Cooper (1974) showed that White interviewers displayed fewer immediacy behaviors toward Black interviewees than toward White interviewees, and that recipients of low immediacy evince poorer performance than recipients of high immediacy behaviors. Surely, a wide array of research opportunities awaits the newest generation of social scientists who are interested in prejudiced communication. At the same time, 24/7 news channels and asynchronous communication such as tweets and news feeds bombard people with messages throughout the day. Similar patterns of controlling talk and unresponsiveness to receiver needs may be seen in medical settings, such as biased physicians differential communication patterns with Black versus White patients (Cooper et al., 2012). As the term implies, impression management goals involve efforts to create a particular favorable impression with an audience and, as such, different impression goals may favor the transmission of particular types of information. An examination of traditional morning and evening news programs or daily newspapers gives some insight into how prejudiced or stereotypic beliefs might be transmitted across large numbers of individuals. Such information is implicitly shared, noncontroversial, and easily understood, so conversation is not shaken up by its presentation. Marked nouns such as lady engineer or Black dentist signal that the pairing is non-normative: It implies, for example, that Black people usually are not dentists and that most dentists have an ethnicity other than Black (Pratto, Korchmaros, & Hegarty, 2007). Legal. Thus, pronoun use not only reflects an acknowledged separation of valued ingroups from devalued outgroups, but apparently can reflect a strategic effort to generate feelings of solidarity or distance. For example, female members of British Parliament may be photographed in stereotypically feminine contexts (e.g., sitting on a comfortable sofa sipping tea; Ross & Sreberny-Mohammadi, 1997). Google Scholar. Slightly more abstract, interpretive action verbs (e.g., loafing) reference a specific instance of behavior but give some interpretation. For example, humor that targets dumb blondes insults stereotypically feminine characteristics such as vanity about physical beauty, lack of basic intelligence, and kittenish sexuality; although such humor perpetuates negative stereotypes about women, its focus on a subgroup masks that broader (not necessarily intentional) message. For example, faced with an inquiry for directions from someone with an unfamiliar accent, a communicator might provide greater detail than if the inquirers accent seems native to the locale. Duchscherer & Dovidio, 2016) or to go viral? Do linguistically-biased tweets from celebrities and public figures receive more retweets than less biased tweets? The research on cross-race feedback by Kent Harber and his colleagues (e.g., Harber et al., 2012) provides some insight into how and why this feedback pattern might occur. Americans tend to say that people from England drive on the wrong side of the road, rather than on the other side. That noted, face-ismand presumably other uses of stereotypic imagesis influenced by the degree of bias in the source. Social science research has not yet kept pace with how ordinary citizens with mass communication access are transforming the transmission of prejudiced beliefs and stereotypes. Exposure to films that especially perpetuate the stereotype can influence judgments made about university applicants (Smith et al., 1999) and also can predict gender-stereotyped behavior in children (Coyne, Linder, Rasmussen, Nelson, & Birkbeck, 2016). Prejudice is thus a negative or unfair opinion formed about someone before you have met that person and is not based on any interaction or experience with that person. Communication maxims (Grice, 1975) enjoin speakers to provide only as much information as is necessary, to be clear and organized, to be relevant, and to be truthful. People also direct prejudiced communication to outgroups: They talk down to others, give vacuous feedback and advice, and nonverbally leak disdain or anxiety. Nominalization transforms verbs into nouns, again obfuscating who is responsible for the action (e.g., A rape occurred, or There will be penalties). With the advent of the Internet, social media mechanisms such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook allow ordinary citizens to communicate on the mass scale (e.g., Hsueh, Yogeeswaran, & Malinen, 2015). Although prejudiced and stereotypic beliefs may be communicated in many contexts, an elaboration of a few of these contexts illustrates the far reach of prejudiced communication. In fact, preference for disparaging humor is especially strong among individuals who adhere to hierarchy-endorsing myths that dismiss such humor as harmless (Hodson, Rush, & MacInnis, 2010). Prejudiced communication takes myriad forms and emerges in numerous contexts. In many settings, the non-normative signal could be seen as an effort to reinforce the norm and imply that the tagged individual does not truly belong. Crossing boundaries: Cross-cultural communication. Communicators also use secondary baby talk when speaking to individuals with developmental cognitive disabilities, but also may use this speech register when the receiver has a physical disability unrelated to cognitive functioning (e.g., an individual with cerebral palsy). An attorney describing a defendant to a jury, an admissions committee arguing against an applicant, and marketing teams trying to sell products with 30-second television advertisements all need to communicate clear, internally consistent, and concise messages. The present consideration is restricted to the production of nonverbal behaviors that conceivably might accompany the verbal channels discussed throughout this chapter: facial expressions and immediacy behaviors. A high level of appreciation for ones own culture can be healthy; a shared sense of community pride, for example, connects people in a society. Andersen, P. A., Nonverbal Communication: Forms and Functions (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1999), 57-58. 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