Tripartite Model Of Prejudice Essay

Individuals use attitudes to evaluate things in their environment. However, when negative evaluations or attitudes are based on an individual’s group membership, this is known as prejudice (Crandall & Eshleman, 2003). For example, lab studies have shown a person who associate Black individuals with criminals are more likely to shoot a Black suspect compared to a White suspect (Correll, Judd, & Wittenbrink, 2002; Greenwald, Oakes, & Hoffman, 2003). The deleterious effects of prejudicial attitudes on marginalized group are well known, ranging from hiring discrimination (Tilcsik, 2011) and unequal access to healthcare (Harrison, Grant, & Herman, 2012) to poorer academic achievement (Steele, & Aronson, 1995) and negative mental health outcomes (Williams & Williams-Morris, 2000). This begs some important questions: a) Why do individuals have prejudicial attitudes? and b) what are ways to reduce it? According to the tripartite model, prejudice, like other forms of attitudes, are composed of an affective, behavioral, and cognitive component (Katz & Stotland, 1959). The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, this article will examine the previous literature on
According to Fiske and Taylor (1984), critical thinking is effortful and comes in limited supply. Thus, individuals are known as “cognitive misers” because they rely on heuristics or mental shortcuts to conserve resources and still make evaluations. Studies how shown when individuals are mentally fatigued, they tend to rely on stereotypes and other mental shortcuts (Govorun & Payne, 2006). While human beings have the greatest capacity to critically think within the animal kingdom, they do not always exert the maximum effort. Depending on the individual’s goals, they can engage in effortful thinking to come to an accurate conclusion or they can be frugal with their mental resources and make less accurate