Exercises — Chapter 36: Prejudice, Stereotyping, and Group Identity

A Note Before You Begin

This chapter's exercises require more honesty than most. You are being asked to examine not only observed social dynamics but your own automatic associations, categorical perceptions, and behaviors that you may not have examined before. The research establishes clearly that having implicit biases is normal — not evidence of bad character but evidence of a normally functioning cognitive system operating in a biased social environment.

The exercises below are most valuable if approached with genuine curiosity rather than defensiveness or self-flagellation. The goal is clarity about what is actually operating, not a verdict on whether you are a good person.

Exercise 36.1 — Category Activation

This exercise makes visible the automatic categorization process.

For each of the following descriptions, write down the first three to five characteristics that come to mind about the person. Work quickly — the goal is to capture what activates automatically rather than what you would endorse after reflection:

A 65-year-old man applying for a technology job
A young Black male in an affluent neighborhood
A woman who is a CEO of a major corporation
A man who works as a nurse
A Muslim woman in a college classroom
A white man in rural America
A homeless person in a city center

After completing the quick-response section, reflect: 1. Which of your associations were positive, negative, or neutral? 2. Which associations were based on category membership rather than anything you know about the actual individual? 3. Which associations surprised you? 4. Which associations do you explicitly endorse as accurate descriptions of category members? Which do you reject but noticed anyway?

The distinction between noticing an association and endorsing it is important. Both are real; they are not the same thing.

Exercise 36.2 — Stereotype Persistence Analysis

Stereotypes are self-perpetuating — they shape what information is attended to and how it is interpreted. This exercise maps the mechanism.

Select a social group about which you hold a stereotype (positive, negative, or mixed). Write the stereotype clearly.

Describe three ways the stereotype leads you to notice stereotype-consistent information more readily.
Describe two ways the stereotype leads you to explain away stereotype-inconsistent information.
Identify one person you know from this group who clearly contradicts the stereotype. Have you updated the stereotype based on knowing them? Why or why not?
Describe the conditions under which you would genuinely revise this stereotype.

Reflection: The fact that stereotypes require deliberate effort to revise in the face of contradictory evidence helps explain why "getting to know people" doesn't automatically reduce prejudice — the new information has to fight against a schema that is designed to maintain itself.

Social Identity Theory holds that multiple group memberships contribute to self-concept. This exercise maps your social identity landscape.

List all significant social groups you belong to (race/ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion, profession, social class, political affiliation, hobby communities, regional identity, family roles, etc.).

For each group: 1. How central is this identity to your self-concept? (1 = peripheral, 10 = core) 2. How positive do you evaluate this group membership? (1 = negative, 10 = positive) 3. How much does this group compare itself to other groups in your internal experience? 4. What is the primary out-group that your group defines itself against?

Analysis: - Which identities do you think about most? Which are invisible because they are dominant (e.g., majority-group memberships that rarely require attention)? - Where do you notice the most inter-group comparison operating? - Which group memberships produce the strongest affective response — positive or negative — when the group is criticized or threatened?

Exercise 36.4 — Minimal Group Reflection

The minimal group paradigm demonstrates that arbitrary categorization generates in-group favoritism. This exercise applies that insight to your current life.

Identify three groups you belong to that are, on reflection, based on relatively arbitrary criteria — professional sports team allegiance, neighborhood association, alma mater, brand loyalty, early adopter community, hobby group.

For each: 1. Have you ever favored in-group members in any decision where that membership was the only distinguishing factor? 2. Have you ever felt contempt or competitive hostility toward out-group members where the stakes were objectively trivial? 3. What does noticing this pattern tell you about what drives in-group favoritism generally?

Reflection: The point is not that these group loyalties are wrong — they often provide genuine community and meaning. The point is that the psychological mechanism generating them is the same one that generates more consequential in-group favoritism. Understanding the mechanism at the trivial level is preparation for recognizing it at the non-trivial level.

Part C: Implicit Bias and Aversive Racism

Exercise 36.5 — Decision Audit

Aversive racism predicts that bias operates primarily in ambiguous situations where a plausible non-racial explanation is available. This exercise examines your own decision-making record.

Think back over the past year and identify five significant decisions you made about other people — hiring, promotion, assignment of work, inclusion or exclusion in an activity, recommending someone, giving someone the benefit of the doubt or withholding it.

For each decision: 1. What explicit reasons did you give for the decision? 2. Was there a demographic category (race, gender, age, social class, attractiveness, disability status) that could be relevant? 3. If that demographic factor had been different, would the outcome have been the same? 4. How confident are you in that answer, and what is the basis for your confidence?

This exercise is not designed to produce a verdict. It is designed to produce questions — the kind of questions that aversive racism research suggests most people do not ask because the explicit self-concept as fair and unbiased prevents the inquiry.

Exercise 36.6 — Stereotype Threat — Personal Experience

Claude Steele's research on stereotype threat applies to many groups across many domains. This exercise identifies your own experience of it.

Identify a context where you belong to a group about which a negative stereotype exists in that domain. (Examples: women in STEM; men in emotional intelligence; older people in technology; working-class people in elite academic settings; any racial minority in a domain where their group is stereotyped as less capable.)

Describe the situation and the stereotype.
Have you ever noticed your performance impaired by awareness of the stereotype — by the pressure of not wanting to confirm it?
Have you ever disidentified from the domain — stopped caring about performance there — as a self-protective response to the stereotype?
Have you experienced the evaluative process differently when you knew the evaluator shared your group membership?

Now apply the same analysis from the evaluator's side: 1. Have you ever been in a position to evaluate someone from a negatively stereotyped group? 2. Did you actively work to counteract potential bias in your evaluation? What did that effort look like?

Part D: Contact and Prejudice Reduction

Exercise 36.7 — Your Contact History

The Contact Hypothesis specifies conditions under which contact reduces prejudice. This exercise maps your own inter-group contact history.

Identify two or three significant contacts you have had with members of groups toward which you had some prior prejudice. (The group can be any social category; the prejudice can have been explicit or just a vague negative expectation.)

For each contact: 1. Did the contact reduce your prejudice, increase it, or have no effect? 2. Evaluate the contact against Allport's conditions: Was it equal status? Were there common goals? Was there cooperation? Was there institutional support? 3. What specifically changed (or didn't) in your attitude, and what drove that change (or non-change)?

Reflection: The Contact Hypothesis predicts that contact reduces prejudice when conditions are met and can increase it when they're not. Looking at your own history, does this pattern hold?

Exercise 36.8 — The Common In-Group Identity Experiment

Gaertner and Dovidio's Common In-Group Identity Model shows that recategorization — shifting from "us vs. them" to a more inclusive "we" — reduces discrimination within the newly unified group.

Identify a current intergroup conflict or tension you are aware of — in your workplace, community, family, or broader society. It need not involve you directly.

Describe the two groups and the current in-group/out-group boundary.
What superordinate category could encompass both groups? (What do they share that could be made salient?)
What superordinate goals — goals neither group can achieve alone — might be available?
What obstacles would exist to making the superordinate identity salient? (Groups often resist recategorization when it feels like erasure of their specific identity.)
How would you design a contact intervention that maintained meaningful subgroup identities while building the superordinate level?

Part E: Intersectionality and Complex Identity

Exercise 36.9 — Intersectionality Mapping

Intersectionality holds that social identities interact in ways that produce qualitatively distinct experiences — not additive combinations of individual category effects.

Map your own intersecting identities: 1. List four to six of your most significant social identities (race, gender, class, age, ability, religion, sexual orientation, nationality, etc.). 2. For each pair of identities, consider: Does holding both simultaneously produce experiences that neither identity alone would predict? 3. Identify one situation where your specific combination of identities created a distinct form of advantage or disadvantage that a single-category analysis would have missed.

Now apply this to someone you work with or know well, with their permission if possible, or in general terms: 1. How might their specific configuration of identities produce experiences you haven't considered? 2. What assumptions might you be making based on a single salient identity that the intersectional picture would complicate?

Exercise 36.10 — Microaggressions — Sending and Receiving

Derald Wing Sue's microaggression research documents both the sending and receiving of these communications. This exercise examines both sides.

On the receiving side: 1. Have you experienced microaggressions based on any of your social identities? Describe one — the communication, the message it conveyed, your response, and the aftermath (did you say something? what was the cost of doing or not doing so?). 2. How did you evaluate the ambiguity: Was it intentional? Should you respond?

On the sending side: 1. Have you made a comment that could have functioned as a microaggression — not intending harm but communicating an unwelcome message about someone's group membership? 2. How did you know (or how did you learn) it had landed that way? 3. What was your response: defensive, curious, apologetic, something else?

Reflection: The hardest exercise in this section is recognizing that you have been on both sides of microaggressions. The defensive response to "that was a microaggression" is understandable but typically unproductive. The most useful frame: the impact matters regardless of intent, and the question is whether you're willing to learn from the information the response provides.

Part F: Structural Analysis

Exercise 36.11 — Structural vs. Individual Prejudice

One of the important distinctions in contemporary prejudice research is between individual-level bias and structural/systemic patterns — the way institutions, policies, and norms can produce discriminatory outcomes even when no individual has explicitly prejudiced intent.

Select one domain (employment, housing, education, healthcare, criminal justice) and one group.

Identify two or three structural mechanisms that produce disparate outcomes for this group in this domain. (These should be mechanisms identifiable in research, not just asserted.)
Identify what individual-level bias, if any, is needed for these structural mechanisms to operate.
Identify what would need to change — at both the structural and individual levels — to reduce the disparity.
What are the arguments against the changes you've identified? Engage them seriously rather than dismissing them.

Reflection: The individual-versus-structural debate in prejudice and discrimination is often more politically charged than empirically contested. Both levels exist; both matter; neither is sufficient without the other. The exercise is to think clearly about both levels simultaneously.

Part G: Integration

Exercise 36.12 — Personal Bias Reduction Plan

The chapter identifies several evidence-based approaches to reducing bias and its behavioral expression. This exercise builds a concrete plan.

First, assess your current situation: 1. What are the three most consequential domains in your life where bias — your own or others' — affects outcomes? (Work, relationships, parenting, volunteering, voting, consumer behavior?) 2. In which of these domains are you primarily in the position of someone potentially targeted by bias? 3. In which are you primarily in the position of someone who might enact bias?

For each domain where you might enact bias: 1. Write two to three implementation intentions in if-then format: "When [specific decision point or situation], I will [specific counter-bias action]." 2. Identify one source of counter-stereotypic exposure you could build into your regular environment. 3. Identify one accountability mechanism — a person, a process, or a structural check — that would make biased behavior harder.

For each domain where you might be targeted by bias: 1. What responses, if any, are available to you when discrimination occurs? 2. What is the cost/benefit calculation for different response options (direct confrontation, reporting, exiting, building coalition)? 3. What self-care resources do you need to maintain functioning while navigating these experiences?

The goal of this chapter's exercises is not to produce the answer "I am/am not prejudiced." That question is less useful than "Where specifically does bias operate in my cognition and behavior, and what specifically can I do about it?" The specificity is what makes change possible.

Next: Quiz 36 — Test Your Knowledge of Prejudice, Stereotyping, and Group Identity