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	Social Psychology II > Prejudice and Conflict > Stereotypes and Prejudice

		Self-esteem maintenance Another motivational approach finds the roots of prejudice and discrimination in the need to bolster self-esteem. When self-esteem is threatened, one way to feel better is to engage in downward social comparisons. When people engage in downward social comparisons, they compare themselves to people who are worse off than they are. In a clever experiment, Steve Fein and Steve Spencer <REF>(1997) hypothesized that subjects who experienced a threat to their self-esteem would be motivated to apply their stereotypes as a means of making themselves feel better through downward social comparison. Consistent with this logic, they found that subjects who were told that they had failed an intelligence test were more likely to use stereotypic terms to describe a Jewish woman and a gay man than were subjects who were told that they had passed the test. Realistic group conflict At the heart of the realistic group conflict approach <REF>(Levine & Campbell, 1972) to prejudice is the notion that competition for scarce resources breeds prejudice. When one person's gain results in another person's loss, feelings of superiority and entitlement, on the part of the winner, and resentment and frustration, on the part of the loser, rapidly escalate to full-blown prejudice. Consider an early study by Muzafer Sherif and his colleagues <REF>(1961). In this study, boys were invited to a summer camp where they were first encouraged to form activity groups. These groups, the "Rattlers" and the "Eagles," were then thrown into competition with each other. Football games were played, races were held, and winners and losers were declared. As the competition intensified, so did the boys' loyalty to their respective groups. Being an Eagle or a Rattler came to mean something special to the boys. They were all convinced that their group was superior. They deserved to win and the other group deserved to lose. In other words, as the competition intensified, the groups showed clear signs of ingroup bias. They developed strong feelings about the superiority of their own group and they shunned and discriminated against members of the other group.   What, if anything, can be done to stop this cycle of competition and prejudice? Simply eliminating the competition does not erase the stereotypes that have been formed. Instead, Sherif and his colleagues found that the most effective way to overcome prejudice was to create situations in which the groups had to work together to solve some higher goal. At one point, for example, a truck that delivered drinking water to the camp had to be pushed to get it into the camp. Neither group, by itself, could move the truck. But when they worked together, they solved the problem and also broke down some of the barriers between the groups that they had created. Realistic group conflict helps explain why ethnic tensions increased immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, why they tend to increase during economic downturns <REF> (Hepworth & West, 1988), and why they decrease within a country when it is faced with an outside enemy <REF>(Rabbie & Bekkers, 1978).
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	Click an activity to open it: • Conformity • Conformity Factors • Milgram Obedience Experiment • Why Obey • Bay of Pigs • Impression Formation • What's Going On? • In Your Face • Actors and Observers • Birds of a Feather • Ratings Game • Love Scale • Love Triangle • Attachment Style • Ad Categorization Activity • Dissonance Theater • Decision Model of Helping • Self-fulfilling Prophecy Movie • Impressions and Expressions • Reducing Prejudice • Prisoner's Dilemma • Faces of the Enemy