The next two chapters in my book The Social Animal, discusses two completely different topics, prejudice and interpersonal attraction. I say different because these two types of social behavior involve different types of attitudes one can express. The book defines prejudice as a hostile or negative attitude toward a distinguishable group on the basis of generalizations derived from faulty or incomplete information. Interpersonal attraction is more of a happier, respectable type of behavior. It deals with the study of people and how they interact with one another. Interpersonal attraction creates a very broad question like—what makes people like one another? It also creates a very specific question like—what makes people fall in love with each other?
The book identifies multiple forms of prejudice, like conscious and intentional or unconscious and unintentional. One type discussed really caught my interest because of it relating to an article we talked about in class. Sexism is a form of prejudice because it favors one sex more over the other. Hostile sexism refers to an active dislike of women, which reminded me of the article Patriarchy at the Checkout Counter. In the article female Wal-Mart workers felt like they were being discriminated against because of their sex. The women employees of Wal-Mart felt they were not receiving the same amount of pay that men were receiving for doing similar work. It wasn’t just the pay that that felt upper management was being sexist about. Women also felt that they were not being promoted into upper positions, even if they had more experience and more education. After performing experiments to test their hypothesis, social psychologists discovered potential causes of prejudice. The five basic causes are (1) economic and political competition, where a dominant group may try to exploit a minority group to gain material advantage. (2) Displaced aggression, where an individual might last out when frustrated. (3) Maintenance of status, where we need to justify our behavior and sense of self. (4) Dispositional prejudice, which deals with the person just being who they are. (5) Conformity to existing social norms where childhood conflicts or personality traits influence his or her decisions. At the core of prejudice is a generalization called stereotyping. Stereotyping occurs when we allow certain pictures of people to dominate our thinking. It is not necessarily intentional, “often it is merely a way we humans have of organizing and simplifying the complexities of our social world, and we all do it.” (309) We can see stereotyping when working in groups with other people. Like in the article Managing Multicultural Teams, it is hard to get over “stereotypes” we have formed towards people, causing potential problems when having people work together whom are of different backgrounds.
The next chapter in my book was dealing with a completely different type of social behavior. In this chapter author Aronson is trying to prove why human beings are so obsessed with people liking them. In experiments conducted, he concluded that we like people with pleasant characteristics, people who agree with us, and we like people who like us in return. One generalization made is that humans like getting the maximum reward from people at the minimum cost. People are not only obsessed with being liked, but also obsessed with being right. If we surround ourselves with people whom have similar beliefs and can provide us with social validation it will provide us with a feeling of being right. Being right is a kind of reward for a person so we find it enjoyable to be around something that agrees with us versus someone that disagrees with us. There is an even further step then liking someone, and that is to love someone. The second part of this chapter talks about passionate love, which is defined as strong emotions, sexual desire, and intense preoccupation with the beloved. The second type of love is companionate love, which is a milder form; there is mutual trust, and dependability.
