Open-Minded or Prejudiced? FINAL

This topic submitted by Matt Shaltry and Diana Perry (dianaperry@homestead.com) at 4:22 pm on 4/28/00. Additions were last made on Wednesday, August 9, 2000. Section: Myers.

1. Introduction
a. Purpose/Problem. What are your hypotheses?
The purpose of this class experiment is to examine a part of our human nature. Human nature involves many different feelings, thoughts, and actions. In this class, we are examining human nature on an evolutionary level. This is to say how evolution has affected how we perceive the world around us. For our idea, we have chosen to examine prejudice in general, in animals, and at Miami University. In general, prejudice is a feeling, favorable or un-favorable toward a person or thing prior to, or not based on actual experience. Prejudice can be on many levels such as race, religion, or social class. We are interested in the feelings people feel towards Western and Main campus.
With the surveys that we intend to use, we have come up with a multi-part hypothesis. We feel that the Western Campus data will represent a group that is accepting of different lifestyles other than their own. We also feel that the Main Campus data will represent a group that is the most judgmental and least accepting of the three groups and therefore show the most prejudice. And lastly, we feel that the Architect data will show less acceptance than Western, but more acceptance than Main Campus. We also hypothesize that the data from freshman and sophomores will show more prejudice than the data from older segment of the students.
b. Relevance, if any. Why is this research interesting?
We feel that this is a relevant topic because prejudice can be found in humankind throughout its history. This topic is also interesting because it is something that we deal with every day of our lives. Prejudice has always been around and always will be around as long as people are different. Therefore, it is interesting to examine some of the root causes of prejudice and how it exists in just one aspect of our lives.
2. Relevance of your research question
a. Literature Review--What have others done?
A multitude of theories and definitions exist to explain what prejudice is, why we
discriminate, and how it affects us. Explanations extend along every type of animal, from fish to birds to monkeys to humans.
In sociology, one term exist to explain how we identify with a particular group and how we take on ideas of that group. This is called labeling. This is when a person is associated with a group and given a descriptive tag. Examples could be genius or idiot, black or white, crazy or sane. People may be given a numerous amount of theses labels and not even have a say. They may not even realize they have been labeled this was because a person idea of themselves does not match how others see them.
Also in Kidder and Stewartís book is the idea that people join the groups they do and stick with them is because they assume they will be more accepted by certain groups. These groups become even closer when a conflicting out-group exists.
In Allportís book, he describes two reasons why we may be prejudiced. Sometimes these prejudices are serving a self-gratifying purpose. Other times though, it is just a matter of blind conformity. We will use the idea of conformity to support why we made the hypothesis idea that we did. We felt that freshman entering, and even some sophomores, would be more prejudiced towards a certain group because others of their same group tells them negative things about the out-group. Instead of forming their own ideas at the time or questioning it, they go along so they do not become outcast themselves.
He also defined two reasons we may see these as justifiable reasons for our prejudices without really knowing they are prejudices. The first is where a person fits into various groups, with their ties becoming much more large scale. In the first ring, the see they selves fitting into their own family. The next three layers out they fit into their neighborhood, their city, and their state. These levels vary for each person, but where they feel they fit will decide how they feel about people who are part of the out-group. (Allport, p. 43) The second idea is the some people have a ìwell deserved reputationî and deserve the labels and treatment they get. (Allport, p.87, 88)
In the evolutionary sense we can see prejudice feelings in all spectrums of life. In Allenís book, he shows studies of 16 animals that all share a fear of strangers. Plus, many of the studies can be applied to similar animals. An example of this would be when they did studies on one mammal, they applied it to many others who seemed to display stranger fear too. All the animal studies show that the caged or free animals defended their space because it was their territory and they were worried over their food source. The fear and attacks were even worse on those of the same species. We can use this not as justification for the prejudice attitudes we plan to see in people, but as the base from which it is rooted.
Bibliography:
Allen, David. ìFear of Strangers.î Bennington Books, Michigan. 1993.
Allport, Gordon. ìThe Nature of Prejudice.î Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Massachusetts. 1954.
Baird, Robert and Stuart Rosenbaum. ìBiogtry, Prejudice, and Hatred.î Prometheus Books, New York. 1992.
Goodall, Jane. "Through a Window". Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.1990.
Kidder, Louise and V. Mary Stewart. ìThe Psychology of Intergroup Relations.î McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York. 1975.
Wright, Robert. "The Moral Animal". Vintage Books, New York.1994.
b. How does your research relate to a larger question (use real world examples)?
Prejudices and fear of strangers have existed throughout history and are very evident in the animal world. Why did the Nazi kill? Why do we go to war? Why do the chimpanzees fight and go to war as depicted by Jane Goodall? Why does the Ku Klux Klan oppose non-white immigration? Why do children exclude some people into their in-group? Why are minorities so discriminated against by some majority groups? All of these and so many more examples can be explained by prejudice feelings. Sometimes they provide detailed answers and try to justify their reasons. But these are just ways of hiding their prejudices. Anytime there is an out-group and an in-group, there is some form of prejudices.
We plan to look at two groups who see the other as an out-group based on our own personal experience. We want to see if one group is more prejudice than the other is and if it decreases with knowledge about the ìotherî.
3. Materials and Methods
a. What is your experimental design? Is it statistically sound? What types of data analysis will you do?
To accomplish our goals, we had to devise some type of survey that would give us some empirical data. With the Western campus survey, we asked questions that dealt with Main campus. For the Main campus survey, we used the same questions and switched the words Main campus with Western campus. And for the Architects, we asked questions dealing with both Main and Western campuses. We have attached a copy of all three surveys at the end of this paper.
b. Describe important materials and how they will be used.
We will use our surveys and people of various class standings and of various majors. The
data we get back should enable us to see if our hypothesis was accurate and with research, why the results were the way they were.
c. Describe other methods. How will you involve the class in your study?
We would like to involve the class by handing out the surveys and getting their feedback on our progress and direction of our focus. Also, we want them to fill them out as Western students of various standings.
d. Who is your survey audience? How many surveys will you distribute and why?
Our target survey audience is Western and Main Campus students and also Architect students. We will also try to get data from younger students as well as older ones. To do this, we may have to go to a freshman dorm and pass out surveys. To get results that are somewhat scientific, we are going to try to get as close to a hundred filled out for every survey.
e. Include a specific time-line of research execution.
Week 9: Begin getting surveys ready and printed, Post a progress report
Week 10: Beginning surveying people, do more research in books
Week 11(3/27 ñ 3/31): Post a progress report, Continue surveying
Week 12: Continue with surveying, continue with books
Week 13: Post a progress report, Begin analyzing data
Week 14: Analyze our results, Begin final write up
Week 15(4/24 ñ 4/28): Final write up
Week 16: Post final results and paper
4. Results
Our result from our surveys was as follows. We surveyed a total of 113 Western, Architecture, and Main campus students. This number was then further subdivided into class standing. See figure I for the number of students from each class standing in each group. We then tallied the survey results for each question. Our results from the tabulation of the answers can be seen on figures II, II, IV, V, and VI. After our results were recorded into graph form, we checked our results using the Chi-Square test. The Chi-Square test is a test that gives validity to data results. A value that is .05 or lower is considered to be significant and a value above .05 is considered to be not significant. After the test was performed, we found that none of our data could be considered significant. The lowest p value that we had was .1637 for the data from figure VI. Therefore, none of our results we calculated could be deemed significant. Our results can be attributed to chance. It was due to chance that the students answered the surveys the way they did so we are unable to conclude that these are the feelings held across campus.
5. Discussion & Conclusions
a. Interpret your results, explaining why you got the results you did.
Judging from our results, we found that some of our hypothesis was right while some was not. Main campus did seem to show a decline in negative attitudes, but did not show a rise in positive attitudes to match this. We had predicted that the negative attitudes would decline and positive would increase as their standing increased. The p-value we got for this group was .2592, therefore it was not significant data. We feel that this can be explained by the simple fact of not having a large enough sample group. Although it was very difficult to collect the number of surveys that we did, there simply were not enough to accurately reflect the general attitudes of Main campus. This same scenario also happened when we calculated the p-values for our Western data. The lowest p-value that we got was .1656. And while this p-value shows a trend towards more significance, it still not even close to the .05 cut off. One again, we feel that a larger sample group was needed to make our data having a lower p-value.
Prejudice can take many forms. It is not always due to ethnic differences. As in the case on Miamiís campus, it seems to be due to different groups of people with different lifestyles. It is undeniable that Western and Main campus students have different lifestyles and different views on life. One of the questions that we asked Western students was to what groups of students do they most identifying with. None of the Western students who filled out a survey identified with Main campus. Also, when asked with which group they identify with, all the Main campus people that were surveyed answered that they identified with main campus only. This should not be surprising data because most people are more inclined to associate with people who they live and converse with.
Judging from the results of our project, we have some questions that did not get answered. What is the level of prejudice on this campus? Is it an issue that worth trying to fix? And how much does it affect people at this school? To find these answers, much more intensive research needs to be done. A much, much larger data range needs to be collected from each part of this campus to get an accurate reflection on the feelings of the universityís students. That is a problem that we had with our project. We realistically could not get enough surveys filled out to get an accurate reflection of attitudes towards differing groups of people. Also, our questions needed to be more to the point and focused. We feel that if we had to do this project over again, and knowing what we know now, that we would be much better off. Some of our questions were very relevant to our hypothesis, but many were not. This became evident when trying to correlate our data into words. They went along with our hypothesis very vaguely in some cases, and in others they were right on. So to us, we needed to do several things to make this project better. First, we needed better thought out questions. Second, we needed a larger number of surveys filled out. And third, we needed to follow the scientific process a little better than we did.
For further investigation, we could definitely suggest some things to make it better. As stated above, better questions, more surveys filled out, and to follow the scientific process. It would also be very helpful if we had more manpower than we did. It was unrealistic of us to think that we could get a majority opinion on something such as prejudice with such a small minority of people surveyed from each group and class standing. Also, we feel that since this is such a touchy subject in peopleís minds, it was hard to get truthful results. Many people who were surveyed answered neither on several questions. This caused problems when trying to view our results and assess them. If we continued our investigation into this, we probably should take that option out of our surveys.
Overall, we both learned a lot about prejudice on this campus from the small groups that we did survey. Judging from our results, we can see that it does exist, and that it is more prevalent in the younger class standings on this campus. (Many people made interesting comments and side notes on their surveys.) There was also evidence from our results that the longer a person has been at school here, the less likely they are to hold prejudice against a specific group. We feel that if we could survey a majority of the people at this school, that our hypothesis would be found to be correct.

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