The Psychology Of Prejudice: Ingroup Love And Intergroup Hate?

Sociology as a study is one thing, but to really gain an understanding, you need to see it for your own eyes in action. So to study these sociological concepts, I observed student and faculty in the college cafeteria. Although nothing really surprised me, everything I saw correlated with my notes almost perfectly; thats what surprised me the most.

The cafeteria is a great place to study the socialization of groups. As mentioned previously, much of what I saw in the cafeteria correlated with my notes very well, but something that stood out to me was role conflict. Role conflict is a situation when one or more of an individual’s roles clash. According to “sociology.about.com,” role conflict can take several different forms. When the roles are

associated with two different statuses, the result is known as status strain. When the conflicting roles are both associated with the same status, the result is known as role strain(Crossman, 2016). So for example, a student appeared to be having an informative conversation with his professor, when all of a sudden one of his friends tapped him on his shoulder letting him know that he and the rest of the group will be sitting at the table on the other side of the room. Although the student continued to have the conversation with his professor, the student seemed speed to conversation up to let the professor eat his lunch, but more importantly to the student, to get to his friends. The conflict in the situation was the student had two roles that intertwined at a specific moment. The role of being student, and the role of being a friend.
Also while in the cafeteria, I noticed something else that I always saw but never knew how well it fit into a topic in sociology.

The groups in the cafeteria were strangely organized. There were two real types of groups. Using sociological terms, there are in-groups, and there are out-groups. In-groups and out-groups are those groups which individuals tend to join as a result of social interactions. an in-group is a social group to which a person physiologically identifies as being a member. By contrast, an out-group is a social group with which an individual does not identify. In The Psychology of Prejudice: Ingroup Love and Outgroup Hate?, by Marilynn B. Brewer, “that attachment to one's ingroups does not necessarily require hostility toward outgroups. Yet the prevailing approach to the study of ethnocentrism, ingroup bias, and prejudice presumes that ingroup love and outgroup hate are reciprocally related (Brewer, 1999).” In other word, an in-group does not associate with an out-group because they do not like the out-group, but because there is a bias to those in the in-group. For example if you compare the two ends of the cafeteria, the student life zone is full of in-groups where everyone is always moving, yet the other end of the cafeteria has kids studying with their piers, yet does not associated themselves with other groups most of the

time.
The location of where I sat down was important to my research because I sat with my friends from class, and right next to where student buy lunch.

While we sat down, some of my friends asked the professor if it was okay to buy something while they were working. Of course it was, but why did they feel the urge to buy something. My question was could it be sociological? Of course it fit into my notes perfectly. When someone enters the cafeteria, consumerism is something that goes through the minds of the student. Consumerism is when you almost need to consume something for a specific reason. According to Colin Campbell’s definition in his book, Elusive Consumption, consumerism is “a social condition that occurs when consumption is “especially important if not actually central” to most people’s lives, and even “the very purpose of existence.” When this occurs, we are bound together in society by how we channel our wants, needs, desires, longings, and pursuit of emotional fulfillment into consumption of goods and services(Campbell, 2016).” My friends felt like they needed to eat something, because they were in the cafeteria, yet in my opinion I don’t believe that they would feel this urge if we remained in

class.
Lastly I noticed that in between each group there was almost like a ranking system between each member. In sociological terms there was a status set in between each member. Status is the responsibilities and benefits that a person experiences according to his or her rank and role in society. R. Linton (1936) defined status simply as a position in a social system, such as child or parent. Status refers to what a person is, whereas the closely linked notion of role refers to the behavior expected of people in a status, in The Study of Man. So in my study in the cafeteria, I observed a difference between faculty, professors, and students. Each member could identify their role, and the roles of others in society clearly, and functioned better because of it. This is called, “Taking the role of the other.”
Overall my studies were fascinating in the cafeteria. Nothing really surprised me regarding how people acted in the cafeteria, but how society fit so well into my notes was the breaking moment in my research. Its amazing how society work so well.