Xolani Mazibuko xmazibuko16@gmail.com Xolani Mazibuko xmazibuko16@gmail.com A comprehensive view of South African race relations. A comprehensive view of South African race relations. Race relations in South africa
Social Psychology assignment 1
Race relations in South africa
Social Psychology assignment 1

Table of contents

Contents 1. Introduction: 2 2. The impact of Social cognition and schemas on race relations: 2 3. Role of attribution and attitudes in understanding race relations: 5 4. Impact of prejudice and discrimination on race relations: 7 5. Social influence: how it impacts race relations in South Africa 10 6. Conclusion: 11 Reference list: 12

1. Introduction:
When speaking of racial relations, one is …show more content…

A study was conducted in South Africa to investigate the link between schemas and race relations. People from the four different racial groups were asked to describe three things that came to mind regarding the other races. The results were rather interesting. The white individuals relatively thought that black people are more likely to be criminals, the coloured people were generally perceived as being aggressive and violent, and the Indian people were regarded as being passive, while the white people were seen as being highly educated and intelligent. (Harris, 2004).
The results obtained from the study show that individuals use schemas to make judgements about people, even if they do not necessarily know those people. In fact, the results proved that people generally tend to use a more simplistic way of drawing inferences about issues, in other words, they make use of heuristics. Heuristics serve as mental shortcuts aimed at reducing complex problem solving or decision making. Usually, when people are faced with a lot of information at once, they employ the use of heuristics to try and lesson the information overload. Therefore, a similar process happened with the participants during the investigation. They made inferences about about the other races based on very little information. (Harris, 2004).
The most commonly used heuristic by individuals is the representativeness heuristic. This refers to how individuals tend to make