Abstract:

The ability to form prejudices can be very useful; it facilitates orientation in a complex life, protects against surprises, helps with decision-making and much more. Nevertheless, prejudices have a bad reputation because in certain situations they can harm the person being judged - especially if it is a negative prejudice. The damage can occur when people allow their prejudices to guide their actions towards others and display discriminatory behaviour.

Against this background, a teaching and research project is to be carried out in the ‘Human Resources Management’ lecture of the Bachelor's degree programme in Socioeconomics. For the experiment and its statistical evaluation, prejudices are operationalised as expectations correlating with a characteristic of a person that the performance of this person deviates from the average.

The following research questions are to be investigated:
- What prejudices exist among students (correlation between personal characteristics and expected performance)?
- To what extent are these prejudices justified (correlation between personal characteristics and actual performance)?
- Does the degree of prejudice depend on the personal characteristics of the person making the judgement?
- Is there a tendency to rate the performance of people who are similar to oneself more highly?
- Is the tendency to prejudice lower when two people know each other well?

As part of the ‘Human Resources’ lecture, students are informed that the lecture period of the following week is to be used for an experiment in which the material learnt up to that point in the semester is also repeated (reference to exam preparation). Approximately 120 students are expected to take part. On the day of the test, the incoming students will be randomly assigned to teams of two. All students will then receive so-called ‘clickers’, i.e. transmission devices. They are asked to answer a series of questions relating to their level of awareness and their own socio-demographic characteristics, such as gender, age, ethnic origin, financial circumstances, etc. They are then asked to assess the socio-demographic characteristics of the other person in the team.

In the next block of questions, all students are asked to answer ten multiple-choice questions, each with five answer options, on the teaching content of the previous weeks, with only one answer being correct in each case. In the last part of the experiment, the students are told that the participants have worked on the same questions as them in recent years and have answered an average of 3.5 questions correctly. Finally, the students are asked to give an estimate of the number of questions their team member answered correctly. This assessment and any discrepancy between it and the actual performance of the team member should allow conclusions to be drawn about the prevalence of prejudices. Finally, correlations with the socio-demographic characteristics of the study participants will provide information on the factors that favour the formation of prejudices.

Keywords:

Stereotypes, prejudices, discrimination, experiment.