Automatic Preference Research Paper

It is evident that our world is not perfect and that people are biased, and not everyone gets treated equally, but that is part of life, which everyone knows to be unfair and there is nothing anyone can do to change that. Over the past few decades we have become more diverse but some people will always be favored more than others. Maybe if the current minority groups become the majority, and the majority becomes the minority, things might be the other way around.

In today’s society, we face prejudice every day in many forms. Most people in today’s society have either been victims of prejudice or are guilty of exhibiting prejudice towards others.

Prior to taking this course, I was taught, and therefore was under the impression, that prejudice is a preconceived notion about a group and that racism is essentially the same thing, except that racism also encompasses the idea that the group is lesser. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva states that “for most whites, racism is prejudice; for most people of color, racism is systemic or institutionalized” (Bonilla-Silva, 2010). Quotes like this force me to reflect, both on how I see myself and how others see me. Reading that quote, I felt like I related more to ‘most whites’ because I believed that racism was essentially prejudice for so long. I remember once while doing a cross the line activity, I hesitated before moving when the facilitator said “step forward if you are a person on color.” Technically, yes, my skin is pigmented in a way that would qualify me as a person of color but there is a connotation with that phrase that I felt didn’t relate to me. My first reaction to that phrase is the thought of someone who has struggled, someone who faces racism on a regular basis, someone who is treated differently because of the color of their skin. In my opinion, the more others acknowledge a part of your identity, the more apparent that part of your identity is to you, and I don’t often feel that people acknowledge my identity as an Asian American. I’ve been called a coconut more times than I can count. Brown on the outside but white on the inside. Sure I look brown, but I don’t ‘act

There are different levels of discrimination and often times, most people do not realize they are prejudiced. “While most people want to be fair, we can’t help but have preconceived notions”. This quote just shows how some people are raised to either dehumanize or respect a person more because of their race or background. Just like any other learned behavior, prejudice is integrated into the lives of many and plays a huge role in society. Stereotypes and personal experiences strongly contribute to the unintentional actions a person gives off towards a certain type of person or group.

People are not born prejudiced. “It is something that is learned". It can be learned in the same way other attitudes and values are learned, primarily through association, reinforcement and modeling. For example, children may learn to associate a particular ethnic group with poverty, crime, violence and other negative things” (2006 Anti-Defamation League). Also, prejudice in “children may be reinforced by listening to derogatory ethnic jokes, especially when others laugh along or think they're cool”. Lastly, children may simply imitate the prejudices of their older family members and popular friends. Prejudice is to pre- judge. “Prejudice is a baseless and usually negative attitude toward members of a group. Common features of prejudice

The ease of modern technology that lets people communicate globally, the access to extraordinary mobility, and the well roundedness of people today has produced the biggest population in history that prides itself in being egalitarian and fair-minded. Psychologists have found evidence in recent studies that, although people are not as outwardly racist and discriminatory as they were in the past centuries, there is an underlying bias that can lead people to act in ways opposing their beliefs. In their book Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good people, psychologists Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald explore the ideas of unconscious identity, the judgment and treatment of others based on stereotypes and the phenomenon of association, and our inability to simply stop being biased as opposed to outsmarting it.

Prejudice is a huge factor in how people treat others. “After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, rumors spread, fueled by race prejudice, of a plot among Japanese-Americans to sabotage the war effort” (history.com). When fear causes rumors to spread, prejudice is allowed to run free;however, not all people allow prejudice get in the way of their

The definition of prejudice may vary among the different psychologist but most will agree that prejudice has something to do with prejudgment, typically negative, about a group. (Fiskie, 1998; Jones, 1997; Nelson, 2002 ). According to Plous (2003), Prejudice is not exactly considered an opinion, but an attitude which includes feeling such as hating the group, rather than believing they’re bad. Within psychology, we can link prejudice with discrimination and stereotyping (Plous, 2003). Although each may go together, they can be done separately. Prejudice and discrimination are most likely absent in a positive stereo type (Plous, 2013). For example describing an ethnic group as “family oriented”. Stereo typing does little to no harm without discrimination or prejudice. A generalized form of prejudice may lack discrimination and stereo types, such as being against foreigners.

In recent years, our views of diverse races have gone from being particular, to being

In this modern world, prejudice is still a universal problem we still have yet to overcome. Although it is true that our society is much less prejudiced than it was 40-50 years ago, we are still struggling to create racial harmony in a world that is so diverse in terms of racial group, sexual orientations, ethnicity, nationality, religions, and so on. I think the core of prejudice comes from stereotyping, which is the generalization of motives, characteristics, or behavior to an entire group of people. In the world where media propaganda is ubiquitous, often times most stereotypes are not formed on valid experiences, instead they are based on images publicized by the mass media, or even created within our heads after seeing and hearing examples from many different sources, like movies, or even hearsay. Stereotyping is more powerful than we think, because it allows those false pictures to control our thinking that leads us to assign uniform characteristics to any person in a group, without consideration of the actual difference between members of that particular group.

When that happens then the words prejudice can be thrown around.As mentioned before, Is racism/prejudice psychological? The process of racism and prejudice has tendencies to arrange our experience in accordance to race into central and universal human brain processes.An article I read from “The Social Psychology of Cultural Diversity: Social Prejudice, Stereotyping and Discrimination written by Wright and Taylor,", says that “We create concepts in order to make sense of the endless complexity we encounter in our environment. This is a necessary part of human thought, allowing us to process information efficiently and quickly”(Wright). This means that if we did not create categories our lives and minds would be in a massive confusion. Also,in social groups we sort people into categories. People also uncontrollably distinguish members from their group are apart of from people who aren 't in their group. Additionally, people tend to evaluate people from other groups more negatively than people in their groups. This way, social groups easily give into stereotypes generally and to negative stereotypes in particularly. Because our world is filled with diversities and ethnicities we need to learn ways to reduce racism.

Sometimes we as people are prejudice without even thinking about it or thinking that we

Sociologist Robert K. Merton identified 4 combinations of prejudice, a negative attitude based on faulty generalizations about members of specific racial, ethnic or other groups, and discrimination, actions or practices of dominant group members (or their representatives) that have a harmful effect on members of a subordinate group. His 4 combinations are unprejudiced nondiscriminators, unprejudiced discriminators, prejudiced nondiscriminators, and prejudiced discriminators. I believe that the prejudiced nondiscriminator is the most common type of group found in our society. Most people have some form of prejudice, known as hidden biases, even the ones that state that they treat everyone equally. These prejudices can be passed down from

- To be honest I don’t believe that any form of prejudice seems to be declining. I’ve been saying this all the time that humans judge those who they cannot understand and humans hate those who they cannot control. Rather than any forms of prejudice declining, all the forms seem to be increasing. One reason why prejudice is increasing is because of Donald Trump, not only does he judge people because of the color of their skin but their religious, sex, class, nationalism, and the LGBT community. The moment Donald Trump shared to the American people his view and his opinion on mostly all of the people who are apart of America, everyone started to voice their hatred for each other. The American people are letting their fears, non-understanding, judgmental, and hatred for people blind them from seeing no matter what race, religious, sex, or class we are in, in the words of Tupac “we all bleed from similar veins” it seems most of us has forgotten how we are all similar because we are humans. I guess it’s like Tupac said “fear is stronger than love” because right now the American people are allowing Donald Trump to divide us rather than keeping us together as

I have no doubt in my mind I contain a small bias against people of different ethnic backgrounds. This is something that I am trying very hard not to obtain but just like Allan G. Johnson mentioned in Power, Privilege, and the Difference, we are ultimately scared of the unknown, and because the unknown scares us, we form a bias against them in order for us to explain a reason that we are scared.