Take Away Beliefs

Jonathan Rauch, while making it obvious that prejudice is one of the worst things about society today, he explains that it lies within us all. It is in fact, inherent. To believe that someone is prejudice, means you’re prejudice. There’s no escaping it. He starts off his piece by addressing

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.

Prejudice is “an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge” (Merriam); according to Lystra Moore Richardson of Yale University: “prejudice… was part of the very fiber of Southern life [during the Great Depression].” With these two pieces of information, it is derived that people formed judgments and opinions of a person without just

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

According to the psychologist, Richard Brislin, there are four reason why prejudice is widespread. People hold certain prejudice because 1, they can read to reward. 2, do not want to believe unpleasant things about themselves. 3, they serve to reinforce aspects of life that are highly valued. 4, such attitudes allow them to organize and structure their world in a way that make sense to them. All of them can be applied to the

Prejudices are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.

Often our prejudices are based on their colour, religion, gender, age. “Prejudice is a part of life and there is nothing we can do to change it”. This quote is only half true, true in the first half ‘prejudice is a part of life’ but wrong in saying ‘there is nothing we can do to change it’. We may not be able to stop people from being pre-judged, but there is always a way to make people look and think about things from a different perspective. One person can change another person’s judgement. People in a position of power often abuse it.

A mistake often made from those suffering from the effects of the prejudice, is to condemn people out of hand just for having the prejudice, when surely what matters is whether people act on their prejudices or whether they learn about them and fight them.

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.

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible. (Maya Angelou) By definition prejudice is a preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience. Prejudice to others is hate, judgement, and evil. The effects of prejudice are shown in the novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, the play The Merchant of Venice, and the tragedy known as the Holocaust. Prejudice affected all people differently, but one thing is true for all; prejudice is crippling and disables those who experience it from being who they truly are and doing as they please.

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.

Prejudice is a topic of interest to social psychologists and society as a whole. Prejudice can be defined as ‘an attitude that predisposes a person to think, feel, perceive and act in a favourable or unfavourable way towards a group or its individual members’ (Secord and Backman, 1974, p). Prejudice is often the cause of negative behaviour such as bullying and aggression. Discrimination such as; racism, ageism, sexism, nationalism, classism may occur as a result. Jane Elliot’s study: A Class Divided (1968) attempts to highlight prejudicial behaviour in children. Elliot divided her class into groups of eye colour. She told the children that blue eye colour defined people to be more intelligent and superior to those with brown eyes.

In this paper I will discuss what happens when we allow biases and prejudice to affect our actions toward others. I will then conclude my paper with what we can do to prevent or eliminate discrimination.

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.

Body Paragraph 1: I. Prejudice develops early within people, as children are the most likely to begin developing ideas based on what they are exposes to. Children