Prejudice In Psychology

Prejudice has become a major talking point in psychology in the last hundred years, primarily because of major world events such as the Holocaust in world war two, Apartheid in South Africa and segregation in many parts of the western world. Prejudice is a major source of misunderstanding and discrimination between different groups of people around the world, and has led to some of the largest and most inhumane acts committed in human history. However even when not looking at a global scale, prejudice is ubiquitous in everyday life and it could even be argued that prejudice is inevitable. For one, even in arbitrarily created groups, preference for ones’ own group emerges as well as the purposeful disadvantaging of another group occurs even …show more content…
(Aronson, Wilson, and Akert, 2010) A schema is a category that is created about as our minds way of storing information. Information from the outside world is added to our current schemas, either through direct observation or from what others describe, which can sometimes result in creating a stereotype. While prejudice is primarily an emotional response and is rarely based on logic, people primarily control their actions cognitively. Even when people actively disagree with a stereotype, priming them with the stereotype and or making them aware of a stereotype before making judgments on other, will affect even a low prejudiced person. A theory created Devine in 1989, suggests that stereotypes are the automatic processing of an individual, but in low prejudiced people, it is a judgment that is purposefully ignored. However, when an individual is distracted or primed, their initial implicit thought process becomes more apparent. In this aspect it can be seen that even when a person appears not to be prejudiced, or does not want to be prejudiced, it is a constant cognitive fight against their own mind, and one that everyone will lose occasionally. Another cognitive response to an individual’s own stereotypes, is to search for “proof” that their prejudice isn’t actually malicious or even wrong, it’s just an accurate representation of how out-group members around them actually …show more content…
Prejudice also appears to be inevitable, given that it appears at such a young age. In a study completed by Hamlin, Mahajan, Liberman and Wynn in 2013 it was found that babies as young as three months old preferred puppets with the same food taste as themselves and even preferred puppets who punished puppets with dissimilar food taste to themselves. However prejudice can be reduced by exposing individuals to members of their out-group in positive, controlled environments (Allport, 1954, as cited in Aronson, Wilson, and Akert, 2010), by helping them to imagine positive contact with a member of their out-group (Vezzali, Stathi, Crisp, Giovannini, Capozza and Gaertner, 2015) or even just by changing their perspective on whether they are part of a larger more encompassing group (Vezzali, Stathi, Crisp, Giovannini, Capozza and Gaertner, 2015): for example, instead of focusing on out-group differences between particular people, a third party emphasizes that they both belong within the same category, such as being on the same sports team, working in a business, working towards the same goal, etc. Prejudice may seem innate and therefore inevitable, however it can be postulated that with educational interventions and more chances for positive contact, perhaps it is just something to be overcome. Unfortunately in the present time, this seems at least logistically impossible. For either the contact or