Paul Bloom: Can Prejudice Ever Be A Good Thing?

Writing Assignment – Paul Bloom: Can prejudice ever be a good thing? To feel scared when a black man is running up behind you, to be hesitant to hire or date an obese person, to be aggressive towards Muslims solely because of the attacks on 9/11 is to be prejudiced. Prejudice means “prejudgment”, an unjustifiable and usually negative attitude toward a group – often a different cultural, ethnic, or gender group. Prejudice is a three-part combination of stereotypes, emotions, and predispositions. It is from Latin praejudicium, breaking it down “prae” meaning in advance and “judicium” meaning judgment. Prejudice can be defined as many things; a preconceived opinion that is not based on reason; dislike, hostility, harm or injury from a judgment. I was taught at a very young age, “to never judge a book by its cover,” meaning you should not form an opinion on someone or something based purely on what is seen on the surface. My biological mother is white and my biological father is black, being the complexion I am, I have not only experienced racism but prejudice in a form I, to this day, cannot describe. Something as simple as walking in a grocery store and saying, “mom,” starts the turned heads, confused, shocked, disgusted looks. In the book it even states that, “Despite increased verbal support for interracial marriage, many people admit that in socially intimate settings they would feel uncomfortable with someone of another …show more content…
He is a zealous teacher of undergraduates, many of his projects are student-initiated, and all of them, he mentions, are “strongly interdisciplinary, bringing in theory and research from areas such as cognitive, social, and developmental psychology, evolutionary theory, linguistics, theology and philosophy.” In this TED Talk, it is obviously derived from social psychology but we often think of bias and prejudice as rooted in