Essay On Prejudice And Discrimination

Decent Essays
Prejudice and discrimination together can contribute to undesirable and harmful social behaviors for many people across the world. Prejudice refers to the act of prejudging something negatively or arriving at an unfavorable conclusion before we 've had a chance to evaluate all of the evidence. Furthermore, discrimination is taking those negative attributions and additionally behaving negative.y towards others or a specific out-group. There are many things such as stereotyping, adaptive conservatism, out-group homogeneity, the scapegoat hypothesis, the just-world hypothesis, and conformity that contribute to prejudice and discrimination. There are also ways to help reduce it such as jigsaw classrooms and encouraging people to work together to reach a goal.
Stereotyping is one way we create prejudices individually. It refers to a positive or negative believe about a groups characteristics that we attribute to most or all members of that group. Humans are cognitive misers and want to simplify the world around us in order to save mental energy.
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People discriminate all the time in the real world. It wasn 't until the concept of blind auditions were brought into major American orchestras that far fewer women than men are a members of the orchestras.
The scapegoat hypothesis is our tendency of blaming others for our misfortunes. An example is that when unemployment rises in European countries, so does hatred for immigrants. People believe that immigrants are taking the jobs and are the reason for these increasing unemployment rates. Another hypothesis is the Just-world hypothesis. It is where we perceive the world as fair for everyone and that things happen for a reason, such as when someone has skin cancer we say they shouldn 't have been out in the sun so much and they wouldn 't have it. This is referred to as “blaming the

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