Question

What is prejudice?

What are some of the major causes of prejudice?

Answer 1

Prejudice is negative attitude or feelings about a particular group or people. Prejudices can often take the form of discrimination, which means behaving in an intolerant, unfair way towards a group of people. The development of prejudice can often happen through stereotypes.

Major Causes

​Stereotypes : Stereotypes are beliefs of people based on their belongingness to a certain group. Stereotypes may be positive or negative in nature, and they can be based on race, age sex, nationality etc.

For Example. Men have the stereotype in the society of being strong, and are expected to not be overly emotional, caring or empathetic..

Stereotypes are hard to break, as when people encounter a behavior which does not fall in line with the stereotype they hold about a certain group, they think that that behavior is an exception. This causes the prejudices to stay in place.

Social learning: Social learning theory says that we learn behaviors through observing others. This social learning can happen in childhood when parents or elders may show prejudice towards a group which the children also learn.

Ingroup - Outgroup - The robbers cave experiment by Muzafer Sherif had shed light on how we identify ourselves with the group we belong to. People have higher opinion towards their own group and may have prejudices towards the outgroup.