Question

Prejudice has traditionally been assumed to be the product of some form of malice, brought about by social or emotional forces. In recent years; however, there has been increasing research on how prejudice can result from cognitive processes, without malicious intent. Discuss how and why cognitive processes can produce prejudice. Once stereotypes and prejudices are formed, how do they come to be self-perpetuating?

Answer 1

ABOUT PREJUDICE AND STEREOTYPE

PREJUDICE is a preconceived idea or preconception about certain things or area which is not based on reason or true experience.Whereas stereotype is a standard,conventional image about certain person or thing which can be both positive and negative.

HOW AND WHY COGNITIVE PROCESS CAN PRODUCE PREJUDICE

when we think of a person hard work to understand and to know the physical and biological environment man appears as an exploring and rational animal slipping heavily on his way and pulled back by insufficiencies but still faulty rational. The cognitive approach aims to understand that prejudice is a function of cognitive processes where stereotypic information about groups, captured in memory, is automatically starts and affects peoples judgements and conduct towards members of the target group.

The most important role in our cognitive process is human memory and it function the process of representing, betterment and encoding various information which are especially important for everyday interaction .Therefore this is utmost important for understanding how people store,heal and apply information about different other person and social groups.

HOW DO THEY SELF PERPETUATE

              Social life is hectic and intolerable. The individual has to handel this chaos and information overburden by various cognitive tools.”categorization” is said to be one of them, it is one of the cognitive tools by which with a minimum amount of information one can simplify the world in which they stay or live. But categorization can lead to undesired in the peoples perception of others for example expostulate is the basic mechanism in stereotype activation. Stereotype is defined as a mental representation or image of a specific social group about what the members of the group like ,their behavioural characteristics and so on. Activation of social category results in increase of related stereotype in memory.Stereotypic information is said to be the social information processing and supplies the observer with necessary information of social inferences .Prejudice is socially sensitive phenomenon and its utterance is a subject to factor like social desirability and in some countries legal charges and penalizing.

               They are self-perpetuating both stereotype and prejudice because they work or they are imposed by the capacities of individual human mind. Implicit and explicit prejudice are not related and implicit prejudice is an unavoidable consequences of stereotype knowledge and activation. To understand such mechanisim implicit and explicit methods developed within the cognitive approach is important .