Prejudice
[1] The word is often used to refer to a preconceived (usually unfavourable) evaluation or classification of another person based on that person's perceived personal characteristics, such as political affiliation, sex, gender, gender identity, beliefs, values, social class, friendship, age, disability, religion, sexuality, race, ethnicity, language, nationality, culture, complexion, beauty, height, body weight, occupation, wealth, education, criminality, sport-team affiliation, music tastes or other perceived characteristics.
[2] The word "prejudice" can also refer to unfounded or pigeonholed beliefs[3][4] and it may apply to "any unreasonable attitude that is unusually resistant to rational influence".
[5] Gordon Allport defined prejudice as a "feeling, favorable or unfavorable, toward a person or thing, prior to, or not based on, actual experience".
He described authoritarians as "rigid thinkers who obeyed authority, saw the world as black and white, and enforced strict adherence to social rules and hierarchies".
According to Marilyn Brewer, prejudice "may develop not because outgroups are hated, but because positive emotions such as admiration, sympathy, and trust are reserved for the ingroup".
The ultimate attribution error occurs when ingroup members "(1) attribute negative outgroup behavior to dispositional causes (more than they would for identical ingroup behavior), and (2) attribute positive outgroup behavior to one or more of the following causes: (a) a fluke or exceptional case, (b) luck or special advantage, (c) high motivation and effort, and (d) situational factors"/[10] Young-Bruehl (1996) argued that prejudice cannot be treated in the singular; one should rather speak of different prejudices as characteristic of different character types.
The realistic conflict theory states that competition between limited resources leads to increased negative prejudices and discrimination.
In the Robber's Cave experiment,[16] negative prejudice and hostility was created between two summer camps after sports competitions for small prizes.
[17] It draws from and builds upon several other psychological explanations of prejudice and ingroup/outgroup behaviour, such as the realistic conflict theory and symbolic racism.
[19] Legitimizing myths, such as discriminatory hiring practices or biased merit norms, work to maintain these prejudiced hierarchies.
Bloom argues that this process of categorisation and prediction is necessary for survival and normal interaction, quoting William Hazlitt, who stated "Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way my across the room; nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life".
[23][24] This is due to concerns that the way prejudice has been operationalised does not fit its psychological definition and that it is often used to indicate a belief is faulty or unjustified without actually proving this to be the case.
[25][26] Some research has connected dark triad personality traits (Machiavellianism, grandiose narcissism, and psychopathy) with being more likely to hold racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, and transphobic views.
[29][30] For example, James J. Gibson, a founder of ecological psychology, believes that human evolutionary success is enhanced by the ability to analyze social costs and benefits so that humans can recognize and functionally respond to threats and opportunities, and that errors in judgment will be biased toward minimizing costs to reproductive fitness.
[31] In other words, human responses to social stimuli proceed from adaptations that motivate action in order to take advantage of opportunities and avoid or confront threats.
One problem with the notion that prejudice evolved because of a necessity to simplify social classifications because of limited brain capacity and at the same time can be mitigated through education is that the two contradict each other, the combination amounting to saying that the problem is a shortage of hardware and at the same time can be mitigated by stuffing even more software into the hardware one just said was overloaded with too much software.
[34] The distinction between men's hostility to outgroup men being based on dominance and aggression and women's hostility to outgroup men being based on fear of sexual coercion is criticized with reference to the historical example that Hitler and other male Nazis believed that intergroup sex was worse than murder and would destroy them permanently which they did not believe that war itself would, i.e. a view of outgroup male threat that evolutionary psychology considers to be a female view and not a male view.
A few commonplace examples of prejudice are those based on someone's race, gender, nationality, social status, sexual orientation, or religious affiliation, and controversies may arise from any given topic.
[citation needed] Transgender and non-binary people can be discriminated against because they identify with a gender that does not align with their assigned sex at birth.
[51] Due to what social psychologists call the vividness effect, a tendency to notice only certain distinctive characteristics, the majority population tends to draw conclusions like gays flaunt their sexuality.
Racism and other forms of prejudice can affect a person's behavior, thoughts, and feelings, and social psychologists strive to study these effects.
While various religions teach their members to be tolerant of those who are different and to have compassion, throughout history there have been wars, pogroms and other forms of violence motivated by hatred of religious groups.
[58] In the modern world, researchers in western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic countries have done various studies exploring the relationship between religion and prejudice; thus far, they have received mixed results.
[citation needed] In the mid-1980s, linguist Tove Skutnabb-Kangas captured this idea of discrimination based on language as the concept of linguicism.
This can manifest through assumption of 'disability' status to those who are high functioning enough to exist outside of diagnostic criteria, yet do not desire to (or are unable to) conform their behaviour to conventional patterns.
This has been most prominent in the case of high-functioning autism,[61] where direct cognitive benefits increasingly appear to come at the expense of social intelligence.
Recent advancements in behavioural genetics and neuroscience have made this a very relevant issue of discussion, with existing frameworks requiring significant overhaul to accommodate the strength of findings over the last decade.
[citation needed] Humans have an evolved propensity to think categorically about social groups, manifested in cognitive processes with broad implications for public and political endorsement of multicultural policy, according to psychologists Richard J.
[65] They postulated a cognitive-evolutionary account of human adaptation to social diversity that explains general resistance to multiculturalism, and offer a reorienting call for scholars and policy-makers who seek intervention-based solutions to the problem of prejudice.
[66][67] Academics Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp conducted a meta-analysis of 515 studies involving a quarter of a million participants in 38 nations to examine how intergroup contact reduces prejudice.
