TOWARD SPECIFIC GROUPS
Reducing Prejudice toward Specific Groups
Prejudice can be defined as a phenomenon when a person makes a judgment toward another person or a group of people about their personal characteristics with no reliable experience. This unreasonable judgment may be based belonging to gender, age, race or nationality, political opinion, religion, beliefs, etc. The prejudice can be rendered innocuous by avoiding negative stereotypes and giving a respect to other cultures’ features.
According to the article ‘Why we hate’ (Monteith & Winters, 2002), Harvard scientists’ research shows that even people that claim that they have no prejudgments actually have the hidden prejudice if they support Arabs’ ethnic profiling. In my opinion, every person was prejudiced during his or her life quite more than once, because having the bias is like an instinct in humans as every person seems to divide himself or herself (and similar to his or her people) into groups. There are two famous school experiments mentioned in the article which have shown to the public that it is quite easy to turn one group against another (Monteith & Winters, 2002). And the main tools in the prevention of the prejudice are self-control, being aware and getting rid of dangerous myths and stereotypes.
In the article ‘Why we hate’ there is an extensive material about the discrimination of Muslims by Caucasians in the multinational countries (Monteith & Winters, 2002). This phenomenon takes place in today’s world because of people’s fear toward Arab terrorists, because there are too many terrible consequences of their actions. Therefore, we involuntarily make prejudgments toward people who have different features. Luckily, new researches ascertain that the moment when we become acknowledged about our unfair behavior can change our attitude in a better way (Monteith & Winters, 2002).
References
Monteith, M. & Winters, J. (May/June 2002). Why we hate. Psychology Today, pp. 44-50.
