What is a prejudice? Theories that explain it, and examples

In general, when it comes to prejudices, everyone agrees that they are negative and that it is wrong to have them.

Whether due to social pressure or greater sensitivity and empathy towards other people, most of the Society agrees that prejudging others is not okay, and that an effort should be made to try to overcome them.

However, we do not realize that everyone has them and that, in one way or another, prejudices, which is what we are going to talk about in this article, play a role.

Let's see what prejudices are, how they originate, what function they fulfill and some relevant theories on the subject.

• Recommended article: "Horn effect: this is how our negative prejudices work"

What are prejudices?

Prejudices are predetermined beliefs about a person, object or situation. These beliefs may be true, although, in most cases, this is not usually the case, as well as being highly exaggerated. Assume what a person is like based on different characteristics, such as their sex, race, nationality or sexual orientation, is something that occurs unconsciously and, as a rule, involves feelings and attitudes negative.

One of the most remarkable figures within the Social psychology who has addressed the phenomenon of prejudice has been Gordon allport. This psychologist, who worked at Harvard University, defines prejudice in The nature of Prejudice (1954) as the negative labeling that is made in based on beliefs acquired through important people and situations in the development of the individual, especially during childhood and through family.

The functionality of prejudices is that they allow, in a certain way, to simplify the world. We are exposed to a large amount of information and we are required to make decisions quickly, without allowing ourselves to reflect on it. Categorizing people based on their most striking features, instead of delving into what they really are, avoids fatigue and saves effort.

How are they generated?

Prejudice can arise out of convenience. In the most serious cases, prejudging is aimed at the submission of a specific group. They commonly originate from negative attitudes towards a group of which there is little real knowledge.

It can also be the result of a generalization based on past negative experience. That is, the person who has a stereotypical view of, for example, Romanians, can defend it due to the fact of having been robbed in the past by one of this nationality.

Cultural factors take on a great weight in the generation of prejudices. It is common in the family or in a specific culture to promote wrong comments and beliefs about certain people, which can be seen as ‘correct’ or that could be included within the expression of ‘think badly and you will be right. ' In addition, almost by inertia, criticizing others is encouraged rather than taking an empathic view and trying to put oneself in the place of the other.

How do they influence us?

Prejudices, based on stereotypesThey are nothing more than generalizations about something that is not well known. In this way, the world is simplified, even if it is done in a way that can be very wrong and cause harm to others.

Prejudices do not only affect people who are part of the stereotypical collective, such as women from sexism or refugees from anti-immigration movements. They also influence those people who are not part of the stereotyped collective, causing them to express themselves in a more hostile or cautious way when they see people from the other group.

So that, biases tend to foster negative biasesAlthough, as we have already commented before, there may also be situations in which there is a false but positive belief about a certain group. For example, suppose that all Finnish people are very smart because Finland has one of the best educational systems in the world is, in effect, prejudging, and may involve overvaluing their intelligence.

Although many people say otherwise, prejudice significantly interferes with our daily lives. They involve a multitude of attitudes, thoughts, predispositions and feelings that can make us change our behavior in a striking way. For example, changing the sidewalk when a black person is approaching us, speaking slower to a person who has an unusual or foreign sounding name or not to touch a person with HIV for fear of contagion or disgust.

Theories about this phenomenon

When we speak of prejudices, we cannot ignore the concepts of exogroup homogeneity and endogroup heterogeneity.. It is common the belief that people who are from another group are more similar to each other, while people from the own group are more distinguishable from each other.

This phenomenon can be better understood with an example. A Christian may have the wrong belief that all Muslim people are violent and abuse women and children, while when talking about the problem of pedophilia in the Catholic Church it has a greater tendency to differentiate between good and bad Christians Christians.

The Robber’s Cave Experiment, by Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif (1954)

In this experiment, more than 20 11-year-olds were taken and signed up to go camping. The children were divided into two groups and stayed in camps that were far apart to avoid any initial contact between the two groups.

After a few days, the researchers brought the groups into contact through sports competitions and other activities in which they faced each other group against group. These contacts generated friction, making both groups hostile to the other.

This hostility was so high that the Sheriffs had to accelerate the last phase of the investigation., in which they encouraged contact between the members of both groups making, to achieve some goals, they had to collaborate as if they were a single team.

In the same way that the researchers had generated tensions between both groups, they also generated friendships and sympathies with the last arrival phase, demonstrating that if people who do not know each other much collaborate to benefit each other, the barrier of stereotypes.

Contact hypothesis: can prejudice be reduced?

Without a doubt, having negative beliefs of others is something bad and that can generate damage, for that reason, the Trying to overcome these stereotypes is beneficial both for those who believe them and for those who are victims of they.

The contact hypothesis holds that the prejudices and stereotypes held by the people of the ingroup with respect to the outgroup could be reduced through continuous contact between members of both groups. For this to happen, six factors must be met:

• that the members of both groups have a certain degree of mutual interdependence
• the two groups need to share the same goal
• must have the same status
• opportunities should be provided for interpersonal contact between groups
• there must be many contacts both within and between groups
• There must be rules that promote equality, and they must be taken into account during the process.

Thus, if these conditions were met, people belonging to two groups could learn one of the others, cooperate together to achieve the same objectives and understand that they are not as different as they could think.

The aspect of having the same social status is very important, since it facilitates greater empathy. For example, a white worker and a black worker understand that both can be equally oppressed by their respective bosses or that cisexual women and transgender women are oppressed by society heteropatriarchal.

Bibliographic references:

• MacRae, C. Neil; Bodenhausen, Galen V. (2001). "Social cognition: Categorical person perception". British Journal of Psychology. 92 (Pt 1): 239–55. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.318.4390. doi: 10.1348 / 000712601162059
• Sherman, Jeffrey W.; Lee, Angela Y.; Bessenoff, Gayle R.; Frost, Leigh A. (1998). Stereotype efficiency reconsidered: Encoding flexibility under cognitive load. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 75 (3): 589–606. doi: 10.1037 / 0022-3514.75.3.589
• Brandt, M; Crawford, J (2016). Answering Unresolved Questions About the Relationship Between Cognitive Ability and Prejudice. Social Psychological and Personality Science. 7 (8): 884–892. doi: 10.1177 / 1948550616660592