PREJUDICE ~

DISLIKING OTHERS
.
DEFINING PREJUDICE
Prejudice, stereotyping, discrimination, racism, sexism, xenophobia, ethnocentrism – terms
often overlap.
Prejudice involves a negative evaluation of a group. And that is the essence of prejudice: a
preconceived negative judgment of a group and its individual members.
Prejudice is an attitude. An attitude is a combination of feelings, actions and beliefs. It can be
easily remembered as ABC’s of attitudes: affect(feelings), behavior(actions), cognition (beliefs).
A prejudiced person may dislike those different from self and behave in a discriminatory
manner, believing them ignorant and dangerous.
Examples: Arabs are terrorists… muslim women are oppressed… Pakistani girls have to fight to
get education…
 STEREOTYPE
A belief about the personal attributes of a group
of people. To stereotype is to generalize. In
other words, stereotyping is belief that people of
a certain group, race or religion all have the
same characteristics when they don’t.

Stereotypes are sometimes overgeneralized,

inaccurate, and resistant to new information.
SOME EXAMPLES

To simplify the world, we generalize:

 The British are reserved.

 Americans are outgoing.
 Professors are absentminded.
 Pakistani’s politicians are insincere.
 Lahorians are overweight.
 Chinese are dishonest
About Stereotype

 Stereotyping generalizing can be more or less true (and are not always negative). Teachers
stereotypes of achievement difference in students from different gender, ethnic and class
backgrounds tend to mirror reality.

 An accurate stereotype may even be desirable. We call it “sensitivity to diversity” or “cultural

awareness in multicultural world”. To stereotype Pakistani’s not concerned about punctuality
than Americans is to understand what to expect and how to get along with others in each
culture.

 The problem arises with stereotypes when they are overgeneralized or just plain wrong.
Stereotyping that ‘Pakistan’s education is all about cramming’ contain a germ of truth but is
overblown.
PREJUDICE: SUBTLE &
OVERT
 Prejudice provides one of the best examples of our dual attitude system. We can have different
explicit (conscious) and implicit (automatic) attitudes toward the same target. Thus, we may
retain childhood dislike of person for whom we now express respect and admiration.

 Although explicit attitudes may change dramatically with education, implicit attitudes may
linger, changing only as we form new habits through practice.

 Examples: Mexicans are rapist and drug dealers… Indians can never be our friends…
Pashtuns violence against women…
RACIAL PREJUDICE
Prejudice of one race against another. It is diagnosed by the cataloguing of its various symptoms
and manifestations which include fear, intolerance, separation, segregation, discrimination, and
hatred. While all of these symptoms of racial prejudice may be manifest, the single underlying
cause of racial prejudice is ignorance.

Examples:
 Hitler’s racial prejudice against Jews (antiSemitism).
 Trump’s racial prejudice against Muslims & Mexicans (Islamophobia & Xenophobia).
 Whites racial prejudice against Blacks (Negro/Colored) in US.
GENDER PREJUDICE
 Gender stereotypes: women are organized and clean. Men are lazy and messy. Women
are better in raising children. Men cannot cook. Women have ‘clean jobs’ such as nurses and
secretaries. Men have ‘dirty jobs’ such as plumbers and construction worker.

 Sexism: Sexist remarks at workplace like ‘office mom’, ‘Did your wife baked the cake’.

 Gender discrimination: two-third of the world’s unschooled children are girls. People
tend to prefer having baby boys. Women being underpaid.
 SOURCES OF PREJUDICE

 Social sources
 Motivational sources
 Cognitive sources
SOCIAL SOURCE OF
PREJUDICE
 Social inequalities (social dominance orientation).
 Socialization (ethnocentrism learned from parents).
 Religious preachers (church members express more racial prejudice than nonmembers).
 Conformity (many people will not act so much out of need to hate as out of a need to be liked
and accepted).
 Institutional Support (right of women to vote, denied mortgages to unmarried women,
ahmadi’s out of electoral process of Pakistan).
MOTIVATIONAL SOURCES OF PREJUDICE
 Frustration and aggression (the scapegoat theory – displaced aggression, Americans and
Indians our responsible for our country’s state of affairs).
 Social identity theory (feeling superior to others – we seek not only respect for ourselves but
pride for our groups, feeling pride for being Urdu-speaking or being Rajpoot)

COGNITIVE SOURCES OF PREJUDICE

 Categorization (classifying people into group – ingroup & outgroup ‘us or them’, outgroup
homogeneity effect)
WHY IS PREJUDICE DANGER?
HOW TO REDUCE PREJUDICE?
POLICIES TO REDUCE PREJUDICE, RACISM,
DISCRIMINATION
 Educational workshops (training people to be empathetic towards other groups by imagining
themselves in the same situation)
 Group encounters
 Group contact: integrated housing, employment and education
 Societal strategies: social protest, information dissemination
 Authorities advocate equal rights (not like Trump but like Trudeau)
 Group cooperation to reach a common goal (ISI & RAW works together in movie: Tiger Abhi
Zinda Hai)
 Groups having opportunities to interact formally and informally