The psychology of prejudice
By Di Kamp (November 2004 Issue)
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Are you prejudiced? I hope so! We all assume that prejudice is a bad thing these days, yet we all have and need prejudices. What we mean when we talk about people who are prejudiced are those who have prejudices that cause them to discriminate unfairly against others for such reasons as gender, race, beliefs, disability and sexual orientation.
A prejudice is a belief that we have that drives our attitude and behaviour in specific contexts. This can be positive or negative in its effect on us and those around us, and the real purpose in exploring prejudices is to ensure that our own prejudices have a positive effect rather than a negative one.
So what we really want to do is to explore the nature of prejudice and establish how we develop our own particular brand. We then have a better idea of how to revise the prejudices of ourselves and others.
MEANINGS AND USEFULNESS
The word ‘prejudice’ means making a pre-judgement – that is, you have already made up your mind about something before encountering the individual or separate manifestation of it.
Without any prejudice, we would find it very hard to live our lives. We have prejudices about what is good to eat as opposed to poisonous, which magazines we like to read, what a suitable home is for us, and so on. These prejudices allow us to make decisions quickly and easily, and without them everyday life would be a slow and difficult process!
Some of these prejudices are accepted as being ‘right’ in our culture; some of them come from our particular upbringing, and some of them we develop for ourselves. What we rarely do is deliberately and consciously form a prejudice.
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