Title: Causes of Prejudice | Encyclopedia.com
Headings: Causes of Prejudice
Causes of Prejudice
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Causes of Prejudice
WORDS TO KNOW
attitude:
bias:
discrimination:
emotion:
prejudice:
socialization:
What prejudice means
Stereotyping
Persistence of prejudice
Psychological explanations
A fear of diversity
Scapegoating
Sociological causes
Socialization
Discrimination and prejudice
Social status and ethnocentrism
Threats and fear
Immigration
Conformity
Economic competition
Political and religious causes
Rationalizing prejudice
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Content: Prejudices become locked in a person's thought processes. Changing or eliminating these attitudes is difficult, and in many cases impossible, even when the person is presented with new information about the targeted group. This is not only true of prejudice against people. The same rigid adherence to prejudice occurs in other kinds of bias, such as prejudice against certain kinds of video games, reading material, or geographic locations. A reason for this inflexibility is that people are prone to overgeneralize about the world around them when trying to categorize their observations. As a result, a prejudiced person thinks in terms of oversimplified images of groups. These generalized, oversimplified images are called stereotypes. The simplistic manner of viewing the world leads to the prejudice being considered "common sense." The prejudiced person likely will then accept only that information which confirms or supports his attitude, and ignore information that does not. Despite the misconceptions involved, prejudices in a person are frequently not considered abnormal thinking.