Prejudice and Discrimination

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Prejudice and Discrimination

Prejudice is a preconceived opinion based on a lack of information. Prejudice is heavily influenced by stereotypes. When meeting a feminine child for the first time, one might assume she likes princesses or pink. Prejudice can exist in every setting starting from home, workplace, online class settings, and other areas. Prejudice is divided into two types: conscious and unconscious prejudice. One does not have to be conscious that they are prejudicing others to do so. Most motivational quotes available for students help us to understand various prejudices and offer ways to deal with them. 

Prejudice is a complex issue that has led to fights, enslavement, assault, voilence, murder, and untold suffering. Working with a psychologist or therapist can assist people in overcoming prejudice, understanding how prejudice impacts the people they are concerned about, and developing skills for dealing with the mental health repercussions of living in a prejudice-filled society.

Definition of prejudice 

Prejudice is frequently conflated with discrimination or oppressive forms such as racism and sexism. While discrimination and oppression are associated with powerful groups acting against the less powerful, prejudice can affect everyone.

Understanding prejudice

Prejudice can influence how we perceive others. Prejudice can lead to a person ignoring information that contradicts their beliefs. Confirmation bias is the term for this. A parent who believes males are tough and rowdy, for example, might interpret their son’s tears to anger rather than empathy or fear of a monster. Prejudice can impair relationships when it leads to erroneous or incomplete judgements about other individuals.

Bias can hinder client care in psychological health as well as other healthcare settings, even if the provider is ignorant of their own prejudice. Doctors, for example, are less inclined to take women’s discomfort seriously, according to study. They may assume that their female patients are exaggerating or faking their pain, or that they are overreacting to relatively modest pain. This can lead to incorrect diagnoses and even death.

Prejudiced beliefs about women, such as that they are overly “emotional,” that they take pain badly, or that they exaggerate their own agony, might influence how a doctor views a patient. The doctor may be hesitant to treat the patient or provide enough pain relief.

A doctor may mistakenly believe that someone in excruciating pain is an addict who is seeking painkillers. Many different groups can be biassed towards. It’s possible that a person’s prejudices aren’t even internally coherent. A person may believe, for example, that men are innately emotionless and susceptible to impulsive angry outbursts.

The forms of prejudice a person is likely to possess are influenced by social norms and cultural settings. For generations, racism has played a key role in American culture. As a result, it’s predictable that racist preconceptions towards persons of colour outnumber prejudices against whites. People are very less likely to say black people are intellectual than they are to say white people are intelligent, according to responses to the 2008 Survey. Prejudice is effectively countered through exposure. Persons who spend more time with people who are different from them have fewer prejudices. Multicultural encounters, for example, were proven to minimise cross-cultural prejudice in a 2017 study.

Discrimination definition

Prejudice is a mindset that can lead to aggressive behaviour. Discrimination is defined by most sociologists as an action or a set of acts. While the two notions are related, they are not identical.  

Discrimination can be caused by prejudice, but prejudice is not the only issue. A person can have preconceptions without discriminating, especially if they are aware of their prejudice and actively work to overcome it.

Discrimination might result from a biased notion that elderly are slow, unwell, or uninterested in learning new things. A person in charge of hiring at a company that values innovation, for example, may refuse to hire older staff. Their prejudiced view of seniors’ unwillingness to develop new skills may lead them to disregard evidence to the contrary on a résumé. This mindset can lead to systematic prejudice if it is used in numerous decisions. If ageist beliefs are allowed to influence recruiting, a corporation may eventually hire solely young people or abuse its older employees.

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