Prejudice
Prejudice has been defined as an individual-level attitude towards groups and their members that creates or maintains hierarchical status relations between members'. It may apply to groups defined in terms of ethnicity, age, gender, sexual preference, body shape, etc. It carries the notion of 'prejudging' an individual based on perceived group characteristics. In view of prevailing norms against overt expression of prejudice, it generally occurs in more implicit or disguised forms. Discourse analyses reveal some of the ways in which implicit prejudice is expressed.
About
- Prejudice: an individual-level attittude (+ or -) towards groups and their members that creates or maintains hierarchical status relations between members'
- To be prejudiced: to 'prejudge' a person based on which group he is seen to belong to in terms of characteristics one associates with that group.
- Ethnic, national, religious, age, gender, sexual orientation, place of residence, musical preferences, body shape etc.
Process: social categorization into in-group and out-group + probable overestimation of intragroup similarity
Prejudice disguised
- Modern racism: many people are ambivalent; they want to see themselves as fair and unprejudiced, but they still harbour feelings of discomfort or worse towards certain groups.
- Measures of implicit attitudes
- Terror management theory: when one becomes consciously aware of one's own mortality, we seek to affirm our own worldview so as to supersede our own mortality.
- In general, prejudice may often be suppressed by prevailing norms and values, but expressed when stereotypes or other events provide justification.