Prejudice in the Personality Formation Stage
A big part of our personality is shaped by the society and the people around us, and our prejudices are no different. According to most modern psychologists, people tend to migrate towards others like themselves, opposites don’t necessarily attract. Because we spend so much of our time with people like us, we may lose our ability to understand and relate to others. This develops into the “us vs. them” phenomenon which can be applied to everything from high school cliques to social, class, and racial divisions. It is here where the social roots of prejudice arise. We tend to be more accepting of people, ideas, and situations that fall into the ‘us’ category and more judging of those in the ‘them’ category. This kind of attitude just ends up dividing us further along with preexisting differences, and is exemplified with the “just-world” phenomenon. This is a notion that we have that there will always be people in the world more successful and better off than others, however, our world is still “just” and people’s choices determine their situation. So therefore those suffering must deserve it in some way. For example, a person might look at the higher percentage of lower-class African-Americans and think that they must be that way because they are lazy and think things should just come to them. In reality, they might be that way because they were born into a hard situation and not given the resources to get out of it.
While we may associate our emotions with our heart, the brain controls most of what we feel; the amygdala in particular controls our fear, anger, and the associations we make between them and the world around us. When we experience fear we often retreat into our “in-group”, and this can cause us to turn more strongly against the “out group.” According to Scapegoat Theory, when we experience anger we seek an outlet for it, often in the form of another person, group, or idea. It’s easier for us to handle bad situations when we have something else to lash out at.
Sometimes situations occur which are so emotionally stimulating that they cause both fear and anger in us, and hence the negative consequences of each. For example, one of the reasons why it was so easy for Hitler to turn the German people against the Jews during the Nazi regime in World War Two, was because the people were already suffering from the consequences of the first World War. The people of Germany were starving and poor, fearing for their future and bitter about their situation. When they were offered a target to blame, the Jews, they used them as a scapegoat for why the world was so unfair for them. This combination of fear and anger further divided the two races in Germany and caused the aggression that ultimately sparked the second World War.
Brainwork and Prejudice
Another factor of prejudice that pertains to the brain is our cognitive influences. We have two forms of processing: explicit, where we consciously make decisions and think, and implicit, in which our thoughts and behaviors may be unconsciously influenced by factors in our mind which we haven’t actively attributed them to. Oftentimes it is this implicit processing that unknowingly determines our prejudice. For example, our mind is better at distinguishing members of our own race than members of other races. This slight prejudice has caused many identifications in court cases, a huge problem in the justice system as it casts more doubt upon eyewitness testimony. Another way our mind tends to misidentify things lies in our ability to correctly remember events. We tend to remember more “intense” or “violent” events and forget about smaller ones, even if the smaller ones may outnumber the intense events. This is where the stereotype of “all muslims being terrorists’ ‘ may come into play.
Can We Control Prejudice
Prejudice may not ever completely go away, as much of it is out of our control, but instead the result of social, emotional, and cognitive influences. However, what we can control is how much attention we draw to it. Whether or not we can eliminate prejudice, we should still be able to admit that it exists and shapes the world around us.
