Chapter Introduction

CHAPTER 10

Understanding Prejudice, Stereotyping, and Discrimination

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TOPIC OVERVIEW

  • The Nature of Prejudice: Pervasiveness and Perspective

  • The Roots of Prejudice: Three Basic Causes

    Hostile Feelings Linked to a Category

    Ingroup Bias: We Like Us Better Than Them

    Ethnocentrism, the Cultural Worldview, and Threat

  • Is Prejudice an Ugly Thing of the Past?

  • SOCIAL PSYCH OUT IN THE WORLD
    Do Americans Live in a Postracial World?

    Theories of Modern Prejudice

    Implicit Prejudice

  • Stereotyping: The Cognitive Companion of Prejudice

    Where Do People’s Stereotypic Beliefs Come From?

  • SOCIAL PSYCH AT THE MOVIES
    Gender Stereotypes in Animated Films, Then and Now

    Why Do We Apply Stereotypes?

    How Do Stereotypes Come Into Play?

    How Do Stereotypes Contribute to Bias?

The most persistent sound which reverberates through man’s history is the beating of war drums. Tribal wars, religious wars, civil wars, dynastic wars, national wars, revolutionary wars, colonial wars, wars of conquest and of liberation, wars to prevent and to end all wars, follow each other in a chain of compulsive repetitiveness as far as man can remember his past, and there is every reason to believe that the chain will extend into the future.

The 1994 genocide of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda is one of many tragic examples of prejudice in its most extreme form.

—Arthur Koestler, Janus: A summing up (1978, pp. 2–3)

In the last three chapters, we have emphasized what social beings we humans are. We live in families, tribes, and cultures. Our groups help us survive and provide our lives with structure. They give us bases of self-worth and imbue life with meaning and purpose. All of this is great stuff. But one major problem is inherent in living within groups: It separates us from other human beings who live within other groups. Prejudice is the all-too-common consequence of this distinction between us (the ingroup) and them (the outgroup). Virtually every known culture has been hostile to members of some other culture or oppressed certain segments of its society.

Indeed, recorded history is riddled with the bloody consequences of a seemingly endless parade of oppression, persecution, colonization, crusades, wars, and genocides. And archeological evidence suggests these problems plagued our unrecorded earlier history as well. Lethal human violence fueled by intergroup conflict has been dated back at least to between 12,000 and 10,000 BC, when evidence suggests that a battle near Jebel Sahaba, Sudan resulted in 59 well-preserved casualties (Wendorf, 1968). Of course that was just an early drop in the bucket relative to what happened during the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the European invasion and colonization of the Americas, the two world wars, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s purges, the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge, and the Hutu genocidal campaign against the Tutsi in Rwanda; the list could go on and on. The violent heritage of our species led a character from James Joyce’s classic novel Ulysses to comment, “History . . . is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” (Joyce, 1961, p. 28).

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In this chapter and the next one, we will explore the many reasons that history has been and continues to be such a nightmare of intergroup hatred and violence. In this first chapter we will focus on the nature and causes of prejudice and how stereotyping arises and affects the way people perceive and behave toward others. In the subsequent chapter, we will consider how prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination affect those targeted by these biases. We will also consider ways in which we might hope someday to awaken from this nightmare to an egalitarian reality in which people treat each other fairly regardless of their differences.