Prejudice in Our Society

Prejudice in Our Society

Introduction

This research paper is based on 'Prejudice in our Society'. In a society, there are certain norms and ethics that everyone should follow and respect each other. Tolerance and acceptance make a society unite and peaceful. There are certain negative practices that are part of every culture and society throughout the world. These have a harmful impact on individual and the society. There are various internal and external causes resulting in increasing or promoting prejudice in a society.

Thesis Statement

“Prejudice is an unfavorable behavior for a society which creates a sense of insecurity and unequal treatment for citizens; practicing prejudice violates fundamental citizen rights, and it is also against ethics.”

Data Collection Method

I have used the primary and secondary data research method for this assignment. The primary data includes the three focus groups, each group consist of four people. While, the secondary data sources includes the websites, books, articles, magazines, research articles and case studies on Prejudice in Our Society.

Discussion and Analysis

A prejudice is a social attitude that may be defined as the unfavorable behavior towards a "particular" group, ethnicity, race or individual. It is considered as a discriminative behavior which underestimates a particular community or group and promotes unequal treatment in the society. It is a negative assumption about a group. Prejudice is a harmful attitude for a society which grows differences among communities and discourages unity and equality among the society. People also tend to claim that they “choose” their attitudes based on personal experience, facts, and other forms of evidence, but implicit prejudice is a case of a person's attitudes forming without any consideration of facts or evidence. In contrast to explicit prejudice, which tends to be based on deliberately held beliefs (e.g., that Blacks are violent or unintelligent), implicit prejudice is primarily feeling based (Dessel, 2010). It is the sum of the large number of negative depictions of a given group, not the product of a single fact or negative experience with a given member of a negatively evaluated group. As such, it tends to take the form of “vague feelings” that exist without any specific reason (although after-the-fact justifications can easily be generated to rationalize a person's prejudices).

The participants in the focus groups revealed that as prejudice tends to be more feeling based than fact based, it tends to appear in behavior where emotions tend to manifest. Nonverbal behavior in particular has been implicated as a common outlet for implicit prejudice. In the example mentioned earlier, the implicitly prejudiced individual smiled less and made less eye contact with Blacks than with Whites. Research has shown that implicit prejudice relates to these and other nonverbal indicators of negativity and discomfort, such as body orientation, fidgeting, and the like.

In sociology, the concept of prejudice usually refers to subjective assessments of systematic and sustained groups or members in adverse conditions. The concept has been at the center of sociological research on race and ethnicity for many years, but also played an important ...