Psychology 6.2 descrimination and prejudice

Lets start by defining prejudice and discrimination
Prejudice is a negative attitude toward members of a group.
Discrimination is behaving differently, usually unfairly, toward the members of a group.

Modern discrimination is when people privately harbor negative attitudes toward minority groups but express them only when feeling such views are justified and its safe to do so.

Prejudice is Authoritarianism, known now as, Right Wing Authoritarianism and is characterized by:

1. Authoritarian submission : exaggerated deference to those in power
2. Authoritarian aggression : hostility towards targets sanctioned by authorities
3. Conventionalism : strong adherence to values endorsed by authorities

RWA are commonly found among political conservative more so than political liberals. Why are right wing prejudice?

1. They organize their social world into 2 groups the in groups and the out groups and view the out groups as threatening their cherished traditional values.
2. RWA are self righteous they believe that they are more moral than others and they feel justified in derogating groups that authority figures define as less moral than themselves.

Stereotyping is a big factor in prejudice and discrimination. People are particularly likely to make fundemental attribution error when evaluating targets of prejudice. Defensive attributions are people who unfairly blame victims of adversity to reassure themselves that the same thing wont happen to them. Expectations can foster and maintain prejudice and discrimination.

The fact is that social thinking is automatic, selective, and consistant meaning that people usually see what they expect to see when they look through the eyes of someone who is prejudice and discriminatory.

In our culture everyone is prejudice and discriminatory at something or someone and it will not change in the future. Look at what happened after 9-11 people of Arab descent were taken and looked at closely because of their skin color. It happens all over the world today. If someone is fat, is a homeless drunk on the street, dresses to express themselves, has lots of piercings, wild hair color they are discriminated against or shown prejudice by someone. The future is still going to see prejudice and discrimination maybe not as bad as it has been but it will never go away, even in the political arena.