Chapter 9: Prejudice: Disliking Others

Prejudice represents a preconceived negative attitude toward a group and its members, encompassing affective responses, behavioral inclinations, and cognitive stereotypical beliefs. This chapter examines how prejudice develops and persists through multiple interconnected sources. Social structures that create inequality contribute significantly to prejudicial attitudes, particularly among those with high social dominance orientation who justify existing hierarchies. Socialization within families and cultures transmits prejudicial beliefs across generations, while religious contexts show paradoxical relationships with prejudice depending on the depth of commitment. Institutional forces including schools, government, and media reinforce prejudicial norms through stereotypical representations and visual biases. Motivationally, frustration can trigger scapegoating behaviors where vulnerable groups become targets for displaced hostility, while realistic group conflict theory suggests competition for resources fuels intergroup tension. Social identity theory explains how individuals enhance self-esteem by favoring their ingroup and disparaging outgroups, creating ingroup bias particularly when group identity feels threatened. Cognitively, the human mind's tendency to categorize people for efficiency leads to the outgroup homogeneity effect where members of other groups appear undifferentiated. Distinctiveness and selective attention generate illusory correlations, while group-serving attribution biases cause observers to discount positive behaviors of outgroup members while attributing their negative actions to internal character flaws. The just-world phenomenon reinforces prejudice by encouraging belief that victims deserve their circumstances. Prejudicial beliefs become self-perpetuating through selective attention and biased memory encoding. Stereotype threat demonstrates how awareness of negative stereotypes can impair actual performance through cognitive depletion and anxiety. Discrimination creates self-fulfilling prophecies where expected behaviors materialize due to differential treatment. Understanding these psychological, social, and cognitive mechanisms is essential for recognizing how prejudice develops and sustains itself across social contexts.