Reducing Prejudice and Stereotypes Essay Example for Free

Reducing Prejudice and Stereotypes Essay Prejudice is an opinion or judgement without due examination toward one side of a question from other considerations than those belonging to. Or we can say that prejudice is a bias on the part of judge, juror or witness which interferes with fairness of judgement. Prejudice involves negative feelings when they are in the presence of or even think about members of the group. Prejudice often involves stereotypes, suggesting that all members of a group behave in certain ways and have certain characteristics. Therefore, prejudice has both cognitive and affective components. Affective component is the positive or negative attitude/ feeling. Beside the cognitive component contains stereotypes. Prejudice will be dealt as a single set of dynamics that function to dehumanize people who are identifiably different in some way from the people whose perceptions are limited by the dysfunction we called prejudice. This approach is taken for two reasons. First, it is easily defensible through the uderstanding of the dynamics of prejudices and second the continued separation and classification of prejudices according to the superficial categories of those who are prejudiced is a disservice to those who are the targets of discrimination and a distortion of reality. Much of prejudice stems from our pre-judging other people’s habits, customs, ways of speaking and value. We often do this with no basic for the judgement other that the fact that they (the customs, values, ways of speaking, etc) are different form our own. When we are confines to a single culture, it’s incredibly difficult to see that one’s way is not the only way, that one’s truth is not the only possible way in which things are done. To travel around the world and seeing the variousity of culture may become the nicest thing to do for reducing prejudice. There is no better way to be convinced of this than to go to another country where millions people are doing something different from you. Another way to reduce prejudice is to make a friend with many background culture. From that, we can learn that we are all different and we have to accept that differences. By accepting and learning that differences, the number of prejudicing people will be decrease. Prejudice reduction refers to a collectionof techniques designed to break down these destructive stereotypes. Most often prejudice reduction programs take place on a small scale for example in workshops which bring together people from different groups to help them develop a better mutual understanding. At times, efforts are made to reduce prejudice among the general population. This can be done with wide spread media efforts and public education programs often implemented during the grade school years. In both small scale and large scale efforts, a first step which is critical to the success of these programs is an ability to overcome the many communications problems cited elsewhere in this training program. This is because a great deal of prejudice arises from simple misunderstandings and the tendency to make worse case assumptions in the absence of reliable information. At the workshop level, facilitators can help people explore their stereotypes, and learn to communicate with eac h other in a more open, trusting, and receptive way. At the community or societal level, misunderstandings can be addressed through carefully crafted public media campaigns and/or education programs designed to counter common stereotypes and present all groups in their best possible light. Still, correcting poor communication may is not usually enough to overcome prejudice. Better communication may simply prove that the parties do, in fact, hold each other in mutual contempt, or that they are, indeed, trying to undermine each others interests. Often such hostility is the result of escalation processes which transform relatively minor provocations into intense confrontations. For this reason strategies for limiting escalation are also an essential component of effective prejudice reduction. This also can be attempted in workshop settings or at the larger, community level. On the other hand, we will talk about stereotypes. Stereotypes are generalizations or assumptions that people make about the characteristics of all members of a grup based on image that often wrong about what people in that group are like. Most stereotypes probably tend to convey a negative impression. By stereotyping we infer that a person has a whole range characteristics and abilities that we assume all members of that group have. Researches have found that stereotypes exist of diffe rent races, cultures or ethnic groups. Although the terms race, culture and ethnic groups have different meanings, we shall take them to mean roughly the same thing at the moment. Not surprisingly, racial stereotypes always seem to favor the race of the holder and belittle other races. It is probably true saying that every ethnic group has racial stereotypes of other groups which can be seen to benefit each group because it helps in the long run to identify with one’s own ethnic group and so find protection and promote safety and success of the group. A brief description of stereotyping includes: grouping people together based on their race, ethnicity, religion, languange, customs, appearance, gender or culture; denying people rights because of the group belong to; believing that one’s own group is superior beside other groups are inferior. And the ways to reduce stereotyping includes: promoting first hand knowledge through personal experiences; putting one self in another’s shoes and considering multiple perspectives; working toward a meaningful goal with others when all share equal status. It will naturally be difficult to change stereotypes and prejudice, because such change will need to overcome all of the cognitive processes such as biased information search, interpretation and memory behavioral confirmation, as well as social processes, such as pressures to conform to the beliefs of others, all of which work to maintain stereotypes intact. Nevertheless, social psychologists have developed numoerous theories about when and why stereotypes will or won’t change and some interventions have been effective at changing stereotypes. In general, there are three types of change in beliefs that can help reduce negative intergroup encounters. Perhaps the most obvious change involves creating more positve perceptions of the group as a whole. When we reduce an individual’s level of prejudice or change his or her stereotypes to be more positive. But change does not always have to involve becoming more positive about the group. If we change the perceptions of the variability of a group such that the individual no longer believes that all of the group members are the same, we have also reduce stereotyping, even if the beliefs have not become more positve overall. Finally, we will have been succesful if we have been able to reduce the tendency for an individual to use social categories when judging others, with the result that they are more likely individuate others instead.