FREE ESSAY ON HOW DO PSYCHOLOGISTS ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN THE ORIGINS OF PREJUDICE?

HOW DO PSYCHOLOGISTS ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN THE ORIGINS OF PREJUDICE?

HOW DO PSYCHOLOGISTS ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN THE ORIGINS OF PREJUDICE?
DO THEY OFFER SOCIETY ANY HOPE THAT IT MAY BE REDUCED? BY JON SALECLEMENTS.
Ethnocentrism is the tendency to assume that one's culture or way of life is superior to
all others. 
Prejudice is a negative attitude toward an entire category of individuals. 
Discrimination is behaviour that excludes all members of a group from certain rights,
opportunities or privileges. 
A range of international events have recently focused attention on the issue of
prejudice; increasing ethno-nationalistic tensions in former Eastern block countries,
racial conflict in the Middle East, Africa and intergroup conflict related to " race
debates " in Europe, The U.S.A and Australia. Psychology is the only discipline, which
over the past century has consistently and systematically investigated the issue of
prejudice and race. 
Social psychology has a long tradition of empirical and theoretical research in this
field and currently there are many social psychologists in Australia engaged in
significant and timely research. This is no accident given the regions long and chequered
history regarding race relations with the treatment of the Australian Aborigines has been
likened to genocide. 
Currently there are a number of theoretical and conceptual psychological approaches,
which both define and explain prejudice. Personality theories primarily locate race and
prejudice within the intro-psychic domain of the individual. From this perspective,
authoritarian-rearing practices, intolerance and intro psychic defence mechanisms are
isolated as casual agents to a significant problem. There are several theories as to why
people are prejudiced. The exploitation theory keeps a racial group in a subordinate
social position. The scapegoating theory says that prejudice people believe that they are
society's victims. In this sense, exploiters abuse others and scapegoats feel they are
being abused. 
Dr. Vance Locke and Dr. Lucy Johnston at the University of Canterbury have recently
published papers on the issues of social cognition and stereotyping . Personality
approaches have been challenged by the dominance of social cognitive perspectives. These
view prejudice as inevitable consequences of normal and functional cognitive processes
such as categorisation and stereotyping. Our limited cognitive capacities, it is argued,
make the simplification and generalisation of social information necessarily adaptive, so
that a group's tendency to view outgroup members as " all alike " is not surprising.
Cognitive mechanisms are thus viewed as the essential foundations to stereotyping and
prejudice. 
Martha Augoustinos and Katherine J Reynolds of the Australian National University have
said that since the 1920's, when prejudice emerged as a construct of significant interest
to psychologists, there have been several distinct stages of theoretical and empirical
development, i.e. white superiority and minority backwardness, human irrational and
faulty cognitive processes, unconscious psychological defences, individual personality
structures and expressions of group interests and intergroup relations .
The psychodynamic approach which Freud spawned many psychodynamic theories of human
personality. The main one lies in the view that early childhood experiences crucially
affect an individual's later personality. This was taken by Adorno et al (1950) and more
recent the non-pyschodynamic derivatives of authoritarianism. Adorno et al argues that
the authoritarian personality has its origins in childhood. Where parents adopt an
excessively harsh and disciplinarian regime in order to enforce on their children
emotional dependence and obedience, children develop a love/hate relationship with their
parents. This conflict between love and hate is stressful and there is a need to resolve
it. The hatred is repressed through fear and guilt and finds its outlet through
displacement on to those who are weaker, while the power and the authority of the parents
is idealised and generalised to all authority figures. This theory rested upon Adorno et
al original work. 
The most dominate theoretical and empirical approach to prejudice is social cognition
(Fiske & Taylor, 1991). Social cognitive research suggests that outgroups discrimination
and prejudice stem from basic and functional cognitive processes such as categorisation
and stereotyping. It is argued that our limited cognitive capacities makes the
simplification and generalisation of social information necessarily adaptive, so a
group's tendency to stereotype out group members and to perceive them as homogeneous is
an inevitable by-product of our cognitive hard-wiring. 
While cognitive models of prejudice are currently dominant, researchers are emphasising
the role that affects plays in prejudice. To some extent this derives from the
frustration - aggression theory of the 1930's and 1940's which argued that inner
hostilities were displaced onto innocent outgroups and minorities. 
The development of prejudice in young children is where much of the social cognitive
developmental literature has been found that children demonstrate clear ethnic and racial
preferences at around 3 or 4 years old (Aboud, 1988). These preferences tend to be
consistent with the differential values associated with different social groups i.e.
North American children between 3 and 5 express negative attitudes towards minority
groups such as Afro - Americans and Native Americans. However after the age of 7, this
attitude does decline. 
The socio-cognitive models have advanced to account for these developmental findings in
young children. We should involve children in lots of role-play i.e. for them to act out
at being ogres, elves and to come to the defence of short people like gnomes and
halflings. Instead of playing the norm as per usual. They should be allowed to experience
different forms of role-play i.e. boys playing with dolls, buggies, girls playing with
woodwork and cars. 
Children are born without prejudice. Prejudice is caught and taught that is why the
parent's attitude is the heart of the matter. We should remember children are always
listening, provide experiences for the children to look, speak or worship differently, so
they can learn from it, answer questions in regard to skin, disability, gender, age,
religion and teach children to be sympathetic and understanding and compassionate, (K
PITZER, 1988). 
Many models view attitude change as an information problem and dependent on individual
cognitive processing, i.e. the Elaboration Likelihood Model emphasises the role of
attention demands in attitude change and argues that more effortful processing is
necessary for long term attitude change. 
Prejudice based on social identity theory and self-categorisation theory (refereed to as
the social identity perspective) is a central feature in the perspective of the
discontinuity hypothesis. This asserts that there is a psychological discontinuity
between people acting as individuals and people acting as group members (Asch, 1952;
Sherif, 1967; Tafjel & Turner, 1979). Self-categorisation can occur as an individual in
contrast to other members (personal identity) or as a member of a social category in
contrast to other categories (social identity).
It is usual to consider prejudice to be an attitude towards a particular set of people,
objects or events. Allport (1958) has said that attitudes have three components;
cognitive which amounts to a set of beliefs about the object of prejudice, affective
which are feelings or emotions related to the person or object in question and cognitive
which are intentions to behave in a particular way towards the person or object. 
Devine (1989) has shown that the primary difference between prejudiced and unprejudiced
people may rest in the way in which unprejudiced people are able to inhibit or to
disregard negative stereotypical beliefs. In Devine's model of prejudice (Devine, 1989)
they are broken up into two stages; the unconscious stage, where identification triggers
the existing stereotype and the consciously controlled stage, where a nonprejudiced
person may inhibit prejudiced beliefs to prevent a prejudiced response, while a
prejudiced person will allow these beliefs to be transferred into responses. 
Allport (1958) identified six approaches or emphases to the theories of prejudice. They
are the historical or economic approach, the sociocultural , the situational , and the
approach via personality dynamics and structure, phenomenological approach and the
approach via stimulus object. 
The emphasis of theory and research into trying to understand and reduce prejudice must
pay less attention to the given issue of prejudice. However, our knowledge of areas such
as individual personality, cognitive processes is fundamental to developing effective
interventions aimed at moderating prejudice. John Duckitt of the University of Auckland
has integrated this knowledge into a multi-level approach to the reduction of prejudice.
It is based on three casual processes; individual - differences in susceptibility,
exposure to certain social influences and social structure and intergroup relations. For
each level various interventions which have been used or proposed in order to reduce
prejudice will be described and evaluated e.g. antidiscrimmination laws, anti-racism
media campaigns, education, racism awareness training and counselling.