Prejudice manifest through unfair, intolerant, and unfavorable behavior that people tend to have on people belonging to a different type of group. Psychologists suggest that prejudice refers to the possession of either a positive or negative perception of members from a different group. Intergroup perception becomes the fundamental source of prejudicial behaviors exercised by people. Psychological development of prejudice relies on affective, cognitive, and behavioral components of an attitude.
The first component of prejudice is the affective behavior that leads to prejudicial feelings. For instance, individuals have a feeling of intergroup associated such that they believe they belong to a particular group of people based on color, origin, and shared beliefs (Whitley & Kite, 2016). In effect, such people begin having negative feelings towards individuals from other groups whenever they come across such people directly or indirectly. Intergroup association creates an emotional feeling that members from other groups are inferior in comparison with those people from other groups (Gerstenfeld, 2017). The effectiveness of prejudicial component comes into play in situations where people develop a cognitive feeling that they are better than their counterparts. Negative emotional feeling indicates that the purveyors are better than the objects of prejudice.
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Cognitive reactions by individuals to actions of other people by virtue that they belong to a particular group of people also explain the existence of prejudice (Crawford, 2017). The behavioral component of people exercising prejudice develops from the fact that such actions lead to the formation of overt behavior. In circumstances where members of a particular group tend to act in a negative manner towards their target group for prejudice, such behaviors manifest through overt behavior. For instance, discriminatory actions such as racial discrimination occur with people associated failure to the target group for prejudice. The effects of prejudicial actions transform into discrimination activities in situations where there are no obstacles minimizing the extent to which such people exercise prejudicial behavioral aspects. However, prejudicial tendencies may be undermined by the existing policies that prevent individuals from converting their negative feelings about particular group into actions.
People who exercise prejudice against other groups have psychological beliefs about the abilities of the target prejudice group. In most cases, this behavior rises from the overreliance of stereotypes which can contribute to high levels of erroneous thinking about other people. This information indicates that the purveyors for prejudice may have a wrong judgment about the ability of their counterparts thus making it easy to make wrong judgments thus resulting into prejudicial actions that people tend to have on members from other groups. For example, in circumstances where a white employer interviews a white employee for a particular position, it is evident that the employer will exercise all stereotypical beliefs they have against the African Americans (Platow et al., 2019). In this case, the employer makes judgment depending on the beliefs that he or she has on the African Americans. The psychological setting becomes the fundamental approach for explaining the reason as to why a majority of people especially whites have prejudicial exercise against the black Americans even in situations where people from both groups have equal abilities for performing a particular.
Cognitive, behavioral, and affective components of an attitude are the underlying explanation of the existing of prejudice in a community. The effective formation of prejudice comes into play from an individual’s development of negative emotional feelings about the group. Behavioral actions result from the belief that purveyors of prejudicial judgments usually have towards a particular group of people. Such behaviors result in cognitive actions that lead to the creation of emotional behaviors among people in society.
References
Crawford, J. T. (2017). The politics of the psychology of prejudice. In Politics of Social Psychology (pp. 109-125). Psychology Press.
Gerstenfeld, P. B. (2017). Hate crimes: Causes, controls, and controversies. Sage Publications.
Platow, M. J., Van Rooy, D., Augoustinos, M., Spears, R., Bar-Tal, D., & Grace, D. M. (2019). Prejudice is about Collective Values, not a Biased Psychological System. Editor’s Introduction, 48(1), 15.
Whitley Jr, B. E., & Kite, M. E. (2016). Psychology of prejudice and discrimination. Routledge.
