User:Matthew M/Week 6 - Prejudice

Week 6 - 26/08/08 – Prejudice
This journal is getting slightly confusing since I seem to be jumping from place to place and being a week behind due to there being no tutorial in the first week. Anyway just a short bit on prejudice. This can be defined as a negative feeling toward an individual based on his or her membership in a particular group. This can range from things such as stereotyping people, to discrimination, social categorisation and racism. With things such as these there generally exists in the persons mind a difference between people who are like them and those which are not. This can be seen as the person’s in-group and out-group members. People’s in-group members generally consist of people who belong to the same group or categorisation as they do and in the case of out-group members it consists of people who are in different categorisations and groups. Common prejudices which occur are between races and cultures or even with people being intolerant of homosexuality within their own gender. It seems that one of the ways in prejudice can exist is due to in-group favouritism where people tend to look more favourably on others which are in their own group, and not so favourably on those which are not. Another way it exists is because people like to blame their misfortunes or problems on other people in the out-group. Even so changing prejudices does seem to be possible as long as people make conscious efforts to do so. It seems that people to hold prejudices are at time unaware of the impact it may have on the other people. People if stereotyped may conform to that stereotype in the belief that, that is the way in which they are meant to act, and on the other hand people may purposely act differently in order not to conform to stereotypes.