Is Prejudice Biologically Based or Learned?

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Title: Is prejudice mostly biologically based or learned? Psychology Essay Batoul Shamma Friends Boys School All around the world psychology and its levels of analysis have influenced people in a way to make them think more critically. Thinking in a mature way from a psychological point of view made people more anxious to know what’s going on around them; concerning an individual’s behavior, thinking, and skills. One of the important levels of analysis in psychology is the sociocultural level where it discusses the main ideas of a person being a social animal and has a social self. A person being a social animal defines the sociocultural level of analysis in a way that it shows the complex interaction between attributing people and judging them based on their culture, stereotype, ethnicity, and prejudice. Prejudice is considered one of the main issues that are used by many people to plague society even though great efforts from schools to teach the history of it were made. In this essay prejudice will be discussed in a way to show wither its mostly biologically based or learned. Prejudice is defined as a combination of negative attitudes made from emotions and cognition of people. When people start judging other individuals based on a set of characteristics on a person’s membership of a social group is considered an attitude of prejudice. For example a person may hold a prejudice on a certain race, gender, nationality, socioeconomic status or ethnicity. Prejudice mainly involves two components of an attitude which are behavior and being affective. This means that people will judge in accordance of the behavior of a certain group, but also will contact elicits an emotional response which in this case is being affective. Some of the well known types of prejudice are: racism, sexism, classicism, homophobia, religious prejudice, and sometime stereotypes.
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