Prejudice Reduction Essay

1988 Words8 Pages
Social policies aimed at reducing prejudice and intergroup conflict would do well to take account of social psychological research in this area.’ Discuss this statement, making reference to relevant research in your answer. The thesaurus dictionary defines prejudice as an adverse judgment or opinion formed beforehand or without knowledge or examination of the facts. The definition is expanded further by saying that prejudice is an irrational suspicion or hatred of a particular group, race, or religion. Prejudice can also be described as a negative prejudgement of a group and its individual members. Dixon (cited in Hollway, 2007) points out that psychological research treated prejudice as the outcrop of abnormal psychological development. The author went on to mention that according to the work by some writers on the Dogmatic Personality ,prejudice is rooted in abnormal personality development and it is because of this view that prejudice was seen as closely related to cognitive rigidity. Prejudice is also closely linked to intergroup conflict. Intergroup conflict according to Bornstain (2003) generally involves conflicts of interest within groups of people. Bornstain (2003) goes on to point out that intergroup conflicts are rational in the sense that groups do have incompatible goals and are in competition for scarce resources. There are several policies that have been put in place in bid to reduce both prejudice and intergroup conflict such as the ten prejudice reduction strategies mentioned by Mendoza-Denton (2010) where the author proposes about ten ways that can be done to reduce pre judging others and thereby cut down on prejudice tendencies. Policies such as the Unfair prejudice in United Kingdom company law was put in place to try and reduce prejudice in companies and work places. These and many other policies that government and organisations put

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