Table of Contents
Introduction
Prejudice is an assumption of a person or community based on restricted understanding. It is important to know prejudice as it often happens because of prejudiced people. These prejudiced people doesn’t see us as a person, instead they see us characters, they see us by our colour and they see us as stereotype, lastly, they don’t see us as their equal. They think they are better than us. Likewise, people might show a negative attitude towards individuals due to their race or religion. Furthermore, there are different ways on forming our personal and social identity. We have two types of identities: social and personal. Individuals are affected by prejudice and handles the situation differently. Unfortunately, there are five different ways on how prejudice affects us as individuals or as a society, all of which can lead us to being unproductive, or lack of performance at school or at work. Various types of prejudice can be overcome in seven ways, which can lead individuals to change their perspective of their life. Although, in doing so they have to do several things to help them view their life differently, an example would be eliminating or spending less time with prejudiced people or media.
What is Prejudice?
Prejudice is a negative attitude towards an individual, mainly based on the individual’s social group. It includes all three elements of an attitude: affective, behavioural and cognitive. The word ‘prejudice’ can be broken down to ‘pre’ and ‘judgment’. Although, prejudice is a negative thing, it serves psychological, social and economic functions. It can help individuals boost their self-esteem, which can lead them to avoid doubt and their fears. Some psychologists indicates that prejudice empowers people to associate with their own groups and by contradicting it with outsider groups. Likewise, doing this can make the group feel special. On the other hand, an example of prejudice would be when the Nazis killed a number of Jews during World War II as Adolf Hitler hated Jews.
What Are the Differences between Our Social and Personal Identity?
Personal Identity is the sense of self an individual develops as they grow up. This isn’t passive, it’s something an individual experience as they enter new aspect of their life. Although, there are times when the individual tries to visualise which group they belong, who they are and what’s significant to them. An example of this would be that “Every person has a form of the identity of himself.” (admin, 2015). This represents that everyone develops their own personal identity as they grow. Moreover, this quote indicates that we differ from other people and we form our identity through our character as a person.
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In contrast to personal identity, social identity is our understanding of who we are and of who other people are, as well as other people’s understanding of themselves and others. This shows that the individuals cooperate with other people and figure out themselves as part of humanity. In our society nowadays, individuals belong in various religions, ethnic groups, gender.
The differences between these two is that personal identity is the opportunity of an individual to develop themselves, on the other hand, social identity is when the individual distinguish themselves as a member of the society.
What Are the Different Types of Prejudice?
There are seven various types of prejudice which are based on authoritative factors like: race, gender, age, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation and nationality, these can be classified as: racism, sexism, ageism, religious prejudice, classicism, homophobia and nationalism. Each of these focuses in one particular thing. For instance, racism focuses on the race of an individual, whereas, sexual orientation focuses on an individual’s sexual identity in relation to the gender in which the person is attracted to. Various types of prejudice cooperates with how people form their social identity because these are the factors that affects us, especially racism, it doesn’t just affect us it also affects our race. It can lead to an individual having a difficult time to fit in with groups because some groups might dislike the individual’s race.
How Do We Overcome the Different Types of Prejudice?
Overcoming different types of prejudice can be done in seven ways since there are seven types of overcoming prejudice: become aware of your prejudices, stay mindful and accountable, eliminate or spend less time with prejudiced people and media, broaden your horizons and become a spokesperson for them. By following these, your point of view in life would alter as it can help you to overthink less. Another way of defeating prejudice is when you reduce your self-stigma because having a negative belief towards yourself may lead to negative behaviours, otherwise known as self-discrimination.
Moreover, the fourth point is “eliminate or spend less time with prejudiced people and media”. This indicates that you spend your time with a variety of people, not just with people who are nice to you when you’re in front of them, but actually they just back stab you and talk bad things about you. Spending time with a variety of people can enhance the way you act towards other people as well. Additionally, other people can have an impact on the individual’s academics, especially when the person is hanging out with people who are kind and smart. This helps the individual overcome prejudice as they can decide they are.
Conclusion
To conclude this essay, we use prejudice to form our social identity by knowing which group we belong to. Since social identity differs from personal identity, it emphasises more on our understanding of who we are as individuals and of who other people are as part of our society. Although, some would say that prejudice is negative, it helps us decide which group we belong in. Nevertheless, this is already covered since as individuals we have our own beliefs, race, religion and sex. We use prejudice to form our social identity since it helps us understand who we are and who the people around us are.
Online Sources
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