The Acquisition of Prejudice

The word 'prejudice' comes from the Latin word pre-judicium, which means 'pre-judgment'. Without examining a person on his or her own worth, one has already adopted a negative attitude that implies a judgment. A prejudice is a mixture of beliefs and feelings that predisposes people to respond positively or negatively to members of a particular group. Prejudice is defined as a positive or negative attitude based on information or knowledge that is either irrational, unrelated to reality, or a distortion of fact, and that is discriminatorily generalized to all the members of a group. As with other attitudes, prejudice can be thought of as consisting of three components: classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and cognitive-social learning.…