Notes

Attraction / part 2:

Romantic love usually includes a caring feeling, attachment, and intimacy. Intimacy usually develops with trust when the persons in a relationship reveal their innermost feelings, thoughts, concerns, desires, etc., to each other. People express feelings of romantic love by performing certain actions and giving material gifts to the loved one. Although it usually takes most people time to like another person, people can experience intense romantic love immediately or soon after meeting another person. However, research indicates that intense emotions tend to be unstable and mild forms of attraction between two persons more often tend to develop into long-term stable relationships.

Research also shows that most individualist and collectivist cultures give importance to physical attraction, emotional security, and personal traits such as intelligence and kindness in romantic relationships and marriages. However, in many cultures, people do not consider physical attraction or a feeling of romantic love to be a prerequisite to be married. In such cultures, older family members usually arrange the marriage and romantic love often develops after marriage.
Unconditional love is a characteristic of altruism.

Bias, Discrimination, and Stereotypes:

Do you make your judgments based on careful evaluation of facts and reason or are your judgments influenced by your personal preferences or media influence? When you make decisions, are you objective and logical or are you influenced by your own preconceptions? You may not be conscious of it but if you are like most people, you would probably have some biases and prejudices that could affect the judgments you make about people, the decisions that you make, and the actions that you perform. In the process of trying to understand and evaluate the world you live in, you also tend to stereotype people. Let’s further examine biases, prejudices, and stereotypes.

A bias is a tendency to lean toward ideas, opinions, or people that are in line with your own beliefs or preferences. Biases may relate to different aspects such as age, gender, religion, or political beliefs. They can lead people to antisocial behavior— such as avoiding people from a certain background, or performing discriminatory actions—such as not employing someone because of their gender. Often you are unconscious about these biases. A statement that all people from the West are materialistic is an example of a generalized biased statement.
A prejudice is a positive or negative belief, opinion, or attitude that does not rely on facts. Gordon Allport (1897–1967), was a famous American psychologist who graduated from Harvard. He played a prominent role in the development of personality psychology. He developed the trait theory of personality. According to Gordon, “Prejudice is an antipathy based on faulty and inflexible generalization. It may be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group or an individual of that group.” It means that you develop prejudices through ignorance and without accounting for individual differences. Prejudice may remain at the thought level. Alternatively, you may express it through your action and behavior toward a group or a person who is part of the group. Usually, your prejudice reflects your hatred or fear toward a person or group.

A stereotype is a positive or negative belief or image that you carry about particular individuals. This is based on the group to which they belong. When you stereotype people, you make a simplistic generalization. This generalization does not take into account individual differences. Family, friends, society, and the media largely influence your perceptions and beliefs. Often, the information that you use to form your beliefs is incorrect. Racial stereotyping refers to categorizing people according to the race to which they belong such as Asians, Chinese, Africans, etc. Stereotyping may seem harmless when it takes the form of jokes. However, it often leads to discrimination and demeaning behavior. This in turn can foster negative feelings in the targeted individual or group.
Discrimination refers to an unequal treatment of people who belong to particular groups. The group can be based on any characteristic such as age, gender, or ethnicity. Discrimination can take the form of favoring those who are a part of the group to whom they belong, or discriminating against those outside their group. Discrimination can take place at an individual level or at the national level. It may result in rude behavior or horrific incidents.

The Nazis’ belief that the Jews are an inferior race led to the Holocaust, a state-sponsored mass extermination of Jews between 1939 and 1945. In the United States, civil rights activists fought for years for the rights of Africans who were enslaved. Many women all over the world face gender discrimination. Even in the United States, it was only in 1920 that women were given the right to vote. You also witness hate crimes against people from certain communities. Community leaders feel that there is a lot of bias, subtle and not so subtle, at the individual level, institutional level, organizational level, and even by the police. In 2013, a group of African American brokers won a discrimination case against Merrill Lynch and won a settlement of $160 million.
Let’s understand how you form and reinforce biases and prejudices. This will help you learn to consciously make decisions and judgments without bias.

Some biases have their origin in people’s basic survival instinct and people’s need to understand and simplify the world they live in. The instinct for survival led to humans categorizing people as friends or enemies. The human mind is capable of quickly and automatically categorizing people. Your survival instincts and need for order led to the human mind automatically grouping people based on various characteristics. As children, you do not attribute any value to these categorizations. However, as you grow older you tend to attribute values and label groups as good or bad, superior or inferior, etc. You acquire prejudices through a complex psychological process. This starts by forming an attachment to the people in your social group. You develop positive feelings of trust, empathy, and admiration for the group you belong to. This is your ingroup. At the same time, you tend to develop negative attitudes, biases, and prejudices toward groups with which you do not identify. These are your outgroups. Your outgroups are usually those people with whom you have limited interaction with or people who are different from you.

Socialization is a learning process that starts in childhood and continues throughout life. As children and adults, you learn from others. Through this process you develop your social identities and learn about expected norms and values of the society in which you live. Social scientists believe that socialization plays a major role in your beliefs and actions. They also believe that some of your biases and prejudices that you acquire as toddlers are due to this process.
People today are subject to a large amount of media information through television, newspapers, radio, the Internet, billboards, etc. On a daily basis, you see thousands of images. These images have powerful messages that can be positive or negative, and can strongly influence your thinking and beliefs (forming beliefs, changing your beliefs, or reinforcing existing beliefs). Many people assume that media sources provide true, factual, and unbiased information. However, the media does not always provide true or complete facts. The fact that media can influence many people at one time makes it very powerful. Organizations with a vested interest in influencing large groups of people, such as media owners and political parties, can use the media to shape people’s beliefs and values. They can do this quite subtly by selecting certain sources only, omitting certain facts, highlighting some stories or some aspects of a story, etc.

The social responsibility theory was introduced in 1947. It is an ethical theory that suggests that the media should be free of government interference but should serve the public and be self-regulating. This theory helped bring a certain amount of responsible professional attitudes in media.

Reducing Biases and Prejudices:

By becoming conscious of your biases and prejudices and following certain strategies, you can reduce your biases and prejudices and minimize their influence on your decisions and judgments. You acquire most biases through ignorance or fear. You feel secure in an environment that is familiar to you and threatened by values and beliefs that are different from yours. Exposing yourself to other cultures and races by learning about them through books, magazines, the Internet, movies and even traveling can have the following positive effects:

make you more flexible in your thinking and attitudes
help you get rid of rigid beliefs
help you understand other cultures, values, and beliefs
introduce you to new ways of thinking and lifestyles
By consciously interacting with people who are not part of your ingroup, you can become familiar with people outside your ingroup. You will become aware of the many similarities that exist among people in different groups. One does not have to accept other people’s values and beliefs as one’s own but one can learn to accept differences as something natural and respect differences as being an important component of human diversity.