Notes

Prejudice- emotional attitude towards a person depending on their membership.
Discrimination is a negative behaviour towards a person or persons depending on their group membership. It can be subtle or Blatant. Subtle discrimination comfortable with own group uncomfortable with the outgroup, exclusion avoidance. Blatant is open expression of negative emotions , hate, contempt ,hostility aggression even in extreme cases violence.

Prejudice is a by product of an automatic, unconcious fast cognitive process called categorisation. We live in a world where we are bombared with an endless amount of stimuly so in order to make sense of the world and not lose our senses due to cognitive overload we make generalisations about people- stereotype. For example, in an experiment individuals had to take part in an implicit association test ( strength of a person's automatic association between mental representations of objects) people were more likely to classify racially ambiguous person as white or black depending on high or low status clothes. Individuals followed the stereotype and results yielded that they were more likely to say that a man in a suit is white.

Prejudice has many shades and can elicit different emotions. For this reason, the stereotype content model was developed. The stereotypea psychological theory that hypothesizes that stereotypes possess two dimensions: warmth and competence. Social groups are perceived as warm if they do not compete with the ingroup for the same resources (e.g., college space) and they are considered competent if they are high in status (e.g., economically or educationally successful). Thus, lack of competition predicts perceived warmth and status predicts perceived competence.[1][2] The model was first proposed by social psychologist Susan Fiske and her colleagues Amy Cuddy, Peter Glick and Jun Xu.[3]

The SCM posits that intergroup emotions and stereotypes predict distinct behaviors which can be active, passive, facilitative, and harmful.[10][11] Active behaviors require effort and engagement (e.g., help or attack) whereas passive behaviors impact the target group either positively or negatively but require less exertion (e.g., passive association or neglect). Facilitative actions are intended to bring about favorable outcomes or gains for a group while harmful behaviors are intended to produce detrimental outcomes or losses.[12]

Admired groups judged as both warm and competent (e.g., the in-group) elicit the desire to assist them and associate with them (active and passive facilitation). By contrast, groups which are regarded as low in both warmth and competence are harmed passively or actively, that is, they are ignored or attacked. An example of this behavior would be avoiding eye contact with or harassing a homeless person. Pitied groups considered warm but incompetent elicit active helping or passive neglect. Disabled people, for example, may sometimes be neglected and other times patronized and offered too much help. Envied groups judged as competent elicit active harm and passive association. For example, one might choose to work with a member of a group assumed to be very competent (e.g., Asian or Jewish) on a math project but otherwise dislike that groups and seek to actively harm .

evolutionary speaking we humans have evolved to be more protective in our in groups so we can keen our genes go through generations. When resources are limited the out group is seen as a competition and poses theat to the individual and similar others. The out group can also be considered a threat to one's attitudes culture language and other aspects which we identify ourselves. Research shows that children can pick up prejudice from parents. Neuroimaging responses to individuals showed that in all situations besides low-low mpfc is activated who especially activated insula and amygdala (disquist). Almost dehumanised.

Also prejudice is an adaptive mechanism which our ancestors have used to understand where someone was an out-group who possed threat to physical security health and economic resources.

Unfortunately people may react negatively to group and their members even when they actually pose no realistic threat-