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Prejudice And Social Psychology Essay

991 Words4 Pages

Social psychology is defined as finding an understanding to the 'nature and causes of individual behaviour in social situations (Baron, Bryne & Suls, 1989). The approach that involves this understanding underlines that group identification or the membership in which an individual holds in a group contributes to a major source of causation. One key topics in the study of Social psychology is being prejudice. Prejudice is a negative and unjustified behaviour towards an individual due to the status or membership of the individual in a certain group. There have been many theories or explanations as to why people may or may not be more prejudice than others. The social psychological approach mainly consisting of experimental procedures in research, has made a large influential impact on prejudice research. Social psychological approaches have converged to recognise the importance of how individuals and groups affect intergroup relations. …show more content…

He classifies prejudice into three levels, cognitive, emotional and action orientated levels of prejudice. Cognitive level prejudice is where prejudice is carried out by thoughts and beliefs. Emotional prejudice includes emotions such as anger, fear, jealousy and hope. The action orientated levels of prejudice illustrates that people are already born with prejudice, they just are unaware of this until they are put into certain situations, which test this. Allport believes that personality is a genetic trait, in which environment does play a big impact. In contrast to this, Loehlin, Willerman and horn (1988) had concluded that 50% of the scores conducted by participants, testing their individual personality attributes are due to inherited

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